Murder, MAGA, the mainstream, and the media

Why the press keeps doing the wrong job.

DALL-E 3 via chatGPT

While the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson and the rise of Donald Trump are very different stories, how the so-called mainstream media has treated them both is, I think, instructive about the ways the media has failed at its job and why it should be having a real hard think about what that job is in a democracy—especially when the democracy in question is headed down the drain.

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The TL;DR: The media did a bad job on reporting Trump’s rise, and is doing a bad job on reporting Brian Thompson’s murder. The reasons are similar: thzere are large groups of people it’s not taking seriously.

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For five days after the murder on December 4, the overwhelming majority of the overwhelming flood of media coverage was about the hunt for the mysterious young man who had shot Thompson dead at point-blank range in the center of Manhattan in broad daylight and then somehow escaped without trace. In the four days since, most of it has focused on Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old suspect—his arrest, his charging, his chiseled looks, his chiseled abs, his family wealth, his friends, his social media posts, his notebooks, his health problems, his possible motives, and whether or not he has a TV in his jail cell.

I mean of course people are obsessed with this stuff. I went off on a little screed on BlueSky about how the media was treating the story like a true-crime thriller, but honestly this is hardly news. The US has a long history of hardened criminals being treated as vigilante folk heroes. Indeed, one particular sub-sub-genre of the present coverage is po-faced explainers about folk heroes laced with hand-wringing about whether social media or political polarization or our violent culture are to blame for the fact that so many people online seem absolutely overjoyed at seeing a father of two get shot in the back.

Here’s what there has not been so much of: Taking those people seriously. I don’t mean sharing their glee at Thompson’s death. I mean reporting on them as if they were mainstream, rather than—as in most of the coverage—an aberrant fringe group worthy of either laughter, horror, or fascinated study, in the way a lepidopterist studies some freakish new butterfly.

This description should sound familiar. It’s how the media treated Trump’s supporters after he first came to political prominence and for a long time after. It practiced lepidopterology on them. It went into their habitats, observed them closely, and reported assiduously and solemnly on their habits, beliefs and concerns. It thought this was its job: to explain these exotic creatures to its constituency, so that constituency—which was obviously going to stay in charge of the country, right?—could make some adjustments to its policies.

In hindsight, this was not the media’s job, or not its only one. The other job, at which it roundly failed, was to entertain the possibility that those exotic creatures were in fact the mainstream themselves. As one writer enjoined his fellow progressives on November 6, “Stop pretending Trump is not who we are.”

So in the same vein, stop assuming that taking delight, or at least some quiet satisfaction, in the cold-blooded murder of a symbol of corporate rapaciousness is not who we are. I suspect it’s who a great many of us are.

(Aside: It’s true that Trump voters and healthcare malcontents are “not who we are” when “we” is the media. That most journalists in national newsrooms are liberal is not in dispute. And I suspect most have good enough health packages and incomes that an occasional denial of insurance coverage doesn’t force them to make tough financial decisions.)

OK, you say, but so what? What do I mean when I say the media should report on these people “as if they were mainstream”? After all, it’s not as if there isn’t already plenty of reporting on the horrors of the health insurance system—stories of lives wrecked and sometimes lost by claims delayed or denied. Surely if you contacted some of the people posting shirtless Luigi memes you’d hear plenty such stories.

But that is lepidopterology. It’s treating the victims of the healthcare system as just that—victims. Telling more of their victim stories achieves very little. Nobody needs further evidence that the healthcare system sucks.

Rather, what I want to know is whether the Luigi fans (the Luigini?) have any potential to become a political movement rather than just a giant fart of schadenfreude. It would be a pretty big deal if they did. That’s the media’s job, to find that out, just as it was our job to see Trump’s victory coming.

To answer this question I’d want a few things from the reporting. Who are the people posting these memes—not as individuals but collectively, their demographics, their wealth, their political leanings? Whom do they admire as leaders? Do they organize, and if so how? And what about Americans in general: how do their attitudes to the healthcare system correlate with their demographics, wealth and politics? Where are the economic or social dividing lines between the people for whom the system is acceptable and those for whom it’s intolerable? And what is the power balance between those groups?

[Update, December 18: Jonathan Stray has pointed me to this survey, showing that people under 45 are far more approving of Mangione (33% “positive” or “somewhat positive”) than those over 45 (8%). Also more favorable are Black (31%) and Hispanic (28%) than white (14%) Americans.]

All this has been on my mind not just because of the Thompson case but because I’ve been thinking about what the “job” of the media is in a democracy more broadly. I wrote a short piece this week for the Nieman Journalism Lab’s annual predictions series. The main points:

• I’m not convinced by the rhetoric that Trump voters simply don’t care about democracy. Some may not, but I reckon most of them (and most Americans) just didn’t think this was much of a democracy in the first place.

• Judging by past performance, the media will think its main job in Trump 2.0 is to conscientiously chronicle all the ways Trump is destroying democracy. But such a constant barrage of grim tidings will cut no ice with the people who didn’t think it was a democracy to start with, and will just stun the rest into horrified apathy. Neither of those is a job well done.

• The media’s job is not simply to report everything that’s going on. The media’s job, in my view, is to empower the public to hold power to account. When accountability mechanisms are broken, as they are now, simply reporting what’s going on isn’t enough. I think empowering the public involves additional roles, such as helping them see the alternatives to the situation they’re in.

• It is the media’s job to be on the side of democracy. Some journalists will see this as activism or partisanship. It’s not; it’s a matter of definition. A free press under an autocracy is not a free press, period. The mistake, however (see first point), is to simplistically paint MAGA as anti-democratic and Democrats as pro-democratic. Instead we need to go back to the drawing board on what democracy should be.

I have a lot more to say on that last point, but I will save it for another time.

This week’s links

Direct democracy in Syria—yes, Syria. Well, in a small Kurdish-majority corner, anyway. Carne Ross visits Rojava, where he finds local assemblies that center women and minorities, and a system of “social peace” that replaces punishment for crimes with a kind of restorative justice. (Gentle Anarchy)

AI and elections in 2024. A rundown of how artificial intelligence got used around the world for fundraising, political organizing, polling, drafting speeches, connecting with voters… but interestingly, much less than some feared for deepfakes and mis-/disinformation. (Ash Center, Harvard)

Tech for talking to each other. Another rundown, this time of some tech fixes (mostly but not exclusively AI) to moderate and facilitate dialogue in tricky situations. (Better Conflict Bulletin)

Why Americans rejected election reform. They hate their system, yet given some alternatives that were supposed to reduce polarization and gridlock, voters in seven states almost universally rejected them. Seems to be a chicken-and-egg thing: people won’t vote for changes they haven’t already seen work elsewhere. (The Atlantic)