Politics and Democracy: Tips from Our Newsletter

October 28, 2021

Sigh. Considering the exceptional political polarization of U.S. society and the slate of broadly popular legislation that has hit the cutting room floor in recent years, perhaps we can all agree something is up with U.S. democracy. But, to put that at the feet of the Democratic party alone, as this Rolling Stone headline above does, despite acknowledging in its opening ‘graph that Republicans are seeking to curtail voting rights and overturn fair elections (those critical pillars of said democracy), is disingenuous and inaccurate. Sure, headlines aren’t the best place for nuanced political commentary, but in this case the answer for reframing this headline is found in a meme: Why not both?

 

December 16, 2021

In December 2021 a U.S. House select committee investigating the events of January 6, 2021 revealed a number of text messages sent to Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows by lawmakers and journalists. Some of the texts are from panicked people stationed within the Capitol while the deadly riot unfolded urging the then-president’s team to end the violence. Others, including one from Ohio congressman Jim Jordan, are from Trump allies suggesting ways he might illegally seize power. Of course, a U.S. lawmaker seeking to keep a president in power against the will of the people is extremely newsworthy and demands public attention.

Vague headlines like the one above, from CNN, however, don’t help audiences jump into this complex story. By leaving out details (who is Jordan again? what texts are we talking about? what did it say?) this headline makes big assumptions about its audience’s knowledge of a story that unfolded over many days during the busiest time of year. It would be perfectly understandable for many Americans to have missed this story completely. And without key details, this headline displays no sense of urgency to the public. Contrast it with the one below, from CNBC; crucial contextual elements help audiences get up to speed on this important story before they even get to the article.

 

January 20, 2022

In late January 2022, the U.S. Senate failed to advance legislation to expand voting access and a change to Senate rules that would allow the legislation to pass failed by a 52-48 margin. All of the Republicans in the Senate, as well as two Democrats, Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin, made this happen. As with any big news event, it’s critical that reporting on this centers both those responsible for the action in question and who those actions will impact.

The headline above, from CNN, focuses the story on Democrats’ “defeat.” This plays into the politics-as-spectator-sport framing of legislation that erases the very real people who are impacted by the actions of Congress as if it’s all just a game. (Were Democrats defeated, or were voting rights for the entire country defeated?) It also obscures the Republican party’s prominent role in the outcome of last night’s debate by assigning no actor to the failed vote.

By contrast, the above headline from CNBC, properly positions the actor and the act: Republicans blocked the voting rights bills alongside Sinema and Manchin. While it’s certainly relevant that two Democrats also blocked these bills, the emphasis should be on Senate Republicans. The press often takes for granted that all legislation should split along party lines and thus focuses on outliers who cross the aisle. In reality, any of the 50 Senate Republicans could have chosen to alter Senate rules to expand voting rights and chose not to, and in news coverage those 50 should receive as much responsibility for this outcome as Sinema and Manchin.

 

February 3, 2022

The New York Times reported that, after the 2020 election, Donald Trump asked his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, “to ask the Department of Homeland Security if it could legally take control of voting machines in key swing states.” That, apparently, was after asking the Attorney General if the Justice Department could do it.

So it sounds like the former president had quite a specific, prominent role in the attempt to seize voting machines: asking those on his team to do something completely unprecedented in U.S. democracy. It’s curious that the Times would describe it so vaguely in their headline, above. We always prefer precision here, making the Guardian’s reporting on the Times’ discovery, below, a better option.

 

March 24, 2022

A hearing for a U.S. Supreme Court nominee — which literally has two partisan sides and entails a lot of one-on-one conversation — can quite easily be framed by headlines as a head-to-head battle. That makes any bias pretty clear when comparing different framings side by side. That the hearing in question below was of Ketanji Brown Jackson, who is the first Black woman to serve as a Supreme Court justice, makes it even more important to get right.

The headline above, from The Hill, describes Sen. Ted Cruz’s part in the hearing. The word “presses” connotes seeking hidden information, like an interrogator might, implying Jackson has something to hide. Emphasizing “critical race theory” (without quotes) implies it was a legitimate thing for Cruz to be asking about — with CRT being a legal framework to begin with that might have been the case if not for the bastardization of the phrase we’ve described elsewhere. And finally calling the whole endeavor “tense,” a vague assessment of the environs, puts culpability for that tension on both Cruz’s and Jackson’s shoulders.

In reality, any tension or agitation during the hearings was the fault of the GOP who, by many accounts, raised the temperature in the room while Jackson remained calm and patient. The Guardian headline above frames those events in a much more straight-forward and honest way. This construction places Jackson squarely as the recipient of the “attacks” perpetuated by Senate Republicans without equivocating.

