Strapped to a lie detector, many Americans – and a sizable chunk of President Joe Biden worshippers – might admit that the riot at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 was not an insurrection. Most recently, even the Associated Press (AP), rarely friendly to once and future chief insurrectionist Donald Trump, has used other less inflammatory expressions in its news accounts.
Here are a few January 2024 AP headlines mentioning “riot”
rather than “insurrection”:
Trump downplays Jan. 6 on the anniversary of the Capitol siege and
calls jailed rioters ‘hostages’
Former President
Donald Trump campaigned in Iowa and spent time there marking the third
anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021 assault on the U.S. [sic Capitol building].
To plead or not to plead? That is the question for hundreds of Capitol riot defendants
Hundreds of people
charged with storming the U.S. Capitol three years ago have had a powerful
incentive to plead guilty rather than go to trial.
On Jan. 6 many Republicans blamed Trump for the Capitol riot.
Now they endorse his presidential bid
Democracy scholars
warn that political parties must accept the results of fair elections, reject
violence and break ties to extremists. They say in the Trump era, Republicans
have violated all three rules.
Hundreds of convictions, but a major mystery is still unsolved 3 years
after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot
Three years after the
Capitol attack, Washington’s federal courthouse is flooded with trials, guilty
plea hearings and sentencings stemming from what is now the largest criminal
investigation in American history.
Proud Boys member who went on the run after conviction in the Jan. 6
riot gets 10 years in prison
A member of the Proud
Boys extremist group has been sentenced to 10 years in prison for his role in
the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at
the U.S. Capitol.
Headlines from December were similar. During the last couple
of months, the widely reported “insurrection” has given way to a widely
reported – and certainly more accurately reported -- “riot”.
Chiefly for political reasons, the term “insurrection” will
be bandied about in courts and among politicized prosecutors who hope see Trump
frog-marched into jail, where he will no longer be able to torment neo-progressive
Democrats. Prosecutors have not charged Trump
with insurrection. Republicans are hoping that a clarifying Supreme Court
decision will be handed down on the 14th Amendment’s use of the term
“insurrection” months before bewildered voters march to the polls on November
2024.
Not only have the insurrection hawkers changed their
verbiage, reporters across the fruited plains have abandoned the Republican
Party altogether, according to a recent survey of the former ink-stained
wretches conducted by Syracuse University titled “The American Journalist Under Attack,” soon to be issued as a book.
The Syracuse University study was based on an online survey of 1,600 U.S. journalists
in various media organizations conducted from January to April 2022.
An Executive summary extract of the survey tells us:
“More Journalists Say They Are Democrats
“Compared with 2013,
the percentage of full-time U.S. journalists who claim to be Democrats has
increased 8 percentage points in 2022 to about 36 percent, a figure higher than
the overall population percentage of 27 percent, according to a 2022 ABC
News/Washington Post national poll. This is the third highest percentage of
journalists saying they are Democrats since 1971. Journalists who said they
were Republicans continued to drop from 18 percent in 2002 and 7.1 percent in
2013 to 3.4 percent in 2022. This figure is notably lower than the percentage
of U.S. adults who identified with the Republican party (26 percent according
to the poll mentioned earlier) in 2022. About half of all journalists (51.7
percent) said they were Independents, which is about 12 percentage points above
the figure for all U.S. adults (40 percent). Overall, U.S. journalists today
are much more likely to identify themselves as Independents rather than
Democrats or Republicans—a pattern similar to 2013.”
At some point, one hopes, some objective school of
journalism will set itself the task of accounting for this stunning migration
of reporters from one party to another. The more important open question is: Do
party preferences among journalists indicate a political bias in news reporting?
Surveying the survey, The Epoch Times noted, “According
to an October Gallup poll, 39 percent of Americans did not trust the mass
media, while 29 percent held very little trust. Only 32 percent reported having
trust in the mass media.”
To what extent, then, is the extensive mistrust of the media
among the American public – nearly 70 percent -- related to the ingrained ideological
preferences of reporters? And, assuming anyone is willing to correct the
imbalance, how may the trust of the American people in its journalists be most
quickly restored?
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