![\"Nation:](\"https:\/\/fair.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/11\/Nation-Political-Press-Failing.png\")
<\/p>\nJoshua Holland (The Nation<\/strong>, 10\/26\/18<\/a>): “Trump floods the zone with bullshit, they dutifully convey it, and we end up swimming in it.”<\/em>If the establishment media\u2019s coverage in the home stretch of the 2018 midterm elections is any kind of prologue to 2020, be prepared for an avalanche of right-wing xenophobic propaganda during our next presidential election. That\u2019s because, once again, the political press dutifully chased Trump\u2019s rhetorical tail as Election Day neared, and repeatedly ceded its editorial judgment and newshole to the nativist fearmongering he used to stoke the Republican Party\u2019s base. And nowhere was this fecklessness more apparent than media’s breathless \u201cmigrant caravan\u201d coverage.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Left-wing media critics documented these failures almost in real time. Joshua Holland at The Nation<\/b> (10\/25\/18<\/a>) noted in late October how Trump was all but acting as the de facto segment producer for all those ubiquitous cable news panel shows that were spending all their time discussing a few thousand asylum seekers that were more than a thousand miles from the US southern border.<\/p>\n Likewise, a study by the liberal media research site Media Matters (11\/2\/18<\/a>) found that Trump might as well have been the front-page assignment editor for elite newspapers like the Washington Post <\/b>and New York Times<\/b>, which simply couldn\u2019t resist the siren song of his manufactured crisis. In all, those two papers published nearly 30 different stories about the migrant caravan on their respective A1 pages in the two weeks before Election Day. And on three different days, the Times <\/b>devoted two<\/i> front-page stories to what Trump had not-so-subtly began calling an \u201cinvasion.\u201d<\/p>\n What is most striking, however, is the Post <\/b>and Times<\/b>\u2019 unmistakable cognitive dissonance and institutional blindspot about this coverage. Throughout the weeks leading up to Election Day, these two news organizations dedicated analysis, blogs and opinion pieces\u2014mostly online\u2014to detailing the naked gamesmanship and misinformation behind Trump using the migrant caravan as a campaign bogeyman. But then the papers\u2019 front pages and their \u201cstraight\u201d political coverage routinely used Trump\u2019s assumptions as the premises for framing their stories.<\/p>\n A\u00a0 Washington Post<\/strong> headline (10\/25\/18<\/a>) treats stopping the migrant caravan as a question of “how,” not “whether.”<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Case in point: On October 25, the Washington Post <\/b>ran a business section analysis (10\/25\/18<\/a>)\u2014\u201cWhy False Narratives About the Migrant Caravan and Mail Bombs Won\u2019t Go Away on Social Media\u2014and an online factcheck (10\/25\/18<\/a>)\u2014\u201cA Caravan of Phony Claims From the Trump Administration\u201d\u2014that sought to debunk the many lies and conspiracy theories fueling the migrant caravan narrative. But neither of these pieces bothered to look at how the Post<\/b>\u2019s own flood-the-zone coverage was exacerbating the story and giving it the oxygen to make the conspiracy theories more relevant.<\/p>\n In fact, on that same day, the Post<\/b>\u2019s front-page story (10\/25\/18<\/a>) offered a much more friendly framing, one that subtly bought into Trump\u2019s something-must-be-done hysterics: \u201cWhite House Grapples With Caravan Strategy: President Urges Aides to Craft a More Forceful Plan Than Pressuring Mexico.\u201d The online version\u2019s headline (10\/25\/18<\/a>) was no better, positioning the issue as being one of tactics (i.e., how <\/i>to stop the caravan). Instead of whether or not it should be <\/i>(i.e., one of policy): <\/i>\u201cTrump Promises to Stop the Migrant Caravan. But His Administration Struggles With How to Do It.\u201d<\/p>\n The next day\u2019s top headline at the Post<\/b> (10\/26\/18<\/a>) kept this theme alive with its focus squarely on Trump taking action: \u201cTrump Weighs Border Closing; Central American Migrants Targeted; Deploying 1,000 More Troops Also Considered.\u201d<\/p>\n The New York Times<\/strong> (11\/13\/18<\/a>) also seems to have forgotten its own intense interest in the caravan story.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n This lack of self-awareness wasn\u2019t confined to the Post<\/b>. This week, New York Times <\/b>White House correspondents Maggie Haberman and Mark Landler wrote a similarly obtuse analysis piece (11\/13\/18<\/a>) about the migrant caravan as campaign issue. Leading off with a damp-bread headline\u2014\u201cA Week After the Midterms, Trump Seems to Forget the Caravan\u201d\u2014Haberman and Landler proceed to offer a workable review of the president\u2019s sudden amnesia about an issue that up until a week ago was tantamount to a national crisis.<\/p>\n However, this Times <\/b>story also doesn\u2019t bother to look in the mirror. In fact, it fails to mention the words \u201cpress\u201d or \u201cmedia\u201d even a single time, although it does take what could be construed as an oblique potshot at cable news with a brief mention that the \u201ccaravan having faded from television screens.