 

March 31, 2022

What makes a good headline? Context, context, context.

The above headline, from the Washington Post, is accurate. But why does it matter that the call logs are missing? The average person reading this may not realize (or it might just not come to mind) that White House call logs are supposed to be complete and turned over to the National Archives for the public’s knowledge of what our president is doing and to whom they speak. Some audience members aren’t old enough to remember the scandal that 18 minutes of missing audio recordings caused for President Nixon, an incident folks like Bob Woodward were quick to note in comparison. The significance may seem obvious to reporters and political obsessives, but our job as journalists is not to assume knowledge on behalf of our audiences.

The headline below, from the New York Times, is better because it quickly provides context and meaning. The gap in call logs — what we don’t know — matters because of what we do know: that on January 6, 2021 Trump was seeking help from Republican lawmakers to overturn the rightful election results while his supporters overtook the Capitol. Thus, a gap this large is rightfully concerning to those investigating any wrongdoing on behalf of the Trump administration. Connecting the dots this easily in a headline does a great service to busy audiences.

 

April 21, 2022

The headlines below refer to the bill signed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) in March 2022 which, as the Washington Post reports,:

“…[bans] instruction or classroom discussion of ‘sexual orientation or gender identity’ for kindergartners through third graders in public schools. It also empowers parents to sue school districts over teachings they don’t like, and requires schools to tell parents when their child receives mental health services.”

After the bill passed, the Walt Disney Co. released a statement condemning the bill and asking for it to be repealed. Both of the headlines below frame these events very differently.

The headline above, from a Los Angeles Times story syndicated by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, combines two harmful tropes of political coverage. First, it uses the word “feud” to describe a very uneven conflict. As MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan and NYU’s Jay Rosen have discussed on Twitter, calling this a “feud” creates a false equivalence between Disney and DeSantis’ actions. DeSantis and his party have led a bad-faith campaign accusing the company of being “groomers” who support child abuse and made moves to remove the company’s self-governing status in the state. Disney, on the other hand, put out a late, three-sentence statement. These actions are not proportional.

Second, the use of the term “culture war” to vaguely refer to the long fight for equal rights for the LGBTQ community is delegitimizing. As we’ve written above, “Lumping debates over whose life is worthy and free into the term ‘culture wars’ dilutes the serious and often deadly consequences of whose ‘values’ are enshrined into law.”

The headline above, from Vanity Fair, gets it right. It calls DeSantis’s actions “threatening” and refers to Disney’s actions as “spoke out.” These terms accurately describe those actions without implying they are of equal weight. The headline also refers to the bill as “Anti-LGBTQ,” putting the true goal of the bill in harsh relief rather than referring it to as a “culture war.”

 

July 14, 2022

During the July 2022 House select committee public hearings on the events of January 6, 2021, important details about a December 2021 meeting held at the White House were revealed. Ten Republican members of Congress and then-Representative-elect Marjorie Taylor Greene met to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

I’ll give the headline above from Axios credit for citing the primary source of this information (White House visitor logs). But it leaves out the most important part of this news: What were the Republicans pressuring Pence to do?

The headline below, from Insider, may be way longer than most newsrooms would allow, but it does cover all the critical details: what the meeting was about and that the president was there. It also adds that crucial fact that six of those in attendance later asked for pardons, implying that they feared what they were doing put them at risk of prosecution. The bottom line: who attended a meeting is important to audiences but only if they know what the meeting was about.

 

August 11, 2022

The Washington Post published the headline below atop its story on the political implications of the FBI search of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate. It was immediately and harshly judged by media scholars on Twitter for doing the politicizing it accuses of U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland.

The implication of this headline structure is that, if vowing to depoliticize “Justice” came before this search, then the search marks the politicization of it. That suggests that the FBI’s search was not driven by a compelling legal reason, like evidence of a crime, but instead by retaliation against a political rival.

We know little about the search so far. But, considering the measured history of Garland’s approach, the fact that a federal judge signed off on the warrant, and the unprecedented nature of the search, it is likely safe to say the argument for it was compelling.

Regardless of the facts, however, supporters of Trump (including much of the GOP) will likely declare this a “witch hunt” driven by electoral politics. (In fact, violent rhetoric has already begun to spread on the right.) This is the “political firestorm” the second version of this WaPo headline below, updated later the same day, refers to.

This updated version accurately describes the heat Garland will face due to the right’s determination that the search is politically driven — instead of implying he is in fact politicizing his role.

