Trump Indicted + Media Complicity in the Rise of Fascism

Trump Indicted + Media Complicity in the Rise of Fascism

Refuse Fascism Episode 159

Sun, Jun 11, 2023 1:15PM • 52:29

Mark Jacob 00:00

There’s just been a lot of failures in the news media now, and I’ve kind of given up on the idea that the news media is going to save us. They’re not gonna save us. The best I can hope for is that they won’t completely buy into this whole right wing disinformation atmosphere that we’re seeing. You see Twitter taken over by Musk, you see CNN, pretending that it’s gonna chase after some mythical centrist viewpoint, when clearly they’re tacking to the right. I think that the news media has never been liberal and it’s getting more right wing. Because of Trump, you know, he changed the game, and some journalists start putting on the uniform — put on the Jersey, so they were like into the game rather than just covering the game. That’s what they’re doing, is trying to make them legitimize people who clearly wanted to overturn a free and fair election. It’s accepting of fascism. It’s making the fascists part of the club of democracy.

Sam Goldman 01:11

Welcome to Episode 159 of the Refuse Fascism podcast, a podcast brought to you by volunteers with Refuse Fascism. I’m Sam Goldman, one of those volunteers and host of the show. Refuse Fascism exposes, analyzes, and stands against their very real danger and threat of fascism coming to power in the United States. I’m glad to be back and well. What a week! In today’s episode, we’re sharing an interview with Mark Jacob to discuss the mainstream media’s normalization and accommodation to fascism. Mark is a former editor at the Chicago Tribune and Sun Times, and a co-author of eight books on history and photography.

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Before we get into it, we have to talk about the Trump indictment, which, crystal clear, shows our timeline is filled with the unprecedented. The fact that those who rule this country are at each other’s throats can no longer be denied. They can no longer rule and hold things together in the way they have since the Civil War. The old ways, the old “norms”, are coming apart. Let’s get into this more. For the first time in U.S. history, a former president has been indicted with federal charges. He faces a 37 count federal indictment involving possessing classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, conspiring to hide them from federal authorities and a grand jury, revealing National Defense documents to unauthorized folks, and making false statements about it all to investigators.

Trump is expected to be arraigned in Miami, Florida this Tuesday. It’s significant that Trump, who has always declared himself above the law, and transformed the GOP and its base into a party of fascist lawlessness and violence — culminating in the January 6th coup attempt — faces serious charges and multiple investigations. The joy felt by many at the prospect of seeing this fascist criminal face any accountability for anything, and the hunger to see him locked the fuck up, is righteous. It reflects an enormous reservoir of popular sentiment that could be turned into necessary action to change the course of history.

But here’s the thing, we must not pin our hopes on a mechanism that cannot and will not address the reasons we so badly want to see Trump locked up. Now is a time for vigilance, not complacency. Trump and the Republi-fascists have shown us again and again that they know how to turn a crisis into fascist opportunity. On Friday, Trump posted to his millions of followers on his social media site truth social in an all caps message, “See you in Miami on Tuesday!!!” An ominous throwback to his infamous, “Be there, be wild” tweet, calling on people to converge in DC on January 6. As of now, Trump remains the GOP frontrunner for the 2024 presidential elections.

Yesterday, Trump spoke at Nazi rallies — I mean state GOP conventions — in Georgia and North Carolina. To the thousands of Trump devotees gathered, donning their “God, Guns and Trump” caps, Trump painted his bid for presidency as a “final battle” with “corrupt forces” that are destroying the country, leveraging every racist, xenophobic, anti semitic, anti LGBTQ anti woman dog whistle to do so. Speaking of the Democrats in 2023, he said: “Either the communists win and destroy America, or we destroy the communists.” He called Jack Smith, the Special Counsel, “deranged” and said the Justice Department was a “sick nest of people that need to be cleaned out.”

In his speech, drenched in grievances and vengeance, he said, “I put everything on the line and I will never yield. I will never be detained. I will never stop fighting for you.” Going on to say: “now the Marxist left is once again using the same corrupt DOJ and the same corrupt FBI and the Attorney General and the local district attorneys to interfere,” going on to say, “they’re cheating, they’re crooked, they’re corrupt. These criminals cannot be rewarded. They must be defeated. You have to defeat them because in the end, they’re not coming after me, they’re coming after you and I’m just standing in their way.”

Key figures in the Republi-fascist Party have rallied behind the lie that the indictments are political persecution meant to influence the 2024 election. This brazen disregard for facts reflects a totalizing fascist worldview insulating the Republi-fascist base from empirical truth. As Paul Street pointed out in a piece that is linked in the show notes: “One after another key congressional Republicans, including the worm-like Speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy, have reflexively joined their dear leader’s preposterous claims of unjust radical left persecution and the weaponization of the law against the chosen one. With some exceptions, Trump’s party has lined up behind their maximalist cult leader in demonstrating cold blooded opposition to the application of elementary rule of merely bourgeois law.”

