Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
Home > The Corporate Media Can't Be Bothered to Report on GOP's Voting
Suppression
________________________________________
The Corporate Media Can't Be Bothered to Report on GOP's Voting Suppression
By Neal Gabler [1] / Moyers & Company [2]
April 18, 2016
Donald Trump has been cranky this week, and the mainstream media dont seem
terribly sympathetic. Apoplectic over the way rival Ted Cruz has managed to
pluck delegates from state conventions in Colorado and Louisiana, Trump has
called the Republican Party crooked, corrupt, rigged and dirty.
GOP chairman Reince Preibus [3] and the poobahs of the conservative media
have fired back, saying that the rules governing delegate selection had been
in place for months and that it is just too darn bad if Trump is aggrieved.
Note, the Trump bashers are not saying that the selection process is
honorable or fair, only that Trump should have known better and engaged in
the skullduggery himself [4].
Putting aside that by one assessment [5] Trump actually has gotten more
delegates than his vote total should have earned him, you can imagine how
much more sympathetic the press would have been if, say, John Kasich had
been the frontrunner and was losing delegates to Trump.
Anyway, Trumps whining over the naked attempts to deny him the nomination
underscores the medias misplaced priorities when it comes to reporting the
real tragedy of Republican voter abuseone that has gotten some attention,
especially and thankfully on this site, but nowhere near the amount it
should in the MSM, given how important and reprehensible it is. I am talking
about systematic efforts by the GOP to throw impediments in the way of
minority voters, poor voters and young voters simply trying to cast their
ballots.
This is a scandal of gigantic proportions. The Republican Party has done a
plethora of heinous things over the years to the poor and powerless, but to
actively prevent people from voting may be their cruelest and most shameful
achievement yet.
In no way should this be a partisan issue. It strikes at the very heart of
our democracy where, it should go without saying, every effort must be taken
to make voting easier. And yet the media dont seem to be particularly
exercised about voter suppression. Why? I think it is because it doesnt fit
the template of scandal the media love to report.
Think about it. One of our two major political parties has long been
dedicated to subverting the democratic process. You could almost say that
voter suppression and manipulation is hard-wired into the modern Republican
Partyfrom the early 1960s, when William Rehnquist, then an attorney and
Republican activist and later Supreme Court chief justice, was accused of
patrolling Arizona polling places [6] and intimidating black and Latino
voters; to the 2000 Supreme Court coup détat [7] awarding the election to
George W. Bush by denying Florida voters their choice; to the Supreme Court
gutting the Voting Rights Act in 2013 [8] by invalidating the provision that
required certain jurisdictions to get federal approval for new election
laws.
And now, in the wake of that decision, we have a skein of voter suppression
laws [9] passed almost exclusively by Republican state legislatures and
signed into law by Republican governorslaws that include [10] cutting back
early voting and reducing weekend and evening voting, requiring photo IDs
and then making it difficult to obtain them, requiring proof of citizenship,
and forcing voters to file dual registration for federal and state
elections.
Just a few weeks ago, as reported by The Nation magazines Ari Berman [11],
we had the insult of Maricopa County in Arizona reducing the number of
polling places in Latino neighborhoods by a whopping 70 percent to make it
more onerous for them to vote. Thank you, Supreme Court.
Republicans defend the practice, saying that these laws are necessary to
prevent voter fraud, which studies show is virtually non-existent. But lets
be honest. Republicans pass laws to make it more difficult for qualified
minority, poor and young voters to cast ballots not because they want to
protect the nation from fraud, but because they want to protect Republicans
from the swelling numbers of potential Democratic voters [12].
But Im not concerned here with the merits of the laws, or even with the
disingenuousness behind their passage. This is about media negligence. The
only reason that the Republicans can get away with a policy that is beyond
unconscionable is that the MSM dont really seem to care. More, Republicans
counton the media not caring. They are like thieves in a corrupt comic book
metropolis who know the police will always be looking the other way.
