The other day, on a podcast, national political reporter Thomas Edsall analyzed the growing threat of Republican authoritarianism and asked an excellent question:

“Trump and the Republican Party have created a real dilemma for the media. … A sedition party tries to (enact) rules that even if it loses, it wins. … We have a different animal in the ball game now. One side is dominated by a party that is ready to accept lies, i.e. delusional … a party that is on the verge of becoming something unseen in America, beyond the point of no -return. … When you have a party that moves in this extreme way, how do we describe it in the media? “

Easy answer: Describe reality.

The old days of bilateral journalism, going against the grain, the old days of writing “on one side and the other”, the good old days when both parties honored democracy by accepting the results of elections – those days are over. When a party openly declares that it no longer believes in democracy, when in fact it works tirelessly to destroy it, journalists can no longer take refuge in “neutrality”.

Richard Tofel, founder of the investigative journalism website ProPublica, recently wrote that neutrality is only an “attractive value” “if you see public life as a never-ending series of fights between two camps, which stand out above all. by the primary colors of their uniforms ”. But all too often – and especially now – neutrality is simply “an appropriate pose for the uninformed”.

Any journalist who is remotely informed of what is happening in 2021 should be required to report it in plain language. If arsonists set a house on fire and it burns in front of your eyes, you report it and identify the arsonists. It is not enough to say, “Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell hopes to win the House in 2022.” It is correct to simply say, “Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell after voting to exonerate a president who has inspired an undemocratic coup attempt, hopes to win the chamber in 2022 and bolster Republican efforts to suppress votes in 2024.

In a national civic emergency, the mainstream media must be pro-democracy and pro-truth. It is not a “bias”. It is patriotism.

The problem, however, is that too many journalists (especially the older and more seasoned ones) are stuck in the old paradigm. Jay Rosen, media critic at New York University, put it right last week: The press is still too invested in ‘the game -‘ who wins and losers, who is ahead, what is the strategy ? ‘ You can continue to do this until democracy breaks down. “

I agree. Also Tom Edsall: “In times of great change, journalists find it harder to find ways to describe and manage them. Journalists are usually stuck in a language they have used (for a long time) to describe political competition. Nonetheless, “you have to watch the truth. … The press has been reluctant to examine the truth adequately. … This is what the press is supposed to do. Personally, I am against mince words ”when, in too many mainstream outlets,“ the pressure is to mince words ”.

True, the word bossy bothers a lot of people. But what more empirical evidence do we need that the GOP wants to turn America into Turkey, Hungary or worse? In plain sight, its state-level lawmakers are working to sabotage future free elections – by ensuring that Republican state legislatures have the power to invalidate Democratic victories, by installing local election officials. who can refuse to certify Democratic victories, by enacting a series of new voter suppression laws designed to protect their white minorities.

Meanwhile, national GOP leaders remain in the grip of the loser who thinks the 2020 election was stolen, and they continue to claim that the insurgent coup attempt was a mirage. As Edsall puts it, “treading things through the memory hole is precisely what authoritarianism does.” If we journalists don’t report it, we are not doing our job.

James Madison, who defended the Bill of Rights, warned over two centuries ago that a free country hungry for precise knowledge “is but a prologue to a farce or tragedy; or maybe both.

Both indeed. The clock is turning.

Dick Polman, Philadelphia-based veteran national political columnist and writer-in-residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at [email protected]