Should journalists challenge or ignore election disbelievers?
NEW YORK (AP) Matt Negrins campaign to ban deniers from television news has failed to meet its original goal of preventing significant numbers of Americans from believing the lie that Donald Trump did not lost the presidential election to Joe Biden. Instead, he sparked an enduring debate about the role of political journalists, while also illustrating how TV news and the politicians who depend on his cameras have changed. Negrin, a former reporter and now producer on Comedy Centrals Daily Show, wrote a chronicle of december for The Washington Post, saying that TV reporters who invite Republicans to air should start by asking if they think Biden won the election. If they dont say yes, the interview should end. He aggressively continued the effort on his personal Twitter account, claiming that mainstream news programs that show office holders who voted against accepting election results are helping to spread disinformation. Many in the news world think the position goes too far, that a journalists role is to question ideas and point out inaccuracies or outright fictions, not to pretend they dont exist. . Two Sunday morning hosts, Jake Tapper and Chris Wallace, recently turned out to be polar opposites on the point. While not formal policy, Tapper said he did not book election deniers on CNNs State of the Union and on his weekday show, The Lead. Its a discussion I think everyone in the media should be having, Tapper told Politico. Wallace, of Fox News Sunday, said he was ready to speak to all sides and had no rules about the order of questions. I dont think moral posture goes well with information gathering, Wallace said in a statement last month. When Florida Senator Rick Scott appeared on his show on February 28, Wallace asked if Biden won the Fair and Square election. Absolutely, Scott replied. Led by Trump, suspicions about the 2020 results remained, despite election officials calling it secure and the dismissal of court challenges. A survey from Quinnipiac University taken six months after the election found that 29% of Americans and 66% of Republicans polled said Biden had not been legitimately elected. Confronting deniers is not a topic that many professionals wish to address publicly. No one on NBCs Meet the Press, ABCs This Week, or CBSs Face the Nation, for example, would tell The Associated Press. The former Meet the Press host was the recognized king of Sunday morning political talk shows before his death in 2008, and his former producer said Russert believed in exhibiting ideas that many found repugnant. Russert memorably interviewed former KKK chief David Duke in 1991. But Betsy Fischer Martin, executive producer of Meet the Press from 2002 to 2013, wonders how many such opportunities currently exist. In the current climate, many politicians prefer user-friendly television channels, like Fox News for the conservatives or MSNBC for the liberals. Its human nature in many ways that you want to choose a program that will give you more of a platform than a difficult interview, said Fischer Martin, executive director of the Women in Politics Institute at American University. Reservation refusals are less of a problem when many dont want to be booked in the first place. Current Meet the Press moderator Chuck Todd alludes to this while writing for Politico in January. A handful of GOP senators make themselves available for interviews, he wrote, but there are few. Unless they need to reach out to a larger electorate, many Republican officials dont see the point in such confrontations, said Alex Conant, GOP consultant and founding partner of Firehouse Strategies in Washington. If youre a conservative, the truth is you dont care too much about Liberal voters, Conant said. They will never support you, and there is little point in going through a tough interview. Frank Sesno, a former CNN Washington bureau chief, sided with the deniers interviewed. Still, he wonders if it would be worth it if the questions were ignored, talking points thrown, or empty fights unleashed. Its not about banning them, says Sesno, a professor at George Washington University. You just dont want them to air because they wont be good guests. Some recent interviews prove his point. ABC Newss Terry Moran got angry last month by repeatedly asking GOP spokesman Paris Dennard if he accepted the 2020 election results as legitimate. Its a yes or no question, Moran said. Biden was president, Dennard said. He wouldnt go any further. Moran kept trying, asking him if he was afraid to answer or if he didnt believe democracy worked last November. You can be an American citizen who can accept the fact that Joe Biden is president while still being concerned about the integrity of the election, Dennard said. Todd on May 11 interview with representative Dan Crenshaw turned into a fight when the Texas Republican was asked about his support for an effort to overturn the election. Crenshaw said it was time to move on and attacked the liberal and pro-democratic media for continuing to bring up the subject. Dont start that, Todd said. There is nothing more lazy than that. The interview ended quickly. I understand where the invitations and confrontations come from, said Jay Rosen, a professor at New York University and author of the PressThink blog. But in practice, the confrontation with a fabulist or a determined negationist seldom turns out to the advantage of the spectator. Few interviewers have the ability to effectively speak out against hypocrisy on live television, Negrin said. Even when a journalist can, politicians will remove a message from the invitation to air that they can say whatever they want and that they will always have a platform. The online provocateur said hes delighted producers and TV hosts are at least thinking about these issues. Its been (almost) six months since the insurgency, eight months since the election, and I think a lot of hosts just want to get back to normal by interviewing Republicans, interviewing Democrats, Negrin said. This is what they do. But, for me, its important to remember what happened.