Democracy in the United States is under attack, and the right-wing news media are at least partly to blame, minimizing the gravity of the Capitol Insurrection, the former president’s leading role in it, and the event’s ties to violent white supremacy. Meanwhile, the Jan. 6 Committee’s evidence mounts, the Justice Department continues its investigation, and conspiracists are convicted in trial after trial.
What does history have to teach us about the power of news media untethered to fact-based reality to disrupt democracy and serve the goals of white nationalism? For generations in the South after the Civil War, leading white newspaper publishers and editors joined forces with white political and business leaders to build violent, white supremacist political economies and social orders that lasted for generations. Black press leaders, activists all, fought back, documenting what happened as it happened and working tirelessly to promote multiracial democracy.
