False Equivalencies – How Media Gatekeepers Marginalize Alternative Voices
Parts 1-5 of 10
Part One
Bias in favor of the orthodox is frequently mistaken for ‘objectivity’. Departures from this ideological orthodoxy are themselves dismissed as ideological. – Michael Parenti
There’s nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos – Jim Hightower
Watch what we do, not what we say. – John Mitchell
In 1985, President Ronald Reagan visited a German cemetery where SS soldiers were buried. To soften the scandal, he also visited a concentration camp. In 2017, after white nationalists brutally attacked peaceful protestors in Charlottesville, Va., Trumpus claimed that there were “very fine people” on both sides.
In January 2013 NBC’s Chuck Todd addressed professional vote-counters and sales reps for voting machine companies. He ridiculed critics of electronic machines, accusing them of being paranoid to think that anyone would deliberately alter election results: “The voting machine conspiracies belong in the same category as the Trump birther garbage.” It was long before 2018, when the media, including Todd himself, would regularly accuse Trumpus of colluding with “the Russians” to “hack” election machines in 2016.
That year, the “Doonesbury” comic strip featured Austin, a “MyFacts” consultant, furnishing spurious “facts” on demand. Here, he makes fun of right-wing conspiracies:
A later panel attacks leftists:
Austin: This is MyFacts, Austin speaking.
Caller: My phone is tapped. So I can’t tell you my name...I’m looking for fresh evidence that 9/11 was a government conspiracy.
Austin: I’m sorry sir, but I’m showing our truther line has been discontinued. Can I interest you in another elaborate hoax?
Caller: Who paid you off? It was Cheney, wasn’t it? Just nod.
Austin: How about Bin Laden. We carry irrefutable proof he’s still alive.
Doonesbury makes fun of everyone. In 2009, talk-show host Mark Slackmeyer interviewed a college professor:
Professor: It’s remarkable, Mark...Americans believe in many things that can’t be verified...almost half of us believe in ghosts and 40% in alien abductions. And that availability to alternative reality is reflected in conspiracy theory. From truthism, which holds that Bush was behind 9/11, to Birthism. And, of course, we still have many legacy fringe groups like JFK grassy knollers, etc.
Slackmeyer: Professor, is there any counter to these powerful theorists?
Professor: Not really, Mark. Only the reasonists.
Slackmeyer: Reasonists?
Professor: They believe in an evidence-based world, something called rationalism. But it’s a tiny group, not so influential.
But look at what he’s doing. By denouncing common left-wing opinions along with right-wing lunatics, Doonesbury was subtly instructing readers that they all were unreliable. He was doing the same thing from a liberal perspective that Todd was doing.
This is called false equivalency, instructing Americans that any notions outside mainstream interpretations of reality – no matter how popular – are equally worthless. Here’s the logic:
We define A as silly.
Silly is unacceptable.
We associate B with A.
Therefore, B is silly and unacceptable.
This kind of FE (I’ll abbreviate) is utilized by privileged groups and people who were, as the saying goes, “born on third base, and think they’d hit a triple.”
FEs tell us more about the subject than about the object. They reinforce our sense of identity. We know who we are because are not like either crazy extreme and can laugh at them both.
FEs told honestly and innocently often imply cognitive dissonance:
A – Trumpus is bad.
B – We progressives dislike Trumpus.
C – Therefore, we are good, and we feel good about ourselves.
D – Warmonger John McCain voted with Trumpus 83% of the time.
E – McCain and Trumpus disliked each other.
F – Since Trumpus is bad, McCain was good.
G –To convince ourselves of F, we must ignore D, through cognitive dissonance.
H – