How to cover a coup
Or at least a coup attempt. Hint: this is not a time for journalists to be neutral
It’s Monday, January 4, the first full week of the new year, and what a week it’s shaping up to be.
Tuesday: the U.S. Senate special elections in Georgia, with control of the Senate in the balance. Wednesday: a mob of Republicans—12 Senators and 140 Representatives, according to USA Today—plans to refuse to certify President-elect Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election.
After yesterday’s explosive news that Trump tried to get the Georgia Secretary of State to stuff the ballot box retroactively in his favor, at least one thing is clear: Trump is attempting a coup. And he has the support of a significant proportion of the Republican caucus.
As alarming as these events are for Americans who believe in liberal democracy and uphold the Constitution, they pose a special problem for journalists: how should the news industry cover this coup attempt?
Brian Stelter, Chief Media Correspondent for CNN, had a great segment yesterday asking this very question and many others about how journalists should frame this story and what language they should use. (BTW, I stole my headline today from Brian’s segment—thank you, Brian!)
Should journalists call what’s happening a “coup attempt” and “sedition”? Should TV networks cover Wednesday’s proceedings live?
Back in early December, Zeynep Tufekci, the brilliant UNC professor who studies technology, said in a thought-provoking Atlantic essay that we absolutely should use the term coup. She should know. She is originally from Turkey, or “the land of coups,” as she put it.
A coup, Tufekci writes, is “the illegitimate overthrow of a sitting government—usually through violence or the threat of violence.” Even a month ago she could list enough evidence to convince reasonable readers that Trump and his allies really are trying to illegally keep a duly elected President from assuming office. Weeks later, we have even more evidence, including that alarming phone call.
As for the threat of violence: Trump has been whipping his base into a frenzy, urging them in inflammatory tweets to convene in Washington Wednesday to protest the election certification and support the objectors. As the ADL reports, extremists plan to attend. Muriel Bowser, the mayor of DC, is asking residents to stay away from downtown and “not to engage with demonstrators who come to our city seeking confrontation,” WUSA9 reports. (Please, please let there be no violence.)
So, yes, I think journalists should call what’s happening an “attempted coup.” Journalists should use plain language to describe what is happening before our very eyes, out in the open. And yes, it’s fair to call what is happening “seditious,” if not in the legal sense (which requires force, and perhaps threatening election officials with criminal consequences constitutes force, IDK) then at least in the everyday dictionary sense: “language or behavior that is intended to persuade other people to oppose their government.”
We don’t like to think a coup could happen in the United States, so we’re hesitant to use such a startling term to describe what it is we think we’re seeing. An attempted presidential coup in the United States? It seems outlandish.
It’s a good time to remember that we have had violent coups in our country, just not at the federal level. In the late 19th century, white supremacists used violence and fraud to steal state elections from bi-racial coalition governments in both Virginia and North Carolina. In North Carolina, they even overthrew the duly elected bi-racial government of Wilmington in a bloody massacre that targeted the majority Black population of the city. It is believed that thousands of Black citizens left Wilmington forever.
And guess who played a critical role in both coups? The white press. White newspaper leaders used their papers to stoke white fears of “Negro domination,” organize violence against Black Americans, and execute the coups.
Who has amplified election fraud conspiracy theories besides Trump and his 150+ Republican collaborators in Congress? The right-wing news media.
Fox News and Newsmax covered Trump’s false claims as legitimate until the manufacturers of voting machines filed legal notices a few weeks ago. But now Fox News is a house divided, the New York Times reports, with Trump’s former close friends at “Fox & Friends” warning of anarchy and citing lack of election fraud evidence while Mark Levin claims Democrats and “the media” are attempting to destroy the Constitution. Newsmax covered Trump’s call to the Georgia Secretary State “as a legitimate exercise of presidential power,” the Washington Post reports.
The GOP has been laying the groundwork for Trumpism for decades and has at best acquiesced to and at worst condoned and supported Trump’s anti-democratic behavior for four years. But they could not have radicalized a large segment of the US population without right-wing media actively spreading, day after day, Trump’s disinformation, conspiracy theories, and lies.
We’ve been here before in the United States, and it did not end well for democracy. To be clear, experts and journalists insist Wednesday’s shenanigans will not succeed. The House is in Democratic control after all, and only 12 Senators plan to contest Biden’s victory. But as historian Alexander Keyssar told the Washington Post, Wednesday’s efforts to challenge the election results will even further erode democratic norms, setting a precedent that will allow a future “partisan coup.”
And it’s disturbing to consider what might come next after Wednesday’s Congressional proceedings.
Just yesterday, in an extraordinary step, the 10 living former Secretaries of Defense published a Washington Post op-ed urging current Department of Defense leaders not to allow the U.S. military to be used in any way to help “resolve” the election “dispute.” They clearly believe Trump might well order the military to keep him in office.
We have to wonder what the former secretaries have heard through their whisper networks of power.