There are times when my attempts at media criticism feel useless, a shouting into the void. But this piece by Salon’s Amanda Marcotte reminds me that the stakes are worth the effort, and how invigorating a righteously-worded beatdown can be for the spirit. Marcotte’s not the only one who picked up on how The New York Times and other media outlets framed the impeachment resolution last week, but hers is surely the sharpest. She takes the Times to task for a purported analysis that describes the party-line impeachment vote as a decontextualized example of Washington polarization, and that focuses on the inability of both Republicans and Democrats to compromise. Marcotte writes:
The situation is simple: The Republican Party, both its politicians and its voters, has collectively decided that it's fine for Donald Trump to use his office to run an illegal extortion scheme against a foreign leader in an effort to cheat in the 2020 election. The moral rot of the Republican Party, and its cultist loyalty to a criminal president is the sole reason for this situation. Democrats are — rather too reluctantly! — trying to do something to stop the bleeding.
[. . .] How the parties are supposed to compromise on the issue of whether the president should be allowed to commit serious crimes is not even addressed. After all, to acknowledge that one side is for crimes and the other side is against them might expose how ridiculous this "compromise vs. polarization" framework really is.
The general tendency of the mainstream media to create a false equivalence between opposing political viewpoints is a cliché at this late date, but Marcotte pinpoints how, in the matter of impeachment, it’s been pushed to the point of absurdity and incoherence. It’s no small detail that in this case, such bias makes the GOP’s position seem more normal in part by suggesting that the Democrats, too, are acting in extreme ways. In a world where one party capriciously decides to up and impeach a president from the opposing party, why wouldn’t the president’s side stick together?
While it’s not the role of The New York Times to choose sides in our country’s great political conflicts, it’s also not proper for this paper or any other to perversely obscure the public’s ability to process the facts that are reported. As Marcotte goes on to say, “This isn't an issue where reasonable people arguing in good faith can disagree. This is a black-and-white, wrong-versus-right issue.” The New York Times does the public a disservice when it refuses to countenance the possibility, despite all available facts, that one of the nation’s two major political parties has simply adopted a position of defending indefensible acts by the president, separate and apart from any ideological conflict with the Democrats.
Reading through the Times piece that got Marcotte so rightly fired up, this paragraph stuck out to me personally as particularly rich in contradiction:
Polarization has consequences, and Democrats have been concerned from the start about running what Speaker Nancy Pelosi repeatedly called an inherently divisive process. The mostly party-line vote threatened to undermine public confidence in the proceedings, making it easier for voters to dismiss it as yet another skirmish in an endless partisan war, rather than a weighty constitutional process. Democrats are now faced with the challenge of mounting a compelling case to the public that can cut through the political noise and generate even the barest of bipartisan consensus, knowing that the greater likelihood is that Mr. Trump will be acquitted in the Republican-led Senate.
This summary of the impeachment vote makes me think of something that Marcotte gets at without stating directly: the way that the “both sides are polarized” argument, once internalized by enough reporters, itself becomes an essential catalyst to a more polarized political environment. Here, we can see how the cycle works — the Times reporter describes how voters may dismiss the party-line vote “as yet another skirmish in an endless partisan war, rather than a weighty constitutional process”; while this is accurate as far as it goes, it also reinforces this very interpretation of events by attesting to its validity, in an instance where the very high stakes of impeachment mean that the explanatory power of “polarization” is actually at its weakest. To restate one of Marcotte’s points: when the major fault line between the parties is that one believes in the rule of law and the other rejects it, “polarization” becomes a wildly distorting lens through which to view and describe events. An emphasis on how the parties are “polarized” increasingly looks like a way to avoid acknowledging the fundamental reasons they can be described as polarized.
Far from showing a lamentable deadlock in our democracy, the Democrats’ decision to stand up to the president’s authoritarianism and lawlessness is a sign of life in American democracy — a wrecking ball swinging not just at our corrupt president, but also at the notion of polarization itself, and the idea that this abstract descriptor accurately describes our ongoing national clash between democracy and authoritarian rule.