Georgetown historian rails against the media for treating Republicans like they’re 'normal candidates'
A visiting professor at Georgetown who teaches 20th-century history of democracy is calling out the media for treating many of the Republican candidates as if they're nothing more than business as usual. In fact, he argues, they aren't.
"It’s a massive problem that much of the established media will keep pretending these Republican candidates are serious people because they feel the need to uphold the myth that there are two roughly equivalent sides/parties engaged in a 'normal' political contest," wrote Thomas Zimmer, who also writes for The Guardian.
Over the past week, several Republican candidates have appeared at typical debates saying atypical things. Georgia Senate candidate Herschel Walker, for example, flashed an honorary sheriff's badge and told the crowd that he was an actual cop, a false claim he has made for years.
Zimmer argues that when the two teams are normal, it's easy to treat an election as if it's business as usual but one of the sides isn't normal anymore.
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"Since mainstream journalism is predicated on the idea that politics is a game between two teams that are essentially the same and journalists aspire to 'neutrality,' which they define as equidistance from either side, whatever comes from the GOP has to be elevated to credibility," he wrote.
"Stating clearly what the Republican Party has become would run counter to mainstream journalism’s eternal quest for 'neutrality' and 'balanced' coverage," Zimmer argued. "And so the media continues to cover these GOP candidates as if they were 'normal' politicians with respectable ideas."
For example, it's one thing for a Republican candidate to oppose abortion after 34 weeks, but now Texas Republicans like Gov. Greg Abbott are opposing abortion at all costs, leading to pregnant women having miscarriages to needlessly risk their lives. In Ohio, children who have been raped are being forced to travel to other states because Republicans believe they should be forced to carry the baby.
"It’s one of the most bizarre features of the American political discourse that it demands we pretend these are serious political actors instead of acknowledging that one party is elevating a terrifying number of extremists and utterly unqualified charlatans to positions of power," Zimmer said. "In a healthy political culture, there would be a consensus that people like Herschel Walker shouldn’t be anywhere near positions of political influence, and the party that elevates them anyway would have to pay a hefty political price. In the U.S., that’s evidently not the case."
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