Why won’t the media call fascists ‘fascists’?

Vague descriptions help the people trying to overthrow our democracy.

On Nov. 21, 1922, a foreign politician made his first appearance in the New York Times.

“New Popular Idol Rises in Bavaria,” read the headline over a story about a “reactionary” named Adolf Hitler who was drawing adoring crowds with fiery denunciations of Jews.

The Times assured us, though, that “several reliable, well-informed sources confirmed the idea that Hitler’s anti-Semitism was not so genuine or violent as it sounded.”

Oh, OK. No worries.

I was reminded of that embarrassing episode when the New York Times wrote last week about Vice President JD Vance’s support for Germany’s far-right AfD party. Showing that the Times has learned nothing in the last century, its headline read:

A “party that downplays Nazis”? What a weird description. The Times seemed to be referring to AfD’s call for Germany to stop performing penance for its genocidal past. If that’s all AfD was doing, that would be bad enough. But that is not all that they’re doing.

Recognizing its national guilt from World War II and the Holocaust, Germany bans Nazi phrases and symbols. That’s why AfD leader Björn Höcke has been fined twice for using the forbidden Nazi slogan “Alles für Deutschland” (Everything for Germany), which was etched on the daggers of Nazi brownshirts. AfD is conducting a rehab campaign for Nazism, with the party’s Maximilian Krah saying not all SS men “were necessarily criminals.”

The AfD follows the fascist playbook of picking out marginalized groups and orchestrating hate campaigns against them. Targets include immigrants, especially Muslims. AfD leader Alexander Gauland said in 2017 that socialist politician Aydan Özoguz, who was born in Germany to Turkish immigrant parents, should be “disposed of” in Turkey.

AfD leader Höcke, who hopes to gain significant ground in national elections this coming weekend, is so extreme that a judge once ruled he could be called a fascist without fear of a defamation lawsuit because that was a “value judgment based on facts.”

So, no, the AfD isn’t just “downplaying Nazis” – it’s an actual neo-Nazi party, and U.S. media should say so. But, unfortunately, many American media seem unwilling to make value judgments based on facts.

They fail to sound the appropriate alarms about the global fascist movement being championed by the Trump regime. After all, U.S. co-president Elon Musk has declared that “only the AfD can save Germany.” And an AfD leader recently expressed solidarity with Trump by declaring at a rally: “Make Germany great again!”

The Trump-and-Musk regime is promoting similar authoritarian movements in other countries, and it’s taking a wrecking ball to our own democracy every day, breaking laws with impunity. Last weekend Trump posted a chilling slogan: “He who saves his country does not violate any Law.”

The rise of fascism is the most significant development in our nation’s modern history. That’s obvious. Yet New York Times Executive Editor Joe Kahn said last May that it wasn’t the Times’ main concern: “It’s our job to cover the full range of issues that people have. At the moment, democracy is one of them. But it’s not the top.”

This refusal to recognize the gravity of the situation is reflected in major media’s avoidance of the words “fascist” or “authoritarian” to describe the current White House, which is both fascist and authoritarian.

The media use phrases like these to describe Trumpism:

• “Boundary-testing agenda” (Washington Post)

• “Defying the norms” (PBS)

• “Swiftly breaching the traditional boundaries of presidential power” (Associated Press)

• “Impervious to traditional rules, norms and even laws” (Axios)

• “Testing the limits of presidential power” (ABC)

• “He expects in this second term to dictate his preferences in spheres of national life that go far beyond the normal boundaries observed by presidents” (New York Times)

In other words … FASCIST and AUTHORITARIAN. Yet none of these stories used either of those words. This is not a nitpick. Political descriptions are important to help people focus and understand. When the media avoid the f-word and the a-word, they’re hiding the truth from the public. It’s as if they refused to call a hurricane a “hurricane” and instead called it a weather event with excessive moisture.

Why this coddling of fascists? Is it cluelessness? Timidity? Or worse?

People on social media increasingly ask me whether the media are “in the tank” for Trump. Some of them are. Fox, for example, is an active participant in the assault on democracy. The people who work there are traitors. And some corporate owners of media are neutral on the question of democracy. Whatever system allows them to turn a profit is fine with them.

Then there are people who are in the media because it’s a way to get famous, to make connections with the rich and powerful. It’s an ego thing, and they don’t want to mess it up by confronting vindictive, clout-heavy liars like Trump and Musk. You don’t get exclusive interviews that way. Is that being “in the tank” for Trump? Well, in a way, yes.

That said, some in the media are guilty only of cluelessness. Like a lot of the general public, they are unfamiliar with dictatorships and therefore prone to minimize the threat.

A lot of journalists seem to be “fighting the last war.” In military history, that describes the mistake of clinging to old tactics that might have worked in the last war but are outmoded in the current one. For example, the invention of the Minié ball in 1849 increased the effective range of riflemen, but a dozen years later, Civil War generals went ahead with disastrous frontal assaults anyway.

In today’s America, the news industry is fighting the last war. When reporters cast everything as a partisan battle of Republicans vs. Democrats rather than a choice between democracy and dictatorship, they’re fighting the last war. When they give Republicans and Democrats “equal time” without regard for whether the assertions are true or not, they’re failing to adjust to the right wing’s increasingly sophisticated information warfare. They’re fighting the last war. And the public is losing.

You would think a decade would be enough time for the media to adjust to a dramatically changed political landscape, but many mainstream journalists haven’t. If honest history survives these difficult times, this era will be known for the rise of American fascism. Calling it a “boundary-testing agenda” doesn’t make it less fascist – it just makes the media look more out of touch.

After all, if you haven’t figured out that what’s happening now is fascism, what kind of journalist are you?

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