Part of it is that the crimeand it is a crime in a moral if not a legal
senseis right out in the open. The media love the clandestine. They love to
reveal hidden misdeeds because it seems to empower them. GOP voter
suppression isnt surreptitious. You dont have to be Sherlock Holmes to see
it. For many reporters, like the GOP delegate selection procedures about
which Trump is complaining, its just politics as usual, which only goes to
show how cynical the media are to our detriment. For them, killing
democracy is just another political ploy.
Part of it, too, is that this isnt an insurgency within the party, like
Trumps candidacy. It is the partys standard operating procedure, and the
MSM have a rule: You never call out one party unless you find something
similar about which to call out the other party. That is the media symmetry
about which I complain constantly and which gives the GOP a free pass since
the media cant take the chance of seeming to beat up on them. In a way, the
MSM operate on what I would call the Jordan Principle, after basketball star
Michael Jordan, who once said, when asked to endorse Democratic North
Carolina senatorial candidate Harvey Gantt, a black man, against Jesse
Helms, of all people, Republicans buy sneakers, too. Well, Republicans buy
papers and watch TV, too. You dare not offend them.
Then there is the issue of who is being affected. I can guarantee you that
if either party were to devise a method of intimidating white middle-class
voters and imposing burdensome voting requirements on them, we would hear
plenty about it in the MSM. In fact, if white middle-class voters were
disenfranchised the way minority voters are, it wouldbe a daily headline
story. (Many of Trumps voters, who he claims are being disenfranchised, are
working class, and, though white, still are only faint blips on the MSM
radar.)
Black and Latino voters dont get those headlines because they matter much
less to the MSM. The scandal of their waiting in line for hours to vote, as
they did in Phoenix, barely registers in our major newspapers and TV news
broadcasts. It is a form of media racism that is too little discussed: the
racism of inattention.
Alas, even the good news segments pull their punches. A story reported by
John Yang [13]several weeks back on the PBS NewsHour, about a poor black
couple trying to vote in Wisconsin, where the ID law is especially onerous,
was moving (and infuriating), but it was both a rare foray into the human
cost of the policy, and a circumspect one, unable to come right out and
identify Gov. Scott Walker as the sinister criminal mastermind behind these
folks disappointment.
But the biggest reason the media seem to have so little interest in what
should be the biggest scandal out there may just be an aesthetic one: voter
suppression doesnt conform to the scandal narrative the media prefer. News
reporting is defined as stories for a reasonthat editors (and presumably
readers) want strong narratives with good guys and bad guys, high stakes,
identifiable victims and various plot twists in their news no less than in
their entertainment (if there is a difference now between the two).
Essentially, they want movies. This is hardly furtive. Stories are nearly
always prioritized over information. I can attest from personal experience
that writers are asked by editors all the time to spice up story elements.
Good stories get good play.
By that standard, voter suppression does not have the lineaments of a good
story, much less a headline-grabbing one. It is too diffuse. Thousands of
Republicans are responsible, not a handful of dirty tricksters, as in the
Nixon days, and you cant pin it on a single villain. It has official
sanction from the Supreme Court and the Republican Party apparatus, so you
cant talk about renegades breaking the rulesalways a good tale. Further,
there is a disconnect from cause to effect because we will never be able to
determine precisely how many voters are discouraged from casting ballots by
Republican efforts. And finally, the victims, largely the poor, the black
and Hispanic, and the young, are not the sorts of cohorts with whom the
white upscale consumers to whom the MSM make their primary appeal will
readily identify.
In short, if there are no Pulitzers to be won by reporting incessantly on
it, neither are there readers or viewers to be won. Voter suppression is not
a movie. It is wallpaper.
But if banks can be too big to fail, so can news stories. Voter suppression
ought to be one of them. It can affect the outcome of elections. It
undermines legitimacy. It further divides the country racially. And it is
just plain indefensible. If the press cant illuminate this ongoing,
horrifying miscarriage of justice that is the very predicate for our
democracy, what can they illuminate?
