Media playing firewall against Donald Trump
Response translates as ‘rigging ’ to GOP
Never in modern history has the news media been so united in its condemnation of a presidential candidate and determination to use its influence to help prevent his election. Does that mean the election is rigged? It is certainly a new view of the media function. The media’s sense of civic duty, in even the most high-minded view, is not about protecting the public, but about orchestrating the claims of people and institutions who think they can protect it. The natural competitiveness of the media business, and market sense that moralizing makes for a duller story, have, arguably, helped pluralism and democra- cy. The media is not a church.
But now it is. Or, save for a few outliers, it is like one in its absolute certainty, and hell and brimstone warnings, that electing Donald Trump would be electing the devil. Since September, when the polls appeared to tighten, the message from newspapers, cable stations, networks and pundits, and from the social media echo box, has been as consistent as it might be from Sunday pulpits — or, for that matter, in Saturday union halls, or Thursday meetings of special interest groups.
The media, virtually all forms of it, virtually all aspects of its ownership, virtually all of its employees, on an institutional and operational basis, has come to see itself as a firewall against Donald Trump. Indeed, in an altogether new sense of itself, the imperative quite seems to be to prove it can be a firewall — that it can claim a historic role in the defeat of Trump and the election of Hillary Clinton. For a
anti-Semitic.”
“We totally disavow hateful rhetoric online or otherwise,” Hicks wrote in an emailed statement.
Conversations that take place on Twitter, famous for its 140character limit, tap into the nation’s pulse, be it the protests on the streets of Ferguson, Mo., the congressional sit-in over gun control or the launch of Beyonce’s
Lemonade album. But more and more, people venturing onto the service to catch up on news or with friends are confronted with hatred and bigotry spewed by the fringes of society, Segal says.
“When there is such a volume, we have to ask ourselves what can we do? What can the Internet service providers do? What can vast segments of society do? So that we hold people accountable and create safe spaces online the way we expect those spaces to be in the real world,” he said.
For years, Twitter has faced sharp criticism for not aggressively enough policing abuse and harassment on its service. Twitter says its rules “prohibit inciting or engaging in the targeted abuse or harassment of others.”
Yet, if anything, abuse has increased. In one of the highestprofile incidents, Leslie Jones, who starred in the remake of the
Ghostbusters movie, temporarily left Twitter after being targeted by racist trolls who compared her to primates including Harambe, the gorilla shot dead in May at the Cincinnati zoo.
“Ok I have been called Apes,” she wrote on Twitter at the time, “even got a pic with semen on my face. I’m tryin to figure out what human means. I’m out.”
Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric and policy positions such as banning Muslims from entering the U.S. “have really mainstreamed Islamophobia in our nation,” said Ibrahim Hooper, communications director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
“He’s given permission to all those who held anti-Muslim views or might have formed antiMuslim views recently to go public with them quite proudly. Whereas before maybe they would have been reluctant to be so open about their bigotry, now you have a major American public figure saying that’s perfectly OK. In fact, it’s somehow patriotic,” Hooper said.
Trump supporters have taken to Twitter and Facebook with hateful messages, saying in effect: “‘Wait until Donald Trump gets into office and all of you will be gone. You will be in jail. Islam will be banned,” he said.
Irfan Chaudhry, a criminology instructor at MacEwan University in Edmonton, Canada, who has researched racism on Twitter, says these disturbing attacks that tend to be spurred by electionseason politics have been happening on Twitter for years, just never at this volume.
“During the last election, a lot of people were still trying to get a handle on what social media is,” Chaudhry said. “Now they know what it is, and now we are able to utilize it in more data-driven and analytical ways that give us these insights we weren’t aware of before.”
Observers say the targeting of specific groups of people by hate speech, particularly Jewish journalists, has dramatically intensified during the Trump campaign.
The anti-Semitic hate speech is coordinated in a way it has not been against any other group, said Sophie Bjork-James, a post-doctoral fellow in the anthropology department at Vanderbilt University. “While various groups have been targeted with hate speech on Twitter during this election, I don’t think anything compares to what Jewish journalists are going through,” Bjork-James said. “Many white nationalists have been inspired by the Trump campaign to increase their involvement, and a central part of this ideology is anti-Semitism.”