The hearings of the committee investigating January 6 in the US Congress are more than a didactic narrative about the attempted coup d’etat orchestrated by Donald Trump.
The well-produced spectacle of testimonies interrupted by videos and graphics makes it even clearer that the Capitol invasion was a first act, not the conclusion of an atypical authoritarian upheaval.
The midterms in November heralds itself as one of the most unsafe elections in recent memory, with state legislatures trying to ensure that failure to steal the 2020 election is not repeated.
The US media, whose failure to expose the danger posed by a playboy candidate with decades of dirty New York corporate résumé and Hillary Clinton’s e-mail obsession is a regrettable chapter in the history of the free press, appears to be emerging from credulity. that cost so much.
In at least two major American newsrooms, a new editorial will join the traditional ones, such as Economics or Sports. It’s the Democracy section, something unimaginable here ten years ago. The team of reporters enlisted to cover this year’s election in the New York Times was described by the leading English-language newspaper as the “democracy team.”
The Associated Press, the country’s oldest and largest, appointed a Democracy editor, journalist Tom Verdin, to cover “challenges to the right to vote, election management and disinformation.”
In the case of the New York Times, the change in tone is notable for the newspaper’s power of influence. In March 2017, with Trump newly installed in the White House, then-executive editor Dean Baquet derided the prescient new slogan posted by the competing Washington Post under the newspaper’s headline — “democracy dies in darkness.” “Sounds like a Batman movie,” snapped Baquet sarcastically.
His successor, Joe Kahn, has just acknowledged, in an interview with American public radio, that there is no such thing as independent journalism in a society that is not free. Therefore, he explained, we journalists are not impartial about the risk of the country losing its freedom.
The Trump years, in the US and Brazil, with the original in the White House and the subservient and now terrified clone on the Plateau, exposed both the fragility of democratic systems that depend on social consensus, not only on laws, but also on the free press. , deluded by her role.
Extremist voices that support fascism through the polls have gained space in the name of hearing “two sides”. The side that acts to promote a coup d’état doesn’t need an editorial perch, it needs handcuffs and clean processes in justice. Spreading disinformation from those who want the power to terrorize portions of the population is not objectivity, it is washing their hands of the ongoing demolition.
The historic impact of the January 6 commission should not be fully known this year at the polls or in the 2024 presidential election. To have a beneficial effect in the future, the commission needs to expose what the political press took so long to admit: Trump happened because the system was rotting.
He was the visible boil. The bacterium had been infecting the body of American politics for decades.