Trump’s main competitor for head fascist, Ron DeSantis, tweeted: “The weaponization of federal law enforcement represents a mortal threat to a free society. We have for years witnessed an uneven application of the law, depending upon political affiliation,” and as Tess Owens from Vice has pointed out, “The response from his supporters has taken on wilder and even more dangerous dimensions” than his previous indictment. Here are some examples of that: Fox News host Mark Levin screamed on the Hannity show — and I’m not gonna do it the way that he did, I’m gonna spare your ears — “What do you mean he’s not above the law? There is no law. What’s going on here is a disgusting disgrace. It is a war on Trump. It is a war on the Republican Party, and it is a war on the Republic. The Radical Left is doing what the radical left does while they cover up for Biden, the way they covered up for Hillary. I’m done, and I’m sick of it. June 8th is a day of insurrection, not January 6th. We’ve never seen anything like this in the United States. We saw it under Stalin. We’ve seen it under other autocracies, Marxist regimes fascist regimes in third world. They’ve taken the United States into a hellhole. It’s humiliating, and I’m gonna tell you something, there are tens of millions of us. You have crossed the rubicon twice, which has never been done before. And we will never forgive you; never, ever. That’s the bottom line, and I’m done.”

Let’s be clear, laughing aside, this is an all out call for armed fascists to rise up in violence. And it’s not just a Fox News host saying things like this. Kari Lake, at the Georgia Republican state convention on Friday said: “If you want to get to President Trump, you’re going to have to get through me and 75 million Americans just like me, and most of us are card carrying members of the NRA. That’s not a threat. That’s a public service announcement.” Yeah, you heard that right. We will kill you if you hold Trump to accountable, is what they’re saying.

And it’s not just her. Representative Andy Biggs tweeted: “We have now reached a war Phase. Eye for an eye.” Representative Clay Higgins tweeted: “President Trump said he has been ‘summoned’ to appear at the federal courthouse in Miami on Tuesday at 3pm.” and “This is a parameter probe from the oppressors, hold. Our POTUS has this. Buckle up, one to 50 K, know your bridges. Rock steady, calm. That is all.”

As Jeff Sharlet pointed out on Twitter, “one to 50 K,” refers to military maps and publicly available US geological survey maps of areas mostly surrounding military installations. As Jeff says: “This isn’t a metaphor, not full civil war, it’s a congressman calling for the real deal.” The real thing. Military jargon, talking about seizing bridges, seizing military installations to carry out war. And let’s also get real, the biggest threat is not the hypocrisy of a man and one of the two major political parties that weaponized justice to persecute political enemies and let off allies, now decrying a weaponized judicial system, or the party of Law and Order going after law and order. It’s the fact that they’re fascists; law for me, not for thee; rights for me, not for thee; power for me, not for thee.

The fascist movement has barely been named in the media, much less thoroughly repudiated by a mass movement of millions standing up against it. It is a vicious 21st century American fascism in the most powerful and dangerous nation in the world, that’s been normalized and accommodated. for over seven years now. None of its leaders, including Trump, have yet faced the ultimate crisis; the people of this country, taking over the public square and public discourse to delegitimize these fascists and drive them out of power.

Yet, at these moments of crisis, when democratic norms are being ruptured, and society is being further cleaved, the decent people are encouraged to retreat, to remain passive and prematurely celebrate an outcome that is far from inevitable. Every crisis Trump and his fascist party gets through strengthens the U.S. fascist movement, leaving a core a battle tested and even more dangerous, genocidal revanchist lunatics in power to set the terms for all of society. I mean, just think of the fact that according to a recent report published by The Guardian, more than two years after the deadly January 6th coup attempt, 12 million people in this country, the United States, believe the use of violence is justified to restore Trump to power. Just look at what has happened to abortion rights in this country.

Look at how they are getting voting rights. Look at what they’re doing to the trans community. We must not be lulled into submission by this or future indictments and prosecutions of Trump. Whether or not Trump is able to remain the GOP presidential candidate, this indictment cannot and will not stop this fascist movement. That’s up to us y’all. In addition to being an unprecedented legal challenge to the system, this presents yet one more crisis of legitimacy to the governing institutions of our society brought to the surface by the rise of fascism, but deeply intertwined with the fundamental illegitimacy at the heart of American Empire.

If Trump is somehow exonerated in yet one more situation where the publicly available facts incontrovertibly show guilt, he will be empowered yet again and the rottenness of the system will be exposed once more. In the scenario that he is found guilty, while this will be a victory for the rule of law, and many will recognize that, millions will believe that the verdict is the weaponization of the justice system against Trump. In a legitimacy crisis, the key question is not guilt or innocence, not what is true, or about how many people believe that — those all matter — the key question is: Which narrative will exert power?

If Trump’s notion of conviction as political attack holds sway, the conviction can potentially help propel him back into power, playing the victim and help justify the political vengeance he has already sworn that he will reap in a second term. That is one possible outcome if the fascists win the public narrative. Meanwhile, according to The New York Times article titled “Biden Sticks to Stay Nothing Strategy on the Trump indictment,” “President Biden and his advisers have concluded that commenting on the indictment would only feed into Republican accusations of political motivated persecution.”

