Donald Trump, who attempted to overturn the outcome of his 2020 presidential election loss by inciting a violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, is now in his second term orchestrating a multi-pronged voter suppression campaign to prevent Democrats from taking control of the U.S. House and Senate.
Among the schemes unleashed are unprecedented mid-decade gerrymandering in Republican-controlled states, an executive order to use the post office to eliminate mail-in voting; lawsuits against states to collect confidential voter information; and pressuring Congress to pass the SAVE America Act that by requiring birth certificates or passports to vote, which would disenfranchise and estimated more than 20 million eligible voters.
There’s growing alarm about the Justice Department’s seizure of ballots in Atlanta and Arizona, along with regime threats to interfere in the election by declaring a national emergency, invoking the Insurrection Act and deploying ICE agents to intimidate voters at polling places.
While the many schemes being launched to rig the election in the GOP’s favor are happening in plain sight, U.S. corporate media too often downplay fact checks of the Republicans’ false claim of massive voter fraud by immigrants that they argue justifies policies that make it harder for millions of Americans to vote. Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Julie Hollar, senior analyst with the group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, who talks about her recent commentary titled, “Who Will SAVE America From Misleading Coverage of Voter Suppression?”
JULIE HOLLAR: The way that media covered this influences the way that people understand it. And what we’ve learned from looking at both media coverage and at polls is that people don’t understand it very well. So I think one of the bigger failures of media, of our corporate media outlets on this issue is just a general lack of consistently debunking all of the myths that the GOP, particularly under Trump have spread, continue spreading about the existence or how widespread any kind of vote fraud is or any kind of voting by people without citizenship in the United States.
Your listeners probably mostly know that in fact, it’s very rare. There is very little vote fraud. It is not common. It is not widespread. There are very few people who are not citizens who attempt to vote in federal elections. This is actually, as also many of your listeners may know, or they may not, especially if they’re younger, but this is a claim, this vote fraud claim has been advanced by the GOP well before Trump was around.
I could definitely say that going back decades, the GOP has been advancing the myth of widespread vote fraud and the media for those decades has not, in our estimation, done a good enough job of pushing back against that. Because when you have a claim like that that’s being advanced over and over again, you need to debunk it over and over again. I think what you’ll see in the corporate media is that they will, a lot of these outlets will do maybe like this one debunking article and then in the future they kind of will maybe reference that in one line at some point or maybe not even always, but there’s a lack of a really consistent and forceful debunking of these kinds of myths, which is what people need to hear from them.
SCOTT HARRIS: Julie, you note in your article that what happens in many media stories about these claims of massive voter fraud is there may be some acknowledgement that there’s some facts, some statistics to back up the fact that massive voter fraud is not a problem, not anywhere near a problem. But they often revert to the false equivalence of saying, on the one hand, Democrats say this. On the other hand, Republicans say that. Journalists need to be fact checkers. They’re not there to be stenographers to those people who they’re reporting on. They’re supposed to tell their viewers or listeners, their readers, what’s a fact and what’s not.
For more information, visit the Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting FAIR website at fair.org.
