Lines outside polling places don’t so much reflect democracy in action as democracy in inaction—a reminder of America’s shameful, ongoing history of voter suppression. Add in COVID and they aren't just a democratic disgrace, but immediately dangerous. /1
More broadly, in assessing all the early voting, we need to remember the still-very-high rate of people who won't vote—because hurdles like lines put them off or because they've lost faith in politics. If these aren't both forms of suppression, they at least share causes... /2
...institutional racism and a broad culture of bureaucratic incompetence and inertia that doesn’t just make it harder for people to vote, but to access healthcare, affordable housing, and so on. Me today for @CJR: /3
THREAD: The Union Leader's Biden endorsement seemed a sign of the times—another extraordinary media rebuke of Trump. Look closely at the endorsement race, though, and it seems less a divining rod for a changed public mood and more a case of 2016 redux. /1
In the same vein, we've seen a retreading of the quadrennial debate as to whether endorsements are good or not. Critics say they don't sway voters, make news reporters look biased by association, are often silly, and are representationally problematic. /2
These are weighty criticisms. But I think ultimately they damn not the newspaper endorsement, but much bigger problems with the media industry—including bad media literacy, failures of diversity, and bad ownership practices. /3
NEW: For @CJR, I spoke to one of my favorite writers, @rickperlstein, about his new book, the big media themes lurking beneath the surface of his work, why 2020 is really *not* 1968, and his advice for reporters covering this election. Some smart quotes:
On media criticism in his work: "The secret is I’ve really produced a three-thousand-page exercise in media criticism, with some politics thrown in for good measure... The media has done a lot more than historians generally appreciate to shape our own political world."
On the mainstream press's longstanding ideology of consensus: "That’s how you rise to the empyrean heights. That’s how you become host of Meet the Press, as opposed to a beat reporter in Cleveland: your success in telling a story about conflict in America being epiphenomenal."