In the Deputy Editor’s Notebook | A rejection of the times… and the media

If we listen closely, we can hear in the vote of November 5 in the United States the expression of rejection. The rejection of inflation and the difficult economic situation, of the elite and institutions, of urban insecurity and uncontrolled immigration, of government and powerless bureaucratic structures, of environmental constraints and “wokism”.

In short, there are in this vote various combined rejections, in a way, which make it a rejection of the era, and of those who shape it. Which we, the media, let’s be honest.

It is a conservative and populist vote (see the capsule at the end of the text), a backlash, a backlash to use the title of the latest book by journalist Fareed Zakaria, Age of Revolutions : Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present.

It is a return of the pendulum after years spent making rapid progress on issues disconnected from daily life and the concerns of a good number of citizens, who have the impression that they are being forgotten, that they are being judged, that they are being judged. misunderstands.

There is of course a good deal of perception and feeling involved in this, which explains why many elected officials, experts and the media so easily dismiss this type of comment. They respond with numbers and graphs that show GDP is increasing, immigration is under control, crime is down, and those who claim otherwise are ignorant. The serious issues are elsewhere, they send as a message: questions of identity, trans people, drag, non-gendered toilets.

The sentence is deliberately caricatured. But it nevertheless summarizes the impression of certain voters, as evidenced by the choice of the Republican advertisement most broadcast during the campaign: the one where we see Kamala Harris, in an interview, maintaining that the State has the duty to pay for changing the sex of prisoners.

This message resonated, whether we liked it or not. We can contradict it, judge it, worry about it, be sorry about it. But we can also listen, try to understand, learn lessons.

This is what we media must do: hold out our microphone, rather than turning our backs on Trump voters.

This is why I feel uneasy when I see the Guardian from London officially announce that he is leaving the social network X at this time.

When half the population of a country chooses a candidate who hates the media so much, who accuses journalists of being the “enemies of the people,” is it a good idea to turn away even more?

Should the media’s response to the echo chambers that are created thanks to social networks like X be to move away from them so that they become even more hermetic?

Should the response to the Trumpist vote, to Brexit, to the yellow vests, to the freedom convoy be to distance oneself even further from these circles? I don’t think so.

There are of course hundreds of good reasons to leave X. I completely understand the journalists who desert this “gigantic open sewer”, as Rima Elkouri wrote on Thursday. But the media as an institution have a responsibility to counter disinformation, to be present on networks where the need for quality content is glaring, at least when they have 600 million users.

And more broadly, I believe that the Guardian made a mistake in announcing to the whole Earth that it was abandoning X the day after the appointment of Elon Musk, its owner, within the Trump administration.

He then launches a message which can be interpreted as a political positioning. He gives the appearance of attacking the American president and his inner circle, even more than the social network he rejects.

However, major media like the Guardian – et The Press – have, in my eyes, a duty of reserve to respect, a political neutrality to display. And more broadly, they have the responsibility to reduce the polarization between institutions and citizens who do not trust them, not to accelerate it, as the Guardian.

This is all the more worrying since this is also what the presidential candidates have done in recent months. See how Donald Trump and Kamala Harris snubbed the mainstream media more than usual. See how they preferred to interact with complacent influencers and podcast hosts. And see, above all, how they each chose to address their respective ideological group: Trump with Joe Rogan and Theo Von, Harris with Alex Cooper.

And to this, the Guardian responds by removing its content and logo from a popular social network? By further reinforcing the impression of “them” and “us”?

This is a mistake, in my opinion. The mission of the mainstream media is not to oppose the vote of 50% of a country’s population, its representative, or its social networks. It’s more about reporting on all this, sending journalists into the field to provide information. It is also about verifying, analyzing, publishing a range of opinions and, of course, naming untruths, lies, excesses and slippages. And it is, finally, to disseminate their factual and rigorous content to as many people as possible.

This is what we chose to do The Press… while asking the numerous and relevant questions raised by the result of November 5.

Write to François Cardinal