Voting wrongs: On ballot laws, media fail journalistic ethics by Quin Hillyer
CNN’s Erin Burnett provided a necessary corrective last week on the partisan dispute about voting laws. She also pointed, perhaps unintentionally, at a larger question of journalistic ethics.
Burnett, almost alone among reporters on “establishment media” outlets, actually checked the facts and context for President Joe Biden’s demagogic speech last week in Georgia about voting laws. She pushed back on the habit of Biden and the media of “present[ing] voting rights as a morally right or morally decrepit choice, that there’s a right and there’s a wrong.” Instead, as Burnett noted in a two-minute monologue, the Georgia voting law Biden portrayed as racist voter suppression actually makes it easier to vote in numerous ways than it is in liberal New York.
This ground has been well-trodden in conservative media, but it’s almost never on liberal networks or in big print newspapers apart from the Wall Street Journal. Unlike Burnett, many reporters invariably push a narrative with Biden in the white hat and the whole Republican Party as racist black hats barely this side of the Ku Klux Klan. Again, this comes not just from people identified as opinion journalists but also supposedly “straight news” reporters. Witness CNN’s lead White House reporter Stephen Collinson, who in a piece at least labeled “analysis,” an odd thing for a straight news guy, described a “big current conservative power play — a nationwide effort by GOP-run states to make it harder to cast ballots and easier to steal elections.”
Yes, “steal.”
This was part of a larger rant in which Collinson said the Supreme Court has “gutted” voting protections for racial minorities in a “right-wing victory over democratic values,” while conservatives generally want to use “power to further rupture the traditions of democracy.” Republicans, according to a Collinson subheadline, “are more ruthless than Democrats,” and their “hypocrisy is also glaring.”
Yet CNN presents this man, who has publicly and overwhelmingly chosen a political side, as if he is a neutral reporter on the White House beat.
And CNN doesn’t deserve to be singled out in this regard. Every major establishment outlet regularly does exactly what Burnett described, presenting the liberal viewpoint on voting laws as light and conservative concerns about ballot integrity as darkness.
The key indicator of this and other national problems is the language chosen by the “reporters.” On all the liberal networks, in the New York Times and the Associated Press, and all their kin, the leftists are described in news accounts as “voting rights advocates,” while conservatives are making “efforts to limit voting access.” And only Republicans, never Democrats, are accused of trying “to assert partisan power in elections.”
Nowhere, ever, is there even a hint that honest Republicans see their own position as supportive of “voting rights,” and never is it mentioned that supposedly “restrictive” new state laws almost uniformly make voting easier, not harder, than it was as recently as 2018 when Democrats won big nationwide.
The point is not that reporters should adopt Republicans’ preferred language, which, for example, would mean regularly describing Biden’s favored legislation as “fraud-enabling” or “weaker ballot security” proposals.
But whatever happened to the ethic of a studied neutrality? By that ethic, Biden is pushing neither “voting rights” nor “voter fraud,” but “legislation changing voting laws.” Fair news reports would use nonjudgmental language like that, then concisely describe the provisions at issue and the Republican and Democratic positions on each.
As Burnett noted, there really are two reasonable sides to this story — and to so many others. This is just journalism 101. Too bad so many news outlets nowadays flunk the course.
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