 

August 25, 2022

I typically avoid using examples from Fox News in this space. That’s largely because I agree with media scholar Dan Froomkin that what the channel produces is not accurately described as news but is instead propaganda. It’s also because the juxtaposition such an example would create is often laughably transparent in its partisanship. Today I feel the comparison is worth making.

In August the Biden administration announced its long-awaited student debt plan. The Fox headline above makes no attempt to hide its opinion on the facts of the news. It refers to student loan forgiveness as a “handout,” a term long used to pejoratively describe public assistance. It also chooses to place the announcement against the backdrop of “as national debt soars. ” (This explainer from Quartz shows why the national debt is used as a scare tactic to avoid public spending, if you’re curious.) Fox could have easily chosen to end the headline with “as student debt soars” but that would paint the announcement in a positive light, which is not the goal here.

In contrast, the Washington Post’s headline tells it straight: what’s happening (loan cancellations) how it’s happening (who gets what money) and who’s doing it (Biden). No naked partisan slant to be found.

 

November 17, 2022

On Tuesday, former U.S. president Donald Trump announced he would run for president again in 2024. In the headline above, NPR chose to contextualize this news within the recent midterm election results. But is the challenge Trump may or may not face in becoming the GOP’s nominee the most important part of his potential candidacy?

The Washington Post (above) and NBC News (below) certainly didn’t think so. They both, in slightly different ways, told audiences what was most important about Trump: he tried to overturn the 2020 election in his own favor. Of all the things a newsroom could choose to include about Trump in a headline, this piece is significant. By emphasizing his attempt at insurrection, these headlines implicitly make an argument that his candidacy is at the very least unusual, if not dangerous for democracy.

Oddly enough, though the NPR headline soft-pedals the announcement, a tweet of this story from the newsroom went even further than the examples above. Regardless, it’s refreshing to see newsrooms refusing to normalize Trump’s attempts at subverting the will of the people and keeping it top of mind for readers. For more examples of how different newsrooms handled this aspect of Trump’s announcement, check out Media Matters’ analysis.

 

December 22, 2022

A report from the U.S. House ways and means committee revealed in December that the IRS did not audit President Trump’s taxes during his first two years in office. The IRS has a mandate to audit the president’s taxes each year.

I see two problems with how the headline above, from the Guardian, frames this news. First, the passive use of “failed” denotes something going wrong, as when a machine misfires or someone is unsuccessful at a task. However, reports make it appear that the IRS didn’t try to audit Trump and fail. Rather, they didn’t take up the task until they were asked for the audits by the ways and means committee in 2017. “Failed” implies some attempt at success. The news here is that, for whatever reason, the IRS didn’t attempt their mandatory task until prompted.

The second problem I see is the inclusion of the word “timely,” which makes it appear as though the core issue here is the IRS’s time management. Again, the key takeaway from this story is that people at the IRS chose not to conduct their mandatory work. The speed at which they eventually did the auditing is less important than the fact that they didn’t do it until prompted despite a requirement. These two small words, “failed” and “timely,” effectively soften the impact of the news of this wrongdoing.

The headline from MSNBC, above, on the other hand uses active verbs like “ignored” and “delayed.” These words emphasize that the lack of an audit was the result of choices made by the IRS, underlining their agency in these events. I love to see action words that attribute credit where credit is due.

 

January 19, 2023

President Biden’s lawyers recently found and subsequently turned over classified documents found in two unapproved places. The mishandling of classified documents, of course, rings a few bells considering former president Trump’s recent refusal to hand over government documents after his presidency.

The headline below, from NPR, is a perfect example of false equivalence by omission. Yes, special counsel have been assigned to investigate both Biden’s and Trump’s handling of these documents, that’s true. But that action is in response to similar incidents that are of very unequal magnitude. Emphasizing this framing, that “Biden joins Trump” in this experience, is painting both with the same brush.

The headline from U.S. News below, on the other hand, gets straight to the point. While there are similarities between what can both be called “document dramas,” there are also “dramatic differences.”

The handling and mishandling of government documents by presidents and vice presidents is obviously newsworthy. But it’s just as obvious that these particular cases are very different and should not be falsely equated just because these two sit on opposite sides of the aisle. That would be egregious “bothsidesism.”

For a good read on this, check out a recent Q&A with media critic Margaret Sullivan.

 

February 2, 2023

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced a legislative plan Tuesday that, if taken up wholesale, will have a huge impact on the state’s higher education system. DeSantis, who is expected to run for president in 2024, wants to ban state colleges from hosting programs on diversity, equity and inclusion, and critical race theory. (Reminder: CRT has gone from a term describing a legal theory not actually taught in U.S. grade schools to a euphemism for American history that acknowledges racism and slavery.)

