How journalists should respond to the "Authoritarian Playbook"
Good afternoon from sweltering Washington, where I'm hunkering down in air conditioning and parsing what the Supreme Court's decision on Murthy vs Missouri means for how social media companies and U.S. government interact around disinformation, misinformation, and propaganda. (More on that later!)
Alex Howard here, with another civic text. If you find these newsletters useful, I hope you will share them with your communities and networks – and consider upgrading to a paid membership. (Until I find another source of subsidy, as in the past, I'm depending on you all to help grow this effort into a sustainable enterprise. Thank you in advance for your support.
Today, I want to share a few reflections after a decade of thinking and writing about authoritarianism, democracy, and the free press. This morning, I read the Washington Post's reporting on former President Trump’s efforts to delegitimize CNN anchors Jake Tapper and Dana Bash ahead of the tomorrow's presidential debate.
The newsletter was a good faith effort, but like so much of the journalism I read from mainstream political reporters in Washington in 2024, omitted some key context that would have made it far stronger.
It's important to effectively differentiate what Trump is doing from what other campaigns have done in the past. The role of moderators in a presidential debate has always been contested by campaigns and candidates “working the ref" in hopes of softer questions or better coverage. That's normal.
Trump and his partisans are not just “working the refs” ahead of time — though that’s part of the rationale for their efforts, perhaps in hopes that the moderators will soften questions, perhaps not framing his autocoup or corruption clearly.
Trump is inoculating his partisans against the inevitable, inconvenient facts the CNN journalists will check him on and the aspects of his record they will hold him to account during the debate by delegitimizing the debate moderators ahead of time. That's abnormal.
Debate commissions have historically chosen journalists to moderate because they're independent from campaigns and parties, not conflicted partisans. While the debate questions posed all too often reflect the passions and preoccupations of political journalists instead of the primary concerns of the electorate, great moderators do ask and follow up on core issues.
In other to establish the public facts about candidates that we need to be self-governing in a democracy, from their character to competence to governing philosophy to proposed policies, moderators need to ask tough questions, follow up, and hold participants to account. Unlike Sunday morning news shows, they must not "leave it there" or "move on" when candidates answer the question they wish they'd been asked, filibuster, or outright mislead.
Debate moderators should take the “side” of facts and the truth, without fear or favor – never that of a campaign or candidate. If there are asymmetries between the records of candidates, they should neither seek false balance nor allow false equivalence.
In today's newsletter, the Post accurately reported the news – that Trump was "attacking" Tapper and Bash ahead of the debates, but fell short in explaining why he's doing that to readers and subscribers, like me.
Trump's strategy is hardly a secret! Trump told Lesley Stahl a decade ago why he attacks news media and journalists: to discredit journalism: so his followers don’t believe what they publish or produce. In fact, Trump was remarkably frank and honest about the strategy.
Boston University professor Joan Donovan is quoted in the Post calling this approach “prebunking,” but, with due deference required by her expertise, that term doesn’t feel quite right here.
Prebunking is a strategy that public media or public safety and public health agencies can apply to mitigate harms from disinformation efforts by proactively informing publics before campaigns launch.
To put it another way, prebunking inoculates people against prospective lies with known facts ahead of time. (One might even call prebunking a vaccine against a disinformation virus, if you favored public health metaphors and approaches to mitigating harms from medical misinformation and toxic lies.)
Autocrats apply the inverse of this "prebunking" approach, using “fake news” and false accusations of bias to delegitimize critical coverage by the press. To put that another way, authoritarians inoculate partisans against the truth by clouding their minds with doubt, denial, distraction, and disinformation (false information intended to harm) and misinformation (misleading information that may or may not be believed by those spreading it.)
In today's article, the Post not only failed to identify as “Trump’s playbook” as authoritarian before, during, and after his term in the White House, but to explicitly connect it to the "Authoritarian Playbook" that dictators, demagogues, and despots run around the globe.
If you're unfamiliar with this playbook, scholars of democracy have found that authoritarians often use similar tactics to gain or retain power, which Protect Democracy distilled into seven pillars:
Autocrats politicize independent institutions.
Autocrats spread disinformation.
Autocrats aggrandize executive power at the expense of checks and balances. They quash criticism and dissent.
Autocrats specifically target vulnerable or marginalized communities.
Autocrats work to corrupt elections.
Autocrats stoke political violence.
Sound familiar? (That list is not exhaustive; read Professor Shelley Inglis' excellent compilation of the autocrat's playbook for more.)
To be clear, I’m pleased that the Post assigned and published this article. It's the right direction. The end result is still not where American journalism about this historic moment needs to be in 2024, given the existential risk that transnational, far-right authoritarianism poses to liberal democracies everywhere.
Unfortunately, the New York Times' article regarding Trump's delegitimization strategy was far worse, delivering a "he said, they said" account that privileged his spokesperson in the kicker quote, amplified his false claims of bias without debunking them, and failed to cite or grapple with the authoritarian playbook at all.
For whatever reasons, the Times has all too often normalized Trump's neo-fascism and emolumental corruption in recent years in ways that have been profoundly damaging to our politics and democratic integrity writ large – despite its extraordinary record of original investigative reporting that has consistently revealed both.
Democracy may die in darkness. It can also wither without the care and feeding of gardeners who don't trace and sterilize the sources of pollution.
I hope that in the months ahead the terrific journalists at the Times, the Post, and the rest of our nation's press corps all read, report on, internalize, and share Protect Democracy's excellent resource on how reporters can contextualize and cover authoritarian threats, “as distinct from politics as usual” — including unprecedented debates like the one I'll be watching tomorrow.
As always, you can send thoughts, comments, questions, and the slings and arrows of outrageous fortunate to alex@governing.digital. More anon.