\u201d Nowhere is there any mention of the 14 front page stories\u2014averaging one a day\u2014that their own newspaper ran on the migrant caravan in the two weeks before Election Day. Nor was there any acknowledgement that the Times<\/b>, too, \u201cseems\u201d to have mostly forgotten the caravan, having only run one photo (11\/10\/18<\/a>) on the caravan and one full story (11\/11\/18<\/a>) on the military deployment to stop it on A1 since Election Day. What\u2019s more, a search of the Times <\/b>archives found stories mentioning \u201cmigrant, caravan\u201d fell by more than half between 10\/25\/18\u201311\/5\/18 (an average of 19 a day) and 11\/7\/13\u201311\/13\/13 (an average of 9 day).<\/p>\n Even more galling, Haberman and Landler included this sentence in their introduction: \u201cThere was little dispute, even before Election Day, that Mr. Trump was exploiting the caravan for political purposes.\u201d That sentiment, that the president was merely ginning up outrage to boost Republican voter turnout, though undoubtedly true, was hardly a fixture of all the Times<\/b>\u2019 staid reporting on the caravan in the previous weeks. For example, an October 26 story<\/a> on Trump\u2019s decision to deploy more than 5,000 US troops to the border only offered one brief aside\u2014a quote from Democratic minority leader Nancy Pelosi\u2014that suggested the move was anything close to a brazen political ploy. One could read other Times <\/b>articles about the caravan as well without encountering this now breezily made conclusion.<\/p>\n A New York Times<\/strong> editor (10\/26\/18<\/a>) argues that Donald Trump’s use of refugees as a campaign prop makes them even more newsworthy.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n The Times <\/b>lack of introspection was also on display in a blog post (10\/26\/18<\/a>) by the paper\u2019s deputy international editor, Greg Winter, who archly pushed back against reader questions about the Times\u2019 <\/b>editorial calculus for so heavily covering the migrant caravan:<\/p>\n And, yes, President Trump is a big part of the equation<\/a>. But that does not make the caravan any less<\/i> of a story. It simply adds yet another powerful dynamic to an already newsworthy phenomenon. After all, Mr. Trump\u2019s immigration policies determine the fate of these migrants, and his repeated return to immigration as a campaign theme shapes the election debate.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not our job to pretend that the caravan and the president\u2019s response are not happening. To the contrary, it\u2019s our mission to explain, with clarity and fairness, what is real, what is not and why it matters.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n This defensiveness is not unexpected. After the Times <\/b>unceremoniously killed off its public editor position 17 months ago, I warned (FAIR.org<\/b>, 6\/1\/17<\/a>) that the move would make it much easier for the paper to shrug off\u2014or completely ignore\u2014criticism of its coverage:<\/p>\n Despite the public editor\u2019s uneven history, the Times<\/b> and its readers were still unquestionably better served by its presence and its potential. To lose this position means both the paper and the public will suffer in the long run. Corporate media, now more than ever, can only recapture the public\u2019s trust by bringing more transparency and accountability to those people and institutions in power. And yet these news organizations are increasingly uninterested in applying those same principles to themselves.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Just as with the corporate media\u2019s obsession with Hillary Clinton\u2019s emails<\/a> during the 2016 election\u2014at the expense of robust policy coverage\u2014what\u2019s really at issue here is the broader framing and messaging the press sends through its disproportionate focus. If the last month is any indication, establishment news organizations like the Post <\/b>and the Times <\/b>still haven\u2019t learned the key lessons about their flawed 2016 election coverage. And so they continue to fall for the feints of a president who leverages their deference for authority to mainline hate and bigotry in the service of his and his party\u2019s political fortunes.<\/p>\n This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News<\/a> with permission from FAIR<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Joshua Holland (The Nation, 10\/26\/18): “Trump floods the zone with bullshit, they dutifully convey it, and we end up swimming in it.”If the establishment media\u2019s coverage in the home stretch of the 2018 midterm elections is any kind of prologue to 2020, be prepared for an avalanche of right-wing xenophobic propaganda during our next […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2521,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-385234","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/385234","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2521"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=385234"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/385234\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=385234"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=385234"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=385234"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"WaPo:](\"https:\/\/fair.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/11\/WaPo-Migrant-Caravan.png\")
<\/p>\n![\"NYT:](\"https:\/\/fair.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/11\/NYT-Migrant-Caravan.png\")
<\/p>\n![\"NYT:](\"https:\/\/fair.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/11\/NYT-Times-Covering-Caravan.png\")
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