This sounds very much like the desire for a memory hole where the country’s long history of racism and white supremacy is “disappeared” for the benefit of the white and powerful. The rewriting of history for political gain, banning education that would weaken white supremacy, suppression of the opposition … add to this Florida’s new censorship of school libraries and state “retraining” on book collection and it’s hard not to describe this series of moves as neo-fascist. That ideology, of course, relies heavily on tightly maintaining the education of its people in a way that serves its leaders. That education usually promotes a revisionist nationalism, often calling back to idealized “better” times and/or traditions.

The following statements came from DeSantis’s office Tuesday:

“… the legislation will ensure Florida’s public universities and colleges are grounded in the history and philosophy of Western Civilization ….”

“In Florida, we will build off of our higher education reforms by aligning core curriculum to the values of liberty and the Western tradition ….”

And yet, headlines from major outlets announcing this news barely batted an eyelash. Some, like the New York Times headline below, felt the crux of the story is actually its impact on DeSantis’s political clout.

Not only does this wording dismiss very impactful policy as a savvy political move, but it sets up and normalizes conflict between DeSantis and the public education system. Calling it the “education establishment” — as if state government and public education don’t necessarily work in tandem — legitimizes this “culture war” and aligns itself with a populist ideology that rails against said “establishment.” The DeSantis office was probably high-fiving over this headline today.

Similarly, the headlines below support DeSantis’ point of view more than an “objective” journalist would expect. The first is a National Review headline run by Yahoo! which highlights the elimination of “bureaucracies,” language used by DeSantis and a common dog-whistle from the right as it denotes ineffective government spending. This headline fully buys into the premise that DEI initiatives are wastes of money.

The second, below, is from the Tampa Bay Times; a similar wording ran in Orlando’s Spectrum News 13. Both use “indoctrination” in quotes to imply the word came from DeSantis, not necessarily the newsroom. But since nothing about either headline seeks to interrogate the existence of actual indoctrination, we’re left to assume that it does actually exist. Unless, of course, the writers were attempting a bit of irony-via-scare-quotes. It wouldn’t be the first time, but it’s a cheap way of attempting to telegraph the truth without being married to it.

What would have been an appropriate headline to announce DeSantis’s intervention into higher education? The Associated Press, below, simply tells it like it is.

 

February 9, 2023

In 2020, Twitter temporarily blocked the spread of an unverified New York Post story on Hunter Biden. Three former executives from the social media giant appeared before the House Oversight Committee Wednesday to discuss this and other decisions. Republicans consider this event “censorship,” but that’s far from a settled matter — if it was, the Washington Post wouldn’t have included the quotation marks in the live blog headline above. As we discussed in last week’s newsletter, in headlines, the use of scare quotes around a word whose accuracy is up for debate does not actually imply uncertainty to audiences. (I will die on this hill.) In this case, with no attribution, it’s unclear who is calling this censorship at all.

Furthermore, I’d also argue the word “grilled,” meaning an intense interrogation, implies that the subject warrants such questioning. This is also up for debate, making “grilled” a more sensational verb than necessary.

The Guardian went with the plain “to testify” instead, without making a judgement on whether the “handling” their headline describes below was censorship or not. In juxtaposition I think these headlines make a good case for accurate prose, even if it’s less spicy.

 

March 9, 2023

Former president Donald Trump took the stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference over the weekend. In his speech, he said:

“In 2016, I declared, ‘I am your voice.’ Today, I add: I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed: I am your retribution.”

This is startling language from someone running for president, let alone someone who may face criminal charges for his role in an attack on the Capitol. But many headlines covering the long, falsehood-filled speech — like the Washington Post’s, below — skipped over Trump’s authoritarian messaging. Instead, many focused on Trump’s relation to the GOP, implying the important takeaway was his electability, not his vision for America.

As the Post’s own columnist Jennifer Rubin wrote about the reports, “Coverage can be so bland and innocuous as to mislead. The audience — that is, potential voters — might easily come away from such coverage believing that Trump acted like a normal candidate, not a figure plainly unfit to handle any public position.”

What’s interesting in the Post’s case is that a piece by a different reporter under an “Analysis” banner did a much better job with its headline, below. It highlights the abnormality of Trump’s worrying rhetoric and also connects it to its origins on the right.

The juxtaposition between the tone of this “analysis” and that of the “straight” reporting exemplifies an issue we see across political journalism. In many arenas, connecting the dots of context and history for our audiences is a welcomed and necessary part of everyday reporting. But in politics, one risks the perception of “bias” when you put two and two together without applying an “analysis” or “opinion” label.