https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2025/11/13/18881445.php
The major US media outlets are failing when it comes to fascism
Pascal Sigg
[This article posted on February 1, 2024 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://www.infosperber.ch/politik/welt/die-grossen-us-medien-versagen-beim-faschismus/.]
Donald Trump answers media questions as US President in August 2019.
US historian Rick Perlstein offers a scathing critique of the political reporting of the US mass media.
US historian and journalist Rick Perlstein is currently viewing the acute political situation in his country with concern: in this presidential election year, the US is on the brink of an astonishing turning point. Namely, the real possibility that democracy will disappear.
Perlstein knows what he is talking about. He is one of the most prominent historians of the American right and has published five books on its development over the last 60 years. Most recently, Reaganland: America’s Right Turn, 1976–1980.
Currently a sought-after expert: US historian and author Rick Perlstein. © Democracy Now
In a column for the US magazine The American Prospect, he is currently addressing the question of what needs to be done to prevent US democracy from sliding into fascism. One of his main theses is that the US media is not ready for this moment.
“Completely unsuitable tools”
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“Generations of the dominant, consensus-clouded journalistic elite have created certain tools, metaphors, habits, and technologies that we understand as political journalism. But these tools are completely unsuitable for understanding what politics is right now.”
For Perlstein, the big, national brands that are actually considered reputable are failing in particular: the New York Times, the Washington Post, the big TV stations like CBS. In his critical column, Perlstein gives other historians and journalists a chance to have their say.
Perlstein lists the following five points of criticism:
Blinded imagery and a lack of self-criticism
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Perlstein spoke with journalist Jeff Sharlet for two articles. Sharlet is one of the foremost experts on the Christian right in the US. Last year, he published the reportage book The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War, for which he traveled across the country and spoke with many Americans who were looking forward to a civil war or described it as sad but inevitable.
For Sharlet—using a public discussion with a New York Times reporter as an example—many journalists at major outlets are incapable of self-criticism. This is most evident in their claim that they do not label or schematize, but only “write what is.”
The New York Times, according to the journalist, would not call Trump a “fascist” because it generally does not like to use defamatory labels. Perlstein: “By not calling fascism by its name, while others rightly do so, the Times is describing fascism as non-fascism. All journalists dress reality in metaphors and attach their narratives to existing patterns of interpretation. Those who follow bad institutional rules refuse to acknowledge this. These journalists cannot consciously change their labels, metaphors, and frames because they refuse to think about them out of pride.”
What is fascism?
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Rick Perlstein and Jeff Sharlet follow the lead of US historian Robert O. Paxton, who has researched and published extensively on fascism. In his book Anatomy of Fascism (2004), he defined the term “as a form of political behavior characterized by an obsessive preoccupation with decline, humiliation, or victimhood of a community and by compensatory cults of unity, strength, and purity, whereby a mass-based party of determined nationalist activists, in uncomfortable but effective cooperation with the traditional elites, abandons democratic freedoms and pursues goals of internal purification and external expansion through violence glorified as redemptive and without ethical or legal constraints.”
Following the storming of the Capitol, Paxton wrote in Newsweek magazine in 2021 that he had not long considered Trump a fascist. But that changed after the violent protests against Joe Biden’s election victory. “Trump’s open call for violence to overturn the election crossed a red line. The label now seems not only acceptable, but necessary.”
Unsuitable journalistic traditions
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Traditional broadcast formats are unsuitable for dealing with fascists. Sharlet cites the example of the popular interview format “60 Minutes” on CBS. The concept: experienced interviewer Leslie Stahl puts a political newcomer who now holds responsibility through her paces. In the case of Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, however, this backfired because she made one false claim after another. For example, she referred to Democrats as pedophiles across the board. The interviewer’s response: “Wow, okay.”
“Marjorie Taylor Greene is not trying to enter the cosmos that Leslie Stahl reports on,” Sharlet says. She is at home in a fascist environment. “Fascism is a dream politics. A mythology. You can’t fact-check it. You can’t frown and make it go away.” According to Sharlet and Perlstein, in Greene’s cosmos, it is precisely people like journalist Stahl who are preventing Trump from taking the American people back to the time before the Fall.
Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene in an interview on the CBS program 60 Minutes.
False belief in the market
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Even among many US journalists—such as the Times journalist mentioned above—“the market” is considered the benchmark for success. In this marketplace of ideas, popularity is proof of excellence and persuasiveness. Applied to the work of media brands, this logic means that the more readers, the better the journalism. In democratic politics, it means that the more votes, the broader the candidate’s support base. For Perlstein, it is obvious that this interpretation does not apply to a candidate like Trump, who will stop at nothing to gain power: “This is quite a problem when writing about a movement whose entry ticket is denial of reality and whose leaders threaten violence against those who dare to defy their fantasies and act according to reality.”
False objectivity
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Sharlet describes how, through transparent subjectivity, he persuaded many fascists, including heavily armed ones, to talk to him. For him, the detached objectivity of many mass media outlets is “an ideological remnant of the Cold War era, when the US elites needed the idea of a place at the center.”
Fascism was elsewhere
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For Perlstein and Sharlet, it is no coincidence that the New York Times continues to refuse to label Trump a fascist. The idea that fascism does not exist in the US is widespread. Sharlet: “Many people make the mistake of saying, ‘But this doesn’t look like European fascism in 1936. Well, it’s American fascism in 2024. ” For an analysis of US fascism, Perlstein talks to John Ganz, who publishes the newsletter Unpopular Front on precisely this topic. John Ganz details how fascism was underestimated by established political players, especially where it came to power.
According to historian Dylan Riley, European fascism functioned in societies with a weak political elite but a highly developed civil society. This consisted of many groups that made unfulfillable demands on the inadequate political system.
John Ganz: “This is exactly what we have in the US: a very weak political elite, but underneath it a civil society that is looking for a way to express itself. And the expression it chooses is pathological. It demands a dictator. Because the two-party system is incapable of giving it the answer it demands.”
For Perlstein, it is clear that political journalism should not be primarily concerned with how many votes Trump gets. Because for his supporters, it is clear anyway: he is the only right, legitimate leader of most true Americans. “The question is rather: how many of them are prepared to take up arms for this belief if the people whose job it is to count the votes come to the wrong conclusion.”