Monday
Like many concerned about the state of the nation, I have been discouraged at how the mainstream media (MSM) fails to hold Donald Trump and rightwing authoritarianism to account. Rather than exposing the genuine threat that these figures represent, many news outlets simply present the two sides as equivalent. The New York Times has become so notorious at whitewashing Trump that there’s a parody social media account—New York Times Pitchbot—which hilariously imagines how the newspaper would soft pedal the president’s most egregious acts. Not that one has to invent examples since some of the actual headlines make the point by themselves.
For instance, during the 2024 presidential campaign media columnist Margaret Sullivan complained about the headline, “Harris and Trump Have Housing Ideas. Economists Have Doubts.” Harris’s idea involved tax cuts designed to spur construction and grants to first-time home buyers. Trump’s was massive deportations. One idea, in other words, was serious and worth examining, the other fascistic. You wouldn’t know that from the headline, however.
When voters are presented with such apparent symmetry, an understandable response is to voice Mercutio’s dying accusation in Romeo and Juliet: “A plague on both your houses.”
In a moment I’ll explain why Mercutio is in no position to make such an accusation, but let’s first examine what’s going on. By choosing not to judge, the MSM doesn’t acknowledge how the extreme right is exploiting false equivalence (also called “both-siderism” and “the cult of both sides”). As an article in Rational League puts it, false equivalence “rewards the side willing to break rules and punishes the one still trying to follow them.” Sometimes MSM goes even further, as MSNOW’s Nicole Wallace noted the other day in an interview with law professor Sherrilyn Ifill: the MSM will clean up Trump’s garbled statements so that they appear more coherent than they actually are.
The Rational League article notes that, in pursuit of balance, the MSM “promises symmetry where none exists” and as a result, “allows tyranny to dress itself in the garb of democracy and go unchallenged.” Both the MSM and audiences get something from this: the MSM is able to float serenely above the fray while audiences retreat into “the safety blanket of false equivalence.”
“If both sides are bad,” Rational League points out, “then no side needs to be chosen. No side needs to be condemned. No side needs to be fought.” There’s no need to do anything about MAGA abusing immigrants, censoring books, criminalizing healthcare, or rewriting history.
Mercutio is guilty of false equivalence when he says “a plague on both your houses” although, in his defense, he is dying when he says it. Furthermore, there does not appear to be a great deal of difference between the Montagues and the Capulets (although Tybalt appears worse than any Montague). But Mercutio himself has thrown in his lot with the Montagues and has been helping inflame the rivalry. After all, if Mercutio did not insist on Romeo fighting Tybalt and then take on the duel himself, thereby prompting Romeo’s ill-fated intervention, things would have taken a less violent turn.
In a way, I suppose this makes Mercutio a good symbol of those bad faith actors in our own political wars: while he claims to be above the partisanship, he is actually profiting from it. He is certainly not the cool head that is needed to defuse the situation. Indeed, Romeo and Juliet might have found a way to realize Friar Laurence’s dream of reconciling the two families if this unstable “friend” hadn’t stirred the pot. Think of Mercutio as a media personality who feeds off of conflict and whose ratings would drop if there were a peaceful resolution.
By ignoring the threat to journalism itself, the MSM is not unlike Verona’s prince, who in the end castigates himself as well as the warring families. If he had taken the situation more seriously, he says, he wouldn’t now be surveying smoking ruins. Or to use his words,
Where be these enemies? Capulet! Montague!
See, what a scourge is laid upon your hate,
That heaven finds means to kill your joys with love.
And I for winking at your discords too
Have lost a brace of kinsmen: all are punish’d.
The MSM has been winking at our discord rather than taking a stand for democracy. At this rate, all will be punish’d.
