Violent insurrectionists loyal to President Donald Trump storm the Capitol, Jan. 6, 2021, in Washington. (AP Photo/John Minchillo, File)

Three days before the third anniversary of one of the darkest days in American history, the Associated Press published a headline that will likely go down in history as one of the worst in modern political journalism. It read:

“One attack, two interpretations: Biden and Trump both make the Jan. 6 riot a political rallying cry”

Not to be outdone by AP, The New York Times also went full false equivalence with this gem:

“Clashing Over Jan. 6, Trump and Biden Show Reality Is at Stake in 2024”

USA Today also jumped on the bandwagon with this headline:

“Biden and Trump marked two starkly different versions of Jan. 6. Voters are divided too”

AP and USA Today did not change their outrageous headlines, but the Times did make an edit hours later, changing it to this: “Trump Signals an Election Year Full of Falsehoods on Jan. 6 and Democracy.” The correction is welcome, but why was the headline so wrong to begin with?

All three of these headlines are deeply troubling. Two interpretations? Starkly different? Reality at stake? No. No. No.

There is only one honest take on Jan. 6: It was an attempted political coup led by Donald Trump. Headlines and news stories that say otherwise are dangerously wrong — and they stray so far from the facts that they no longer function as journalism.

The press has taken “both sides” news coverage to its absurd conclusion where there are no facts, no right, no wrong. How can this be?

One reason is that the media’s operating system, to use a tech metaphor, contained a flaw the GOP has fully exploited. That flaw is in the way journalists think about balance and the need to present both sides of a story.

The GOP long ago figured out how to turn that good habit into a propaganda windfall. Muddy the waters by injecting dishonest comparisons into the political discourse then repeat it often enough that it starts to take hold in the media coverage. The lines between fact and fiction are blurred, everything’s given equal measure and the American people are confused at best, misled at worst.

We’ve seen this false equivalence scam countless times (including with Jan. 6) when Republicans endlessly compare the illegal assault on the Capitol to the mostly peaceful protest marches that followed the police killing of George Floyd. Another example is the GOP House’s effort to impeach President Joe Biden. They have no evidence, but they know that the press will cover it as if it were legitimate, and thus making the two very real impeachments of Donald Trump somehow seem just normal partisan politics. In no time, the press will be talking about Trump and Biden and impeachment in the same sentence as if they are somehow equally predicated.

This GOP strategy has been enormously successful. Just look at the polling data on the economy, crime or even on the Jan. 6 insurrection. Americans wrongly think the economy is bad and crime is rising. A growing number now also say they approve of the insurrectionists who attacked the Capitol. The GOP’s right-wing propaganda partners like Fox and Salem Radio Network definitely contributed to these misperceptions. But as we’ve seen this past week with the false equivalence headlines, the mainstream media is also to blame for too often reporting both sides of stories that only have one side.

Vanity Fair political columnist and podcaster Molly Jong-Fast nails it:

 

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Former journalist Rick Stengel points out:

“The quest for ‘balance’ is a journalistic trap. Treating both sides of an argument as equal when one side is demonstrably false is not fair or balanced, it’s just wrong. There aren’t two sides to a lie.”

University of Illinois professor Nicholas Grossman makes a good point when he says truth must be the priority:

“Journalistic neutrality, defined as never appearing to take a side in a two-party system, has trouble handling an asymmetric situation where one side is blatantly, incessantly lying about things big and small. In those circumstances, avoiding ‘bias’ means treating reality and BS as equal, and pretending well-established facts are uncertain or even unknowable, which serves liars’ interests. The easy way out is to make truth the priority, rather than forced balance. But that is apparently anathema.”

Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank adds:

“My colleagues in the media are serving as accessories to the murder of democracy. Too many journalists are caught in a mindless neutrality between democracy and its saboteurs, between fact and fiction. It’s time to take a stand.”

A Pew study found that 55% of journalists “say that every side does not always deserve equal coverage in the news.” But we’re going to need even greater buy-in to put a stop to this propaganda effort. Maybe journalists need to think more like tech companies (at least in this instance.)

Journalism has a code of ethics and professional principles that include fairness, objectivity and accuracy. But extremists have found a flaw in the practice of journalism, exploited and even weaponized it for political purposes. If a tech company is hacked, it fixes the flaw and reboots. Journalism should do the same. Now.

Jennifer Schulze is a former Chicago journalist who talks media every month on WCPT 820AM on “Live, Local & Progressive with Joan Esposito” with former Chicago Tribune editor Mark Jacob. You can follow her on Threads @jenniferschulzechi or Twitter/X @NewsJennifer.