If the rest of the media did their job

Dear reader,

As we countdown the last few days until another momentous election in the United States, I think hard about what the last several years might have been like if other media institutions in my country did their job with the fearlessness of the Guardian when it comes to calling lies lies, crimes crimes and threats threats.

From too many legacy media outlets based in the US we’re getting something else entirely – horse-race coverage, scraped-up and reheated scandals of little significance, credulous repeating of claims from liars, polite evasions about the threats and crimes of the right, and what’s been dubbed “sane-washing”: the translation of the luridly loopy utterances of Donald Trump and his minions into coherent-sounding policy statements. And we’re seeing billionaire owners of major papers suppress their own editorial department’s endorsements.

The Guardian is unafraid. And it’s independent. (No billionaire bosses.) In this media climate, those are qualities as rare as they are crucial to good journalism. And good journalism is in turn crucial to the informed citizens we need for a functioning democracy.

I write for the Guardian, yes, but I’m also a financial supporter. I’m hoping today – with this election right around the corner – that you might join me.

I believe that the deference and evasiveness of legacy American media comes from many causes, including fear and the habit of pursuing the appearance of being even-handed even at a time when the national political situation is wildly lopsided. Lopsided, that is, because one side is pursuing attacks on democracy and the constitution and seeks to institute an authoritarian regime while stripping rights away from most of us – from women, immigrants and refugees to queer and trans people – including the rights of workers to be safe in their workplaces.

The other side has its flaws, its timidities and eagerness for compromise, and the Guardian covers them well, but it is at worst a status quo party seeking to hold off the coup. That is, the two are not alike, and good journalism does not consist in creating the false appearance of symmetry – does not engage in “bothsiderism”, as it’s sometimes called. The situation we’re in is so new we’ve had to reach for new words to describe it; strikingly both sanewashing and bothsiderism unpack the failure to accurately represent the realities of the situation. They’re diagnoses of diseases that weaken truth-telling and thereby democracy.

The Guardian, in contrast to others, has been bold and uncompromising in its support for reproductive rights and women’s rights, as well as immigrant and other human rights. It also does more and better climate journalism than any other newspaper out there and that’s been true for a long time. What if all the major news outlets had given climate the centrality it should have in our public conversations, our politics, our reporting, as the Guardian does? The climate is a physical reality and its future depends on political action – it too is something at stake in the current election. It is the physical circumstances of our existence on earth, and of all the other species from polar bears to coral reefs. When it goes haywire, systems break down and nature and people suffer, as we’ve seen this year in the United States from climate-intensified hurricanes in the south-east to extreme heat in the south-west.

The climate deserves centrality in our news coverage and our conversations, and that’s another one of the important reasons I’m proud to write – about climate among other things – for the Guardian and to financially support it myself.

We can’t change what all the other newspapers do, but we can keep doing what we do, and you can keep supporting fearless, independent news that covers what matters.

Please consider supporting the Guardian’s fundraising campaign today.

Yours,
Rebecca

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