In other words, we have the most powerful people on the earth modeling to their tens of millions of supporters once more exactly how to accommodate fascism and legitimize false fascist narratives at the worst possible time to do so, with the whole future on the line. These are the same folks who have told us that we need a strong Republican Party and want to be bipartisan — but when the Republicans are doing what they exist to do, you know, namely that fascism, the Democratic leadership cannot comment.

We already know an election alone cannot stop fascism and no, a conviction alone cannot stop fascism. Only an activated, mobilize people in action together to create a better future for humanity can stop fascism. It’s critical at this moment to spread the understanding of this fascist movement to the millions who righteously want to see Trump behind bars and to actively oppose this fascism in every sphere of life. So this is your reminder to stay vigilant, to, in word and deed made clear, in the name of humanity we refuse to accept a fascist America. With that, here’s my interview with Mark.

Sam Goldman 15:30

Today I’m talking with Mark Jacob, former Metro Editor for the Chicago Tribune, former Editor for Sun Times, to discuss how the mainstream media has, and is, greasing the tracks that fascism is continuing to advance on, and the media that’s needed now. So, welcome, Mark, I’m so glad to have you with us.

Mark Jacob 15:52

Thank you for asking me.

Sam Goldman 15:54

You have been uniquely positioned as a participant and observer of mainstream news and opinion publishing over, now, decades. We’ve seen, and I think we both agree on this, the normalization of an legitimization of Trump and everything he represents across mainstream media. We’ve also seen the emergence of new media that, before, in terms of cable news, we couldn’t imagine; the emergence of Newsmax, One American News, we now see changes at CNN, the decimation of local news, the buyout at Twitter, and so much more. I think that much of this is changed to accommodate and even propelled fascism into power in the United States.

I was hoping that you could talk to us about what you’ve observed in this regard, and how you have seen things changing. Has this been a gradual change that you’ve noticed? Kind of just walk us through your thinking on that.

Mark Jacob 16:57

One of the biggest myths in American life is the idea that the news media is liberal. The thing about the news media is that they’re constantly under attack from the right, who say that they’re being unfair. And so the news executives, I’ve found, in many cases, have bowed to that and been ultra sensitive to it. When I was Metro editor at the Tribune, I would tell people you’re gonna make somebody mad with the story, but that’s fine, because if you’re not making anyone mad, you’re not doing your job. That’s part of being a journalist, is saying things that people don’t want you to reveal to the public that are true.

Journalism requires some level of courage and a thick skin as well. I would like to see more of that. I think we have a news media that’s really kind of knuckles under to that kind of pressure. I was in the news business a long time. I saw a lot of things. I, at the tribune ,was the editor who edited the first story, about birtherism, when Obama was about to be elected. We knew it was b.s., it was clearly b.s., we knew it was. We didn’t want to write about it. One of the top editors came to me and said, I’m gonna give you a reporter, you’ve gotta get him to write a story, and you got to edit it, about birtherism. I said: You know this is b.s. You know it’s just made up stuff. The answer was: Well, people are wondering. they want us to explain what’s going on and fact, check it for him, because otherwise, they’ll just think, you know, that we’re covering something up — it’s out there, so you have to write about it.

The right wing news media knows how to put things out there. They’re doing it right now with that whole kind of Biden crime, family b.s. They know how to put things out there and then mainstream media just bites on it. It’s ridiculous. So we wrote a story. We did all fact checking. I went back and looked at the story, and it was a perfectly fine story. We talked to the officials in Hawaii. Think about it, in order to believe the birtherism thing you would have had the thought that conspirators put a birth announcement for a biracial child in a Honolulu newspaper in 1960 because they knew he was going to be elected president. It is idiotic. Yet we had to write a story about it.

Let me tell you that story did not allay any suspicions. It didn’t do anything to make anyone think: Oh, this must be baloney. All it did is bring it more out into the atmosphere and just spread it. And you’ve seen how Donald Trump used that as one way to gain prominence — because that’s the way lies are. That’s why in the news media you have to be very careful about what they take seriously. They don’t need to have this obligation to report everything that they hear. All the things that people say are not legitimate.

There’s a lot that’s not legitimate now that’s said. You have a Republican Party that’s pretty much decided that telling lies is a sacrament to them. It’s like it’s something that they do as a badge of honor as how to get admitted into the club, is that you’ve gotta lie. CNN, for example, put Trump on a live broadcast to lie, and they think: Oh, we’re gonna fact check him. Of course, they weren’t gonna fact check him. He’s talking faster than they can fact check him. He gets away with it. He says a bunch of lies. They fact check, you know, a fraction of them, and it’s a big win for him.

This is the news media just failing to do its job and platforming people. Just putting somebody on the air and deciding that that’s an act of fairness is not. It might be an act of fairness to the politician. It’s not an act of fairness to the public, and who you working for? You should be working for the public, you should be be trying to get people information that will help them navigate their lives and protect their democracy. If you’re not doing that — if you’re just trying to please some sort of political operative who’s gonna call you on the phone — you’re not doing your job.

