The No Kings marches on Saturday were likely the biggest day of protest in the history of the country and the media downplayed it almost everywhere. That is a really big problem.

To be clear, I am not talking about Fox and the right-wing media. I mean the New York Times, NPR, and other major media outlets. After the protests the New York Times ran a piece with a headline that said “thousands” took part in protests across the country. (Sorry, the headline seems to have been removed from its site, so you have to take my word.) 

How the hell do you get “thousands” when by all accounts there were tens of thousands of people protesting in New York City alone, with comparable or larger numbers in Philadelphia, Seattle, Los Angeles, and other major cities. That sort of absurd undercount cannot be an accident. Someone made a conscious decision to minimize the size of the protest.

There was a similar story with NPR. In a news summary on its Sunday morning Weekend Edition segment, it said that there were No Kings protests in “several” cities. The organizers put the number of protests at 2,100. This is likely a pretty solid number, because unlike crowd size, which involves some guesswork, protests come with a specific city or location attached to each one. 

FWIW, I found the 2,100 number very plausible. I knew of three different protests in my not especially densely populated part of Western Oregon. There was also one in my very Trumpy former hometown, Kanab Utah, population 5,000. 

In any case, I am confident that the organizers will share their list of protests so that anyone interested can verify the 2,100 number. But the more important question is how does NPR get “several” from more than 2,000? That is not close to being a normal usage of the word. It is hard to explain this except as an effort to minimize the size of the protests. 

I am not trying to nitpick here. FWIW, both the NYT and NPR have done many excellent pieces investigating incompetence and corruption in the Trump administration. But that can’t excuse what has to have been a deliberate effort to minimize the size and importance of the protests. 

If this was an isolated incident it could perhaps be forgiven, although forgiveness is a bit hard when our democracy is on the line. But there has been a consistent practice of finding fault with the left (using the term very broadly) in sins that would never merit comment if done by the right. 

I had been yapping about this endlessly with the economic reporting during Biden’s presidency. While there were clearly problems with the economy, they were mostly caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, which outside of right-wing loony circles was not Biden’s fault. Biden’s policies led to a remarkable recovery which gave us the longest stretch of low unemployment in more than half a century, along with the strongest real wage growth for low-paid workers.  

However, instead of reporting on the economic reality, the media insisted on an “everyone is hurting” line, often pushing stories there were 180 degrees at odds with reality. For example, we heard repeatedly about the “retirement crisis” when near retirees were probably better prepared for retirement than at any point since the 1960s. We heard about young people giving up on the idea they would ever be homeowners at a time when homeownership rates for the young were higher than at any point since the collapse of the housing bubble.

We almost never heard about the record rates of business start-ups, the unprecedented boom in factory construction, or the tens of millions of people now able to work from home, saving themselves hundreds of hours of commuting time each year and thousands of dollars in commuting-related expenses. 

I don’t know why the media felt the need to run these negative stories. Maybe it is an instinctive both sideism. Sure, Trump and the Republicans do crazy things, but the Democrats mess up too. I would be the first to agree that the Democrats have messed many things up, but we will never have a chance of moving forward if we can’t get honest discussions of when they have actually made important progress.

I don’t expect the existing media to change. We have to keep leaning on them to do better, but the problems are structural. We need to foster new media.

That may sound half crazy at a time when the very existence of a free press is in question, but we do need to get a clear understanding of the playing field and look for opportunities where they might arise.   

I have been pushing for decades, along with a few others (notably the late Robert McChesney), for some sort of individual tax credit to support news organizations. The tax credit, which would be fully refundable, would be modeled on the income tax deduction for charitable contributions. 

Media organizations would have to register with the I.R.S. or an equivalent agency, just saying what they do. This would be like a church or research organization registering for tax exempt status. The I.R.S. doesn’t attempt to evaluate the quality of a religion or the research produced, it just determines that the organization is in fact a church or a research organization. 

The other condition I would put on receiving the money is that all the work supported is in the public domain without copyright protection. The logic is that the public is paying for it, the public should have access to it without paywalls.

Such a credit could make a large pool of money available to support news organizations. Some of the money would go to slop – sort of like now. Some would be used to push right-wing viewpoints. We might see that as unfortunate, but such is life. Besides, it is not as though these outfits are wanting for money now. 

The key point is that this system, which could be introduced at the state or local level, could make a vast amount of money available for quality journalism. It would be an uphill struggle to get this sort of system in place even in progressive states or cities, but it is worth the battle. It beats waiting for liberal billionaires to see the light. 

It is bizarre that the media don’t feature front and center in progressives’ agenda. Virtually everyone would agree that the enormous amount of money that the rich can throw into political campaigns corrupts democracy. Money can and does buy elections, as those pushing to overturn Citizens United complain.

But it’s hard to understand how people can believe that the campaign ads the rich buy affect voters, but somehow the content they see or hear between the ads doesn’t. People’s view of candidates and issues is affected by what they see and hear 24-7. Even the most expensively funded ad campaign is only a small part of this picture.

Also, if we are talking about what people see and hear 24-7 we need to include social media. Somehow letting everyone’s favorite tech bro billionaires, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, control huge social media networks to be run at their whims hasn’t struck most progressives as a serious problem. To my view, we should be looking for ways to downsize these behemoths and also hold them responsible for spreading lies. My route is a limited repeal of Section 230 which would benefit smaller sites, but if others have good plans, let’s get them on the table.    

Anyhow, the right has pushed fans of democracy’s backs against the wall. We have some hope because of their incompetence and viciousness, which disgusts even very moderate or conservative apolitical people. But we really need to figure out ways to shore up progressive bases of power. The right has been very effective in designing ways to destroy them, most notably their attacks on organized labor over the last half century. 

The Senate just voted to pass a totally corrupt crypto-enabling bill, absurdly named the “GENUIS Act.” It could only get through the Senate because 16 Democrats supported it, allowing it to overcome a filibuster. I’m sure none of these senators have any special fondness for crypto, but they are fond of the campaign contributions supporting crypto brings.

We can and should deplore the corruption of these politicians. But as someone much smarter than me once said, the job of a politician is to get elected. Unless progressives or fans of democracy more generally have some alternative mechanism for keeping these people in office, they will go with the money. A genuinely independent media can provide that alternative. It is a long trek to get there, but it needs to be done and there will be incremental benefits all along the way. Does anyone have a better idea?