"They [journalists] are supposed to invoke neither fear nor favor. How do they navigate the sticky wicket of a two-party system in which only one party seems to value the truth?"
"this coming election will include many state-level positions, and that many of those candidates are running on the Big Lie.
...
Hard to treat a person as a normal candidate when one of his main positions is undermining democracy."
“The mainstream press (the reality-based press, to distinguish them from the right-wing press) should focus on what's good for citizens and not the horse race aspect of the midterms, and they should call out lies clearly.”
~@Sulliview
"Mainstream media should cover the midterms ... by avoiding treating the two parties as equal and opposite ‘sides’ when they aren’t, especially when it comes to the preservation of U.S. democracy."
~@Jon_Allsop
"start with a more urgent contest:
those from both parties who still abide by the norms of American democracy
vs.
those who have demonstrated they do not..."
~@jayrosen_nyu
"The idea that media should have a prodemocracy bias is a good one.
It would help us focus on politicians straying from democratic norms, and highlight antidemocratic plays like disenfranchising voters."
~@MollyJongFast
"we have to avoid treating this [deception] as ‘clever positioning,’
... that helps Republicans get away with continuing to undermine democracy, rather than calling out their strategy for the antidemocratic bad acting that it really is.”
~@ThePlumLineGS
"the both-sides dynamic remains — big time. The US doesn’t have some generic problem called “voting” or “democracy” — the problem is, specifically, that many key figures in the Republican Party are acting to erode democracy & voting rights"
~@perrybaconjr
"The media today ... Had they been covering John Lewis on the bridge, one shudders to think that they might have “scored” that day as a win for the Alabama troopers who met the marchers with clubs and tear gas."
~@JRubinBlogger
"A majority of Republican nominees on the ballot this November for the House, Senate and key statewide offices — 299 in all — have denied or questioned the outcome of the last presidential election"
"most of the election deniers nominated are likely to win: Of the nearly 300 on the ballot, 173 are running for safely Republican seats. Another 52 will appear on the ballot in tightly contested races."
Here are the election deniers running in Texas 2022:
Greg Abbott for Governor
Dan Patrick for Lt Gov
and the twice-indicted Ken Paxton for Attorney General.
"Donald Trump on Friday issued what can only be described as a threat against Mitch McConnell, declaring that the Senate minority leader’s support for bipartisan bills amounts to a “DEATH WISH.”"
News orgs fail to ask GOP pols about this threat by Trump.
First, they cannot leave these exchanges for the end of an interview, when the guest can filibuster until the commercial break. Do it upfront, and don’t allow them to move on"
"In the absence of higher authority backing them up, personnel in the staff secretary’s office could not be expected to remove documents from the president’s possession...
“They would have gotten their heads cut off by the president if they tried to take things from him.”
"Russian paratrooper Pavel Filatyev spent more than a month fighting in Ukraine after his poorly equipped unit was ordered to march from its base in Crimea for what commanders called a routine exercise."
Over the next 5 weeks, deeply troubled by the devastation caused by ... Putin’s bloody invasion, he wrote down his recollections in hopes that telling his country the truth about the war could help stop it."
"His damning 141-page journal... describes an army in disarray: commanders clueless & terrified, equipment old & rusty, troops pillaging occupied areas in search of food because of a lack of provisions, morale plummeting as the campaign stalled."
"On Election Day 2016, nearly 63 million Americans voted for Trump, giving him more than 300 electoral votes and the White House.
The takeaway?
They, too, knew where he stood and voted for him anyway."
The idea that legislatures stand unbound by any limit from their own founding documents is a fringe debating point invented for Republican political advantage."