There’s just been a lot of failures in the news media now, and I’ve kind of given up on the idea that the news media is going to save us. They’re not gonna save us. I just hope they won’t kill us. To me, the best I can hope for is that they won’t completely buy into this whole right wing disinformation atmosphere that we’re seeing. But then you see Twitter taken over by Musk, you see CNN, pretending that it’s going to chase after some difficult centrist viewpoint, when clearly they’re attacking to the right. I think that the news media has never been liberal, and it’s getting more right wing.

Sam Goldman 21:10

One of the things that you’ve done recently in your writing — and you do it on Twitter a lot — is making parallels that oftentimes can make people uncomfortable. You have spoken about the media and the role that it plays in the rise of fascism in historical examples of Nazi Germany, because it’s the most clear example to people. And you’ve said that; you’ve said why you make that comparison [MJ: Right]. I’m wondering, now, in the moment that we’re in, with the changes that you’ve pointed to, what should I call, the decent people, who do want the journalism that gives you the information about what’s actually happening, what should we be concerned about right now, in terms of the media’s coverage?

Mark Jacob 21:54

There’s a hesitancy to use the word ‘fascism’. I was glad that Biden used the term semi-fascism, except I didn’t like the ‘semi’ part. I went back and read William Shirer’s book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. I did a long Twitter thread, and picked out passages, and related them to what’s happening today, because as far as the fascist takeover of schools, as far as the fascist takeover of churches and other thought leaders, and the tendency to minimize the threat. Two weeks before Hitler took the chancellorship, they thought that they had solved the whole problem, that they were going to minimize him, they were going to bring him into the government, and that would be it. Instead, he took over the government. He never won a fair election in the whole time.

I do feel like, in these times, there are people still who are thinking: Well, you know, this is all overblown. It’s just some political stuff, and I don’t pay attention to politics. You may not pay attention to politics, but politics is paying attention to you. It’s super important for people to pay attention to what’s going on. Again, I love history, I’ve written about history, I’ve written books about history, and I wouldn’t be bringing up the Nazis, except for two things: One, everyone understands what that was. And two, they’re acting like Nazis. As soon as they want to stop acting like Nazis, I’ll stop comparing them to Nazis. Just look at it. Look what they’re doing to trans people now. They’re doing the same kind of thing that the Nazis did to the Jews.

Again, when I compare to the Republican fascists to Germany, I’m not comparing him to what happened in 1938, or 1942, or 1944 — I hope we never get to anywhere close to that point. I’m comparing him to 1933, when the Nazis took over, took away everyone’s rights, started burning books, and we know what happened after that. So just to be clear, when I make that comparison, I’m comparing the rise of Nazism to the rise of Republican fascism. I’ll stop making that comparison as soon as they stop acting like that.

I admire your organization for using the word fascism, because that’s what it is. You see all these examples, and it’s not just Hitler — I think DeSantis is more like Mussolini than Hitler, really. The whole way of coercing corporations and bringing the business community in, and in effect, making government kind of the sponsor of business and the sponsor of corporations. Look what he’s doing to Disney. I mean, that’s totally strong arming a company, because you want them to agree with you on a political issue that has nothing to do with their business. It’s not your place to decide whether a private business agrees with you politically on an issue. Yet he’s trying to sabotage their business because of this. Very much like Mussolini would do.

These kind of comparisons, yeah, I understand that the whole thing about using the term fascism — I think people think is overblown, but there are people who don’t really study fascism. If you talk to somebody who’s actually studied fascism, they’ll say: Yeah. You’ve interviewed some of them and they know what’s happening because they study history. So it’s not overblown, it’s what’s happening, and people need to face up to it.

Sam Goldman 24:54

Yeah, people need to not only confront what’s happening, but to act to stop it. And if people cannot even name what it is [MJ: Right], they are totally incapable of stopping it. Returning to the media point, it’s striking how many euphemisms will be used short of calling it, fascism; extremism… They’re not just cop out words… [MJ: Populist. Populist, is the…] Yeah, ‘populist’. They’re words that confuse instead of clarify. They are disarming to people.

Another one of those things is not even be able to call him a racist, Trump. These are just true things. It’s not an insult. It’s not a name calling game. It’s what is real. The other thing that you had said that made me stop for a moment was, you were talking about what trans folks have come under as the biggest target [MJ: Right] in many ways, or the most cohering target, I should say [MJ: Clearly] of this movement. That has also been a target that the media has fostered and amplified by giving credence and print space and airtime, and to not fact check basic things.

Mark Jacob 26:09

You know, just in the CNN town hall, I watched just recently, the Mike Pence thing, that they asked the question: You know, you’re big on parent rights, why aren’t you for parent rights when they want to deal with gender affirming care for their kids? And: Oh, that’s different. He never explained why it’s different. It’s only because they want to demonize trans kids.

Sam Goldman 26:27

I wanted to go back in time. In 2016, MediaQuant, a company that follows political advertising, and earned — in other words, free — media, analyzed the time Trump appeared on air for free, and calculated that it was worth $2 billion, far and away outstripping all other candidates [MJ: mmhmm], in terms of free coverage. What difference did that make in his rise to power and the consolidation of this nationwide fascist movement, galvanized by by his campaign?