Oh, yes. Emails. I forgot.
Neal Gabler is an author of five books and the recipient of two LA TImes
Book Prizes, Time magazine's non-fiction book of the year, USA Today's
biography of the year and other awards. He is also a senior fellow at the
Lear Center for the Study of Entertainment and Society and is currently
writing a biography of Sen. Edward Kennedy.
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Report typos and corrections to 'corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx'. [14]
[15]
________________________________________
Source URL:
http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/corporate-media-cant-be-bothered-repor
t-gops-voting-suppression
Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/neal-gabler
[2] http://billmoyers.com/
[3]
http://www.latimes.com/nation/politics/trailguide/la-na-trailguide-04132016-
htmlstory.html#6127
[4]
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/04/13/the-dead-giveaway-
that-donald-trumps-complaints-about-process-are-just-whining/
[5]
http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/despite-complaints-delegate-sy
stem-has-given-trump-22-percent-bonus-n553801
[6] http://articles.latimes.com/1986-08-02/news/mn-973_1_justice-rehnquist
[7]
http://billmoyers.com/story/whats-behind-the-gop-witch-hunt-for-voter-fraud/
[8] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/26/us/supreme-court-ruling.html
[9]
http://prospect.org/article/22-states-wave-new-voting-restrictions-threatens
-shift-outcomes-tight-races
[10]
https://www.aclu.org/blog/speak-freely/will-2016-presidential-election-be-de
cided-voter-suppression-laws
[11]
http://billmoyers.com/story/there-were-five-hour-lines-to-vote-in-arizona-be
cause-the-supreme-court-gutted-the-voting-rights-act/
[12] http://harvardmagazine.com/2012/07/voter-suppression-returns
[13]
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/in-wisconsin-path-to-the-voting-booth-now-req
uires-a-stop-at-the-dmv/
[14] mailto:corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx?Subject=Typo on The Corporate Media
Can't Be Bothered to Report on GOP's Voting Suppression
[15] http://www.alternet.org/
[16] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
Home > The Corporate Media Can't Be Bothered to Report on GOP's Voting
Suppression
The Corporate Media Can't Be Bothered to Report on GOP's Voting Suppression
By Neal Gabler [1] / Moyers & Company [2]
April 18, 2016
Donald Trump has been cranky this week, and the mainstream media dont seem
terribly sympathetic. Apoplectic over the way rival Ted Cruz has managed to
pluck delegates from state conventions in Colorado and Louisiana, Trump has
called the Republican Party crooked, corrupt, rigged and dirty.
GOP chairman Reince Preibus [3] and the poobahs of the conservative media
have fired back, saying that the rules governing delegate selection had been
in place for months and that it is just too darn bad if Trump is aggrieved.
Note, the Trump bashers are not saying that the selection process is
honorable or fair, only that Trump should have known better and engaged in
the skullduggery himself [4].
Putting aside that by one assessment [5] Trump actually has gotten more
delegates than his vote total should have earned him, you can imagine how
much more sympathetic the press would have been if, say, John Kasich had
been the frontrunner and was losing delegates to Trump.
Anyway, Trumps whining over the naked attempts to deny him the nomination
underscores the medias misplaced priorities when it comes to reporting the
real tragedy of Republican voter abuseone that has gotten some attention,
especially and thankfully on this site, but nowhere near the amount it
should in the MSM, given how important and reprehensible it is. I am talking
about systematic efforts by the GOP to throw impediments in the way of
minority voters, poor voters and young voters simply trying to cast their
ballots.
This is a scandal of gigantic proportions. The Republican Party has done a
plethora of heinous things over the years to the poor and powerless, but to
actively prevent people from voting may be their cruelest and most shameful
achievement yet.
In no way should this be a partisan issue. It strikes at the very heart of
our democracy where, it should go without saying, every effort must be taken
to make voting easier. And yet the media dont seem to be particularly
exercised about voter suppression. Why? I think it is because it doesnt fit
the template of scandal the media love to report.
