The Media Can’t Handle This Bad Faith

I can still see it in my mind’s eye: My journalism professor telling impressionable college sophomores that it was irresponsible and a violation of journalistic ethics to accuse the George W. Bush administration of lying its way into the Iraq war. 

By the time Colin Powell chose to lie to the United Nations about the threat Saddam Hussein posed to the United States and other western powers, it had become painfully clear that the administration had created the case for war in Iraq from whole cloth. No one could even figure out how or when Iraq had entered the discussion following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which, ya know, didn’t involve Iraq at all. 

Questioning Bush’s case for war was tantamount to treason in those days. America’s bloodlust was raging in the months and years after September 11; the desire for retribution – most plainly seen in Toby Keith’s dumbass song – was all consuming. Blood needed to be spilled. Whose blood? It didn’t really matter. 

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There I sat, in a small University of Maryland classroom in the campus’ retro J-school building, listening to a professor I respected very much tell us that we could not and should not accuse the president and his cronies of lying unless we had incontrovertible truth showing that Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld and Condie Rice knew for a fact that there were not actually weapons of mass destruction in Hussein’s Iraq – WMDs being the central case for a full scale invasion.

Fear ruled the day and the journalistic establishment utterly failed in its role to call the powerful to account in the months leading up to the Iraq invasion. And us journalists in training, watching all of this unfold, were told in no uncertain terms that we were to cover the powerful with the overriding assumption that they were operating in gleaming good faith, that they were telling the truth as far as they knew, and that they earnestly meant what they said. Maybe it was a generational difference, but we millennials – the Greatest Generation – knew better. 

We knew the presumption of good faith politics was foolish, and in many cases, dangerous. 

‘Well Actually’ Lives On

Nothing much has changed over the 21 years since major U.S. publications were complicit in the Bush administration’s illegal invasion of a sovereign nation. Major media outlets, after four years of a habitual, manic liar in the White House, are still basing their coverage on the presumption of good-faith actors meaning what they say. 

The latest and most maddening example came this week during the Democratic National Convention. DNC organizers created a joyful, culturally relevant spectacle that made the Republican convention look like bingo night at the local VFW and demonstrated the power and effectiveness of compelling propaganda (don’t furrow your eyebrows; propaganda is essential to successful political messaging). Part of that messaging was hammering home the (correct and true) connection between Republicans and Project 2025, the fascist playbook for dismantling representative democracy, replacing the civil service with Trump worshippers, and crushing the rights of every marginalized group in the nation. 

Michigan State Senator Mallory McMorrow, during her speech at the DNC on Tuesday night, hauled a copy of the massive Project 2025 playbook onto the stage and proceeded to pan it as dangerous and weird and out of touch. The Associated Press posted about McMorrow’s speech on Threads and identified Project 2025 as a Republican playbook. The AP quickly deleted the post and replaced it with a correction. 

Elected Republicans across the country, Trump campaign officials, and Donald Trump himself have talked up Project 2025 as a blueprint for how to remake the federal government and secure permanent power. Trump has myriad connections with the Heritage Foundation weirdos who created Project 2025 and publicly praised the project before it became a household name in the worst way. As soon as Americans began connecting the dots between Trump and the far-right activists who conceived Project 2025 in the fiery depths of hell, Trump did everything he could to pretend he had never heard of the blueprint for how to create a fascist United States. He did this because Americans predictably hated the vile shit contained in Project 2025. Normal people are repulsed by conservative policies. They know that. It doesn’t stop them from trying to implement those policies though. 

I have no idea what happened in the interim between the first and second AP post. It could have been an overly-careful editor who said, well actually, Project 2025 was written by the Heritage Foundation, which is technically a nonpartisan organization that just so happens to craft all Republican policies and choose the judges who are appointed by Republican presidents. Maybe the Heritage Foundation sent a strongly worded email to the AP saying that they are responsible for the plan and Trump, who has endorsed the plan, has nothing to do with it. Maybe a Trump campaign official shat themselves when they saw McMorrow’s speech and called every news outlet on the planet to distance the campaign from the political kryptonite that is Project 2025. 

Whatever happened, the Associated Press decided to present Project 2025 as some kind of standalone plan that could be adopted by anyone. Who knows, maybe Kamala Harris would implement the project’s seedy little plans. Maybe Joe Biden would have taken up Project 2025 as his own. This is what we were meant to believe: That there is no connection between the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint and Trump’s campaign. 

This is largely because Trump and his surrogates have tried like hell over the past sixty days to distance the Big Boy from Project 2025. They even hailed the “death” of Project 2025 in a fundraising email in July. Major media outlets interpreted this as a good-faith denial of the campaign’s close, indisputable links to Heritage and its project. If Trump officials and Republican lawmakers say they have nothing to do with Project 2025, they have nothing to do with Project 2025. Who are we, as journalists, to say differently? Everyone means what they say. No one lies. No one operates in bad faith. 

But they do, and we know that. And we continue to encourage Kamala Harris and Tim Walz and the rest of the Democratic Party to ignore the pleas of mainstream media outlets to play the same old game in which the mainstream media sets up Democrats as punching bags for the right wing. It’s well past time to operate with the assumption that the right will always cloak their intentions in ways that fool mainstream outlets desperate to be seen as neutral arbiters of the truth, their feckless fact checkers whining into oblivion about minor statistical errors while the nation slides into the grips of authoritarianism. 

A media that gives everyone the benefit of the doubt and never questions the true intentions of those in power is useless in our post-truth, fragmented political and cultural era. The modern media was not designed to responsibly cover an ascendant fascist movement determined to use democracy against itself, operating within the confines of democratic politics until it gains power and undoes the system from within. Covering politics through the lens of bad faith would create a far healthier, most honest political environment in which the truth can finally draw some oxygen. 

Otherwise, we have to do stupid shit like pretending Project 2025 has no connection to the Republican Party and would not be implemented down to the letter in a second Trump administration.

Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @cdcarter13.bsky.social and on Threads at @CDCarter13.