Mark Jacob 27:00

It made a huge movement. Just to really say something I believe strongly is that I don’t think that Trump created a fascist Republican Party. I think a fascist Republican Party created Trump. I think that Trump was just the embodiment of these movements in the Republican Party, and the more moderate people in the Republican Party saw the wave and just jumped on it, and were too cowardly to fight against it. Trump is not like a creator of anything, I think he’s more an embodiment of it.

You look what happened with Trump: He starts getting publicity and getting on Fox News over this birther thing, as we mentioned earlier. It was completely bogus, but he kept on saying all along: I have a source that says that, that birth certificates, fake and all this other crap, and got on here for that. And he’s on The Apprentice. One of the things about American culture is that there are a lot of people who think that when you get on television that makes you legit, that that means that your real — somebody decided to put you on there, so you must have something to say, or you must be really good.

As anyone who’s read about The Apprentice knows, they were covering up for him the whole time, and they had created just this myth. Trust me The Apprentice was not a documentary. It was an entertainment show in which they tried to make him look good. And because of that, any facts that have shown that Trump is a terrible businessman, cheating people he does business with and by other methods, and by lying to people about condos, and this has managed to somehow stay afloat. And I think probably by getting secret payments from overseas. It’s not like he’s a great businessman, he’s clearly not. But that created this myth of him being a great businessman, him being on TV.

Then he announces for office, and suddenly, CNN, especially and Fox, and all them, they just love putting him on the air, because he’s always got something outrageous to say, and they can say “Oh my god, this is terrible.” They can get somebody to say something else, and it creates this big fight on the air. Conflict is drama to these people, and it’s entertainment. But I think that you can’t get beyond the psychological effect of him being on television all the time to make less sophisticated people think that he was legit, that he really knew what he was doing, that they wouldn’t put him on TV if he didn’t have things to say that were important, and to just creating this idea that he was important; just kind of fake it till you make it kind of thing, where he he suddenly became important because he pretended he was important.

The real tragedy in the story is how the entire Republican Party, anything that might have been a little bit decent in the Republican Party, totally folded and totally just gave up to him, and just shut up and just let him go. This is the thing that just blows my mind, even after he was caught on tape bragging about sexually molesting women he didn’t know, that wasn’t enough. That it wasn’t enough to get white evangelical vote to not vote for him. It’s just amazing kind of lack of decency by segments of the American public — especially by the whole Republican Party, which is so terribly complicit in this rise of fascism.

Sam Goldman 30:02

This notion, you hear about the media learning lessons from 2016; have they learned their lesson? are they learning their lesson? It clearly means different things to different people. Some key lessons, I thought we had made a tiny little bit of progress on, were that objectivity is different than equal time or centrism, and it’s good to be partisan to the truth, and it’s good to be partisan against fascism. But one disturbing thing in that Atlantic piece profiling Chris Licht was that as critical as the author may have been about lick, he was clearly working from the same flawed principles. And I’m just wondering, what are the lessons that good journalists and editors took or could take from the Trump experience and moment? The horse race has already begun.

Mark Jacob 30:56

Well, that’s the thing. The horse race coverage is horrible. Jay Rosen at NYU says “Pay attention to the stakes, not the odds.” That’s so important. Most of my takeaway off the last decade, or since 2015, is negative. To me, it’s the triumph of propaganda. It’s the fact that lies work; that if you repeat a lie often enough, it gets believed. Look at how many people — regular Republicans — in polls say they believe in The Big Lie — obviously not true, just based on any rational analysis of evidence. But they’re not doing rational analysis of evidence. They’re saying Donald Trump said so and so. You know Lindsey Graham, or who else, they’re just going with it because they want it to be true — it suddenly becomes true.

I think one of the big takeaways is the triumph of propaganda and the fact that, unfortunately, as someone who was in the news business for a very long time, it was my realization that the news media has limited power, especially in an age with social media. Back in the day, if a politician wanted to get their message out, they pretty much had to go through mainstream media, and they just don’t anymore. And they also have co-opted mainstream media to where it’s working for them, not for the audience. That’s the lesson, is that the media has limited ability to expose lies, because some people just like to believe lies.

There are a lot of members of the news media who just have learned nothing. They just long for the days when it was just Republicans and Democrats, and they could go there cocktail parties, and sort out all their differences in a bill and then they passed it, and then they all shook hands, and it was just more collegial or at least had the appearance of it. I think that the news media liked that; they liked it when it was just the Republicans and the Democrats were just Sharks versus Jets. It was just two different sports teams, they could cover it completely like a sporting event.

The problem now is that it’s truth versus lies. Chris Licht in that interview says — one of the things that really struck me in that profile was him saying that because of Trump, you know, he changed the game and some journalists started putting on the uniform; put on the jersey. So they were, like, into the game rather than just covering the game. When the game is not Republicans and Democrats, it’s decency versus hate, and it’s lies versus truth, there’s a place for the news media to be in the game. They’d better be in the game, they’re in the truth business. Their game is to tell the truth, so if they’re not getting involved, if they’re just, like, bystanders selling advertising and then letting newsmakers say whatever they want, then they’re surrendering what their real role is.

