By Chauncey DeVega, a senior politics writer for Salon. His essays can also be found at Chaunceydevega.com.
One of the great errors of the American mainstream news media in the Age of Trump is an assumption that democracy is a settled matter in this country and that Republicans and Democrats are both equally invested in normal politics and consensus where the differences are just “partisan” and not existential. In the Age of Trump (and the years and decades that brought us here), that is manifestly not true. Public opinion polls and other research show that today’s Republican Party and larger “conservative” movement no longer support pluralistic multiracial democracy. Any members of the news media who conclude “everyone already knows” about Donald Trump’s violence so “why keep reminding them, it is old news,” is committing a number of gross errors in logic and inference.
Most Americans do not follow the news and current events closely. Moreover, political scientists and other experts have repeatedly shown that the mass public is ignorant and not highly sophisticated in terms of their political decision-making and knowledge. Even worse, public opinion polls now show that a larger percentage of Americans are possessed by collective amnesia and are actually yearning for a return to the horrible years when Donald Trump was in the White House.
This refusal to adapt and change for the better in service to real pro-democracy journalism and its dictate to pursue the real truth and not just what is comfortable and the “consensus”, is one of the many reasons why the mainstream news media has lost credibility with huge swaths of the American public.
Channeling Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, Donald Trump and many of his MAGA followers have already targeted the American mainstream news media and its reporters and journalists as “enemies of the people.” To that end, Trump and his enforcers are threatening and planning (as publicly documented in Project 2025, Agenda 47, and elsewhere) how they are going to put “disloyal” and “non-complaint” (in their words “unpatriotic”) reporters, journalists, and other truth-tellers in the back of those pickup trucks right next to President Biden and their other enemies. Those threats are not metaphorical. They are literal.
When the autocrat, fascist, or some other enemy of democracy tells you what they are going to do you should always believe them. They are not kidding. Unfortunately, too many members of the American news media refuse to do so — and it will only be their undoing. They were repeatedly warned. Denial will not save them.
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
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