Think about it. One of our two major political parties has long been
dedicated to subverting the democratic process. You could almost say that
voter suppression and manipulation is hard-wired into the modern Republican
Partyfrom the early 1960s, when William Rehnquist, then an attorney and
Republican activist and later Supreme Court chief justice, was accused of
patrolling Arizona polling places [6] and intimidating black and Latino
voters; to the 2000 Supreme Court coup détat [7] awarding the election to
George W. Bush by denying Florida voters their choice; to the Supreme Court
gutting the Voting Rights Act in 2013 [8] by invalidating the provision that
required certain jurisdictions to get federal approval for new election
laws.
And now, in the wake of that decision, we have a skein of voter suppression
laws [9] passed almost exclusively by Republican state legislatures and
signed into law by Republican governorslaws that include [10] cutting back
early voting and reducing weekend and evening voting, requiring photo IDs
and then making it difficult to obtain them, requiring proof of citizenship,
and forcing voters to file dual registration for federal and state
elections.
Just a few weeks ago, as reported by The Nation magazines Ari Berman [11],
we had the insult of Maricopa County in Arizona reducing the number of
polling places in Latino neighborhoods by a whopping 70 percent to make it
more onerous for them to vote. Thank you, Supreme Court.
Republicans defend the practice, saying that these laws are necessary to
prevent voter fraud, which studies show is virtually non-existent. But lets
be honest. Republicans pass laws to make it more difficult for qualified
minority, poor and young voters to cast ballots not because they want to
protect the nation from fraud, but because they want to protect Republicans
from the swelling numbers of potential Democratic voters [12].
But Im not concerned here with the merits of the laws, or even with the
disingenuousness behind their passage. This is about media negligence. The
only reason that the Republicans can get away with a policy that is beyond
unconscionable is that the MSM dont really seem to care. More, Republicans
counton the media not caring. They are like thieves in a corrupt comic book
metropolis who know the police will always be looking the other way.
Part of it is that the crimeand it is a crime in a moral if not a legal
senseis right out in the open. The media love the clandestine. They love to
reveal hidden misdeeds because it seems to empower them. GOP voter
suppression isnt surreptitious. You dont have to be Sherlock Holmes to see
it. For many reporters, like the GOP delegate selection procedures about
which Trump is complaining, its just politics as usual, which only goes to
show how cynical the media are to our detriment. For them, killing
democracy is just another political ploy.
Part of it, too, is that this isnt an insurgency within the party, like
Trumps candidacy. It is the partys standard operating procedure, and the
MSM have a rule: You never call out one party unless you find something
similar about which to call out the other party. That is the media symmetry
about which I complain constantly and which gives the GOP a free pass since
the media cant take the chance of seeming to beat up on them. In a way, the
MSM operate on what I would call the Jordan Principle, after basketball star
Michael Jordan, who once said, when asked to endorse Democratic North
Carolina senatorial candidate Harvey Gantt, a black man, against Jesse
Helms, of all people, Republicans buy sneakers, too. Well, Republicans buy
papers and watch TV, too. You dare not offend them.
Then there is the issue of who is being affected. I can guarantee you that
if either party were to devise a method of intimidating white middle-class
voters and imposing burdensome voting requirements on them, we would hear
plenty about it in the MSM. In fact, if white middle-class voters were
disenfranchised the way minority voters are, it wouldbe a daily headline
story. (Many of Trumps voters, who he claims are being disenfranchised, are
working class, and, though white, still are only faint blips on the MSM
radar.)
Black and Latino voters dont get those headlines because they matter much
less to the MSM. The scandal of their waiting in line for hours to vote, as
they did in Phoenix, barely registers in our major newspapers and TV news
broadcasts. It is a form of media racism that is too little discussed: the
racism of inattention.
Alas, even the good news segments pull their punches. A story reported by
John Yang [13]several weeks back on the PBS NewsHour, about a poor black
couple trying to vote in Wisconsin, where the ID law is especially onerous,
was moving (and infuriating), but it was both a rare foray into the human
cost of the policy, and a circumspect one, unable to come right out and
identify Gov. Scott Walker as the sinister criminal mastermind behind these
folks disappointment.
But the biggest reason the media seem to have so little interest in what
should be the biggest scandal out there may just be an aesthetic one: voter
suppression doesnt conform to the scandal narrative the media prefer. News
reporting is defined as stories for a reasonthat editors (and presumably
readers) want strong narratives with good guys and bad guys, high stakes,
identifiable victims and various plot twists in their news no less than in
their entertainment (if there is a difference now between the two).
Essentially, they want movies. This is hardly furtive. Stories are nearly
always prioritized over information. I can attest from personal experience
that writers are asked by editors all the time to spice up story elements.
Good stories get good play.
By that standard, voter suppression does not have the lineaments of a good
story, much less a headline-grabbing one. It is too diffuse. Thousands of
Republicans are responsible, not a handful of dirty tricksters, as in the
Nixon days, and you cant pin it on a single villain. It has official
sanction from the Supreme Court and the Republican Party apparatus, so you
cant talk about renegades breaking the rulesalways a good tale. Further,
there is a disconnect from cause to effect because we will never be able to
determine precisely how many voters are discouraged from casting ballots by
Republican efforts. And finally, the victims, largely the poor, the black
and Hispanic, and the young, are not the sorts of cohorts with whom the
white upscale consumers to whom the MSM make their primary appeal will
readily identify.
In short, if there are no Pulitzers to be won by reporting incessantly on
it, neither are there readers or viewers to be won. Voter suppression is not
a movie. It is wallpaper.
But if banks can be too big to fail, so can news stories. Voter suppression
ought to be one of them. It can affect the outcome of elections. It
undermines legitimacy. It further divides the country racially. And it is
just plain indefensible. If the press cant illuminate this ongoing,
horrifying miscarriage of justice that is the very predicate for our
democracy, what can they illuminate?
Oh, yes. Emails. I forgot.
Neal Gabler is an author of five books and the recipient of two LA TImes
Book Prizes, Time magazine's non-fiction book of the year, USA Today's
biography of the year and other awards. He is also a senior fellow at the
Lear Center for the Study of Entertainment and Society and is currently
writing a biography of Sen. Edward Kennedy.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Report typos and corrections to 'corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx'. [14]
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.[15]
Source URL:
http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/corporate-media-cant-be-bothered-repor
t-gops-voting-suppression
Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/neal-gabler
[2] http://billmoyers.com/
[3]
http://www.latimes.com/nation/politics/trailguide/la-na-trailguide-04132016-
htmlstory.html#6127
[4]
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/04/13/the-dead-giveaway-
that-donald-trumps-complaints-about-process-are-just-whining/
[5]
http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/despite-complaints-delegate-sy
stem-has-given-trump-22-percent-bonus-n553801
[6] http://articles.latimes.com/1986-08-02/news/mn-973_1_justice-rehnquist
[7]
http://billmoyers.com/story/whats-behind-the-gop-witch-hunt-for-voter-fraud/
[8] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/26/us/supreme-court-ruling.html
[9]
http://prospect.org/article/22-states-wave-new-voting-restrictions-threatens
-shift-outcomes-tight-races
[10]
https://www.aclu.org/blog/speak-freely/will-2016-presidential-election-be-de
cided-voter-suppression-laws
[11]
http://billmoyers.com/story/there-were-five-hour-lines-to-vote-in-arizona-be
cause-the-supreme-court-gutted-the-voting-rights-act/
[12] http://harvardmagazine.com/2012/07/voter-suppression-returns
[13]
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/in-wisconsin-path-to-the-voting-booth-now-req
uires-a-stop-at-the-dmv/
[14] mailto:corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx?Subject=Typo on The Corporate Media
Can't Be Bothered to Report on GOP's Voting Suppression
[15] http://www.alternet.org/
[16] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