For me personally — and I think other people have come to the same conclusion as me — this whole disaster of this rise of fascism in the United States that threatens our democracy — and that’s what it is. It’s a rise of fascism that threatens our democracy. I don’t know what’s going to happen in the next few years. But I’m scared to death, and minimizing it is stupid. We all should be scared to death. I don’t really believe in journalistic objectivity anymore. I used to. I don’t anymore. When you think about it, it doesn’t make any sense.

Because as an editor, you know, I came into the office, I’d read the news and I’d be thinking about this, or I’d noticed something on the way to work and I talked to a reporter, and I’d say: “Go cover that, go write a story about that.” I wasn’t telling him to write every story about everything. I was making decisions. The very act of me assigning a news story was making a value judgment. I was making a decision on what was important to our readers. That’s not objective. That’s me making a decision. It’s not an objective move.

So, to think that your “objective all the time” is just fooling yourself. It always kills me to see longtime reporters, like somebody who’s been on a beat for 20 years, writing things that act as if they just showed up yesterday — to where they write in such a faux objective way that they don’t want to be seen like they’re prejudiced against anyone or like they have any opinions, they just wanted to, like, say what everyone said. Would you trust a reporter who’s been covering the same subject for 20 years and hasn’t reached certain conclusions about what’s going on on their beat? I wouldn’t.

The truth is they have reached conclusions. They know who’s lying. They know who’s telling the truth. They know what the problems are on that subject. If they’re in transit, they know why what the issues are in transit. To pretend otherwise is trying to fool the readers. That’s not a reader service. I much more believe that objectivity is reporters disclosing their biases and their own views. There’s a movement in this in journalism — kind of a where I’m coming from movement, where journalists would even issue statements saying:

I’ve always been pro choice, I came from a middle class background, I’ve never really been around poor people very much and I’m trying to learn more about them, but it’s not something that I grew up doing. Just a statement that says: This is where I’m coming from, and it’s not from an objective place, it’s from a subjective place. To me, that’s way more honest for journalists to do than to pretend that there’s some sort of God in the sky who just can build your out all the things that would make them be prejudiced, and they can come to objective conclusions. To me that’s lying to the audience.

Sam Goldman 36:04

I think that’s a really great way of putting it. One problem that you’ve pointed out across many mainstream media platforms is a refusal to call a lie, a lie, and the notion that somehow doing so is passing judgment. [MJ: Right] That somehow, that’s not objective. [MJ: Right] It seems [like] one example of a bigger problem in the media regarding the truth.

|Meanwhile, you have this larger problem in society at large, where you have people across a wide swath of political viewpoints who have no clue where to start to understand what’s real, and what’s not. [MJ: Right] Media literacy and scientific literacy have, in my opinion, completely nosedived. I was wondering on how you see the two of these connected? And how could the media maybe play a role in changing that for the better? How do we understand what’s true media literacy, and that scientific literacy?

Mark Jacob 37:09

I do think that the rise of fact checking is important. As I mentioned, it didn’t stop Trump because there were too many people who didn’t really want the facts. They just wanted their lies reinforced, or their prejudices or their fantasies. You’re never going to be able to effectively inform people who don’t want to know the truth. I do think that media literacy is super important. I think it’s been under-appreciated in school. Every high school should have a BS 101 class, should have class that just only purpose is to [teach]: Okay, here’s what you saw on social media, here’s what you saw on this report on the news media. Here’s why it’s true, or it’s not. Here’s how you can assess it. What kind of experts they use, is that scientific study, you know, with three people or with 300,000 people? You say crimes up, well, is it really up? Is it up per capita?

Is Chicago really the crime capitol? No. I mean, it’s got more murders than any other city in America, but its per capita homicide rate is way down compared to a lot of other cities. But it’s become this kind of thing to demonize by right wingers because it’s a Black mayor and the previous mayor was Black too — it’s been run by Democrats. So, suddenly it becomes this kind of symbol of dysfunction. If you look at per capita homicide rate, red states are at the top of that list. And this happened in that Pence town hall, when he was ragging on Chicago and Dana Bash said: Well, you know, but half the guns used in crimes Illinois came from Indiana, which lacks gun laws — which was great for her to point out.

She said, right after that: Well, let’s move on. Instead of: Pence, what do you think about that? Or ask Mike Pence: You’re always criticizing democratic run cities, why are the top five states with homicide rates red states? Push Republicans to deal with real statistics. But back to your question, I do think that there is some education for people, especially young people, in just being more skeptical about media and what what they’re told, and just analyzing: Well, where does that come from? Who said it? Is it really true?

There are things out there that will tell you. There is a fact checking industry, it’s just that sometimes it’s so separated from the lies that it’s not effective. Like at that CNN town hall with Mike Pence, Pence said said he’d always been in favor of exceptions to abortion bans for rape, incest, and the life of the mother. That was just a flat out lie, but CNN did not fact check it in real time. There. In fact checker, Daniel Dale, did it afterward. So the lie just lived by itself. The fact checkers attempt to catch up with it.

