The headline to Philadelphia Inquirer’s Will Bunch’s newsletter today is perfect: Big Media to Democracy: Drop Dead. Bunch describes the dynamic of our elite reporters and political analysts not understanding that the MAGA Republicans’ threat to democracy is also a direct threat to their survival.
There shouldn’t be two sides to the survival of our democracy. Yet we see a failure to understand this from CNN to the Washington Post to other pundits we see on television. As Bunch writes:
“Except that “both sides”-ing the current moment or equating Biden’s struggles to find the right tone to explain the threat to democracy with the actual threat itself, isn’t “accurate” in any true or moral sense of the term. Instead of rising to the occasion, the loudest voices in America want to run away, to hide in a shell of faux professionalism and medieval ethics rather than acknowledge that the foundation that allows them to perform acts of journalism is near collapse.
Our democracy is at stake. I wish more of our reporters and editors understood that fact.