Media coverage of US political extremism: two perspectives

Today, a conversation about the media and the Big Lie.

Former President Donald Trump’s repeated false assertions about the results of the 2020 election — that it was rigged by Democrats and that he, not Joe Biden, was the actual winner — have been ingrained in the public psyche for more than two years. Trump began making his outrageous claims even before the election was called for Joe Biden.

It wasn’t Trump’s first lie, of course. The Washington Post kept a running tally of the false or misleading statements made by the former President during his four years in office. The ignominious total: 30,573.

Trump made 492 suspect claims in his first 100 days in the White House. On the day before the 2020 election, the Post reports he made 503 false or misleading claims on that one day alone.

In her new book, Confidence Man, journalist Maggie Haberman makes the point that the media wasn’t prepared to cover a candidate or a President who lied so frequently, or so brazenly. If that’s true, are we prepared now?

Trump’s propensity for malicious fiction predated his time in politics by decades. But his Big Lie about the election is without doubt the most pernicious of the many falsehoods he has uttered throughout his career. It led to a riot at the US Capitol and the deaths of five people. Has it also brought democracy to the brink of collapse?

There is ample evidence that it has. The Big Lie has been picked up and embraced by a slew of Trump’s fellow Republicans, as many as 370 across the country who are on the ballot next month.

Here in Maryland, two candidates for statewide office, Dan Cox, who is running for Governor, and Michael Peroutka, who is running for Attorney General, are election deniers. Five candidates for the House of Representatives, one candidate for the US Senate, and Cox’s running mate are also election deniers.

Tom's two guests today have done yeomen’s work in helping voters discern between that which is false and that which is true, and we're delighted they have joined us today to talk about how the media should approach coverage of people who deny the truth, for whatever reason.

Jonathan Lemire is the host of Way Too Early on MSNBC and the White House Bureau Chief for POLITICO. He’s the author of The Big Lie: Election Chaos, Political Opportunism, and the State of American Politics After 2020.  He joins us on Zoom from New York.

David Folkenflik covers the media for NPR, and contributes to the NPR Web series called Untangling Disinformation.  He is the author of Murdoch's World: The Last of the Old Media Empires. He joins us on Zoom from Montclair, NJ.

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