Sam Goldman 39:48

It’s really — upsetting isn’t the word — it’s really kind of like pulling your hair out feeling — nerve racking, thinking about more of those town halls.

Mark Jacob 39:58

My suggestion for the town halls was, if they want to do it in real time, they can do in real time, but they ought to have a panel of experts who know it, and they should have what I call the truth buzzer. The panel of experts, whenever they hear somebody say something that’s a lie, they hit the truth buzzer, the anchor says: Okay, we’re gonna stop this right now, let’s go over and talk to the panel. And the panel would say: Well, no, this isn’t true and this is true. You said in 2016, this, and it would go through it adjudicate it, and then they’d go back and the politician could talk some more. Of course, no politician would agree to those kinds of ground rules, but that’s the only way to hold those.

Sam Goldman 40:32

Even a basic follow up. I think that maybe in the town hall with Pence, there was one follow up. Te one that I recall, was the clarification Pence had said something regarding dismissing the indictments, he was briefly challenged to say: Well, does that go with no one being above the law?

Mark Jacob 40:53

Right. He said he said no one is above the law, but then he said there were unique circumstances that meant that Trump should not be indicted. Which means that — sounds to me, like — he means that somebody is above the law.

Sam Goldman 41:04

Right. That was the one follow up, so I don’t want to say that there were no follow ups, because that was, true, but overwhelmingly that isn’t done. Speaking of the CNN staff, I did want to get your thoughts. It’s big news that Licht is out at CNN. A lot can be drawn from his tenure, even just from the Trump town hall and the piece about him by Tim Alberta in the Atlantic.

You had tweeted something that I thought was really apt, and I wanted to get more of your thoughts on it. You had written: “Chris Licht wasn’t ousted because he refused to do what his bosses wanted — make CNN more accepting of fascism. He’s out because he didn’t do it effectively enough.” I was wondering if you could speak more to what are they going for in making CNN more accepting of fascism? What does Warner Brothers/Discovery… what are they trying to do with this at CNN?

Mark Jacob 41:56

I scratched my head a little bit, because what they seem to be doing is they have the kind of the centrist lane to some extent — or had — but they’re veering to the right, which is a very crowded lane right now. So I don’t understand what they’re doing. I don’t know what they’re doing from a marketing perspective. I think I understand what they’re doing from a political perspective. I have this suspicion that they’re, okay not making money, as long as they kind of please their big part owner, John Malone, who is a Trump donor.

When you see what’s happening with Twitter, Elon Musk has been satisfied to lose two thirds of the value of Twitter just to have a bigger voice himself in a personal way. I just wonder whether CNN which is not a major company inside of Warner Brothers/Discovery, but I just wonder whether they just want to please right wing rich people, and really not have it be a thorn in the side to whoever the Republican candidate is. That’s the thing.

That’s what’s so scary, is that we do not have liberal media, we did not have liberal media ten years ago, we didn’t have it five years ago, we have less of it now. I don’t think that CNN is trying to make money by doing this. I don’t know what they’re doing, other than perhaps just trying to please John Malone who owns part of the company, and definitely wants it to be what he calls centrist. What he calls centrist is not centrist.

It’s accepting of fascism, it’s making the fascists part of the club of democracy. That’s what they’re doing, is trying to make them legitimize people who clearly wanted to overturn a free and fair election — that’s what they want to do, is legitimize those people. They want to wash away the stink of what they did on January 6th, and move forward, and have nobody in a suit get punished. A thousand people who went out and committed violence have been charged, but I’m still waiting for a politician in a suit to be charged and thrown into clinker, which, sure as hell should happen. And until that does happen, why wouldn’t you think it’s going to happen again?

I don’t know what CNN’s aim is. It’s clear that what Chris Licht did was to spout the company line — it wasn’t that he wasn’t doing what they said, it was that he wasn’t selling it well enough. He wasn’t doing it subtly enough. He wasn’t sucking up to the on air personalities enough, and he just wasn’t diplomatic enough. One of the things that he really did it was not smart was criticize their past coverage of COVID and stuff like that. He said they didn’t give enough credence to the idea that death toll from COVID was inflated. Well, the death toll from COVID was not inflated. If anything, it’s been under estimated. When you look at excess deaths as a statistic, it’s higher than what the official COVID death rate is — if anything, it was underestimated, I think.

But the conspiracy theorists want to pretend that COVID was no big deal, and that it was all a government conspiracy. Giving kind of a legitimacy to all these conspiracy theories by letting those people on the air by CNN is pretty much what news channels were doing when they let Donald Trump on a decade ago to accuse Obama of not being an American citizen. It’s a total BS theory that they’re giving on their airwaves.

Sam Goldman 45:08

You had mentioned indictments, and people needing to be indicted for their role in orchestrating the coup. I just wanted your take on what’s with the constant constant media speculation about Trump possibly getting indicted and at this time, and for this, this, or arrested, but very little explanation about what crimes he’s allegedly committed. All this like: Is it gonna be today? It’s gonna be tomorrow. It’s gonna be at this time, with very little: He is going to be charged for this because…

Mark Jacob 45:46

It’s because this is illegal, because it violates this law. Also, they haven’t done a good enough job of setting out — for people who aren’t news junkies like me — they haven’t set out the timeline. And they haven’t really explained adequately how this is different from the thing that involves Biden and Pence. Biden and Pence, they both owned up to it. Whereas Trump not only lied about it — I mean, he had his lawyer issue a statement to the federal government saying he didn’t have anything more when he did. There’s just so many ways that his case is different on the documents thing.

Reality check: The Republican Party tried to overthrow democracy. Reality check — that’s what they did. If anyone wants to dispute that sentence, I can explain to you why that’s exactly what happened. Yet nothing’s happened to them. They’re still running for office. They’re still taking away people’s rights. They’re still gerrymandering — they’re trying to prevent black people from having political power. They’re still doing all the same crap and even worse, and nobody has been held to account who really mattered. These foot soldiers, Three Percenters and Oathkeepers, in that, I’m glad that they’re being thrown in prison, they belong in prison — and you still have the leading candidate for the Republican Party nomination saying he’s going to pardon them, which is another thing that’s outrageous.

Real accountability has not come yet, and it’s over two years since it happened. Justice delayed is justice denied. I think they should have hurried more. I understand justice is slow and they’ve gotta have all their T’s crossed, and their I’s dotted and all that stuff, and I get that. In the recent move, it sounds like they’re moving the documents case down to Florida, because that’s where most of the crimes occurred and they don’t want to get thrown out of court just because they file in DC. That makes plenty of sense, and I understand that this is way more complicated than I know, I’m not a lawyer. But just for the sake of American democracy, and its safety, people need to go to jail, I think members of Congress need to go to jail.

Sam Goldman 47:44

For people who want to write opinion pieces and get them run any tips on getting op-eds published?

Mark Jacob 47:52

They need to say something that no one else is saying. If you’ve read what you’re writing, then don’t submit it. Find a new angle. Stay nice and tight. Stay short — stay, you know, 700 words or something like that; don’t write a novel, write something that people will get to the end of. But be heartfelt. Or write a letter to the editor of your local newspaper, or submit an op ed there. Everything doesn’t have to be also everything doesn’t have to be national. Some of the best ways to get published in local newspapers and local publications is to write about local issues. A lot of things that we’ve been talking about on a national basis rear their ugly head locally. The book bans and stuff like that, those are all local issues. Stay active locally too. Everything that’s important is not on MSNBC and CNN. There are things that you can pay attention to in your own neighborhood that will make democracy stronger for all of us.

Sam Goldman 48:43

I want to thank you so much, Mark, for taking the time to talk to us to share your expertise, your perspective and insight. If people want to connect with you, where should they go?

Mark Jacob 48:57

They should follow me, I hope. on Twitter. I’m still on there until Elon Musk gets even worse. I still think we need to have a voice there, and I’m @MarkJacob16. Love for you to follow me, and I follow a lot of people, and we’ve gotta be loud there. We can’t surrender the platform to liars and haters. That’s a battleground for us to fight on.

Sam Goldman 49:21

We love hearing the ways that you’re inspired to act after listening. Here’s this from John: “Recently, a local library planned to hold a drag queen story hour but ultimately canceled the event due to objections from a few patrons, despite the majority being in favor of it. In response, I wrote an email expressing my view that this is how fascism can begin and so forth — all while made maintaining courteous language towards those involved. To my surprise, the librarian replied, agreeing with my opinion and promised to forward my message on to their board members.” Thanks, John, for sharing this.

In related news, I wanted to alert folks that Moms for Liberty is holding their fascist summit complete with Trump, DeSantis, Haley and more Jun 29 to July 2, in Philly, where they’ll be training their Christian fascist stormtroopers to run for school boards, terrorize teachers, students and the LGBT community at large, aiming to erase LGBTQ folks from public life — with a specific viciousness towards the trans community. And they’re doing this nationwide. We’ll be covering this more, including what Moms for Liberty is, the danger they pose, why they’re coming to Philly, and the ways for people to act. But, right here, I want to say folks should be turning up and turning out in Philly at the end of this pride month, this June, to defend the lives and rights of LGBTQ people, the rights of kids to have a real education, to learn history, and against the overall fascist program they are hammering into place. As always, stay tuned on our social @RefuseFascism.

Thanks so much, Mark.

Mark Jacob 50:47

Thank you.

Sam Goldman 50:47

Thanks for listening to Refuse Fascism. We want to hear from you. Share your thoughts, questions, ideas for topics, guests, or lend a skill. Tweet me @SamBGoldman. Drop me a line at [email protected]. See the show notes to find us on Mastodon or how you can leave a voicemail for us. We’d love to hear from you.

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Thanks to Richie Marini, Lina Thorne, and Mark Tinkleman for helping produce this episode. Thanks to incredible volunteers, we have transcripts available for each show, so be sure to visit RefuseFascism.org and sign up to get them in your inbox. We’ll be back next Sunday. Until then, In the name of humanity, we refuse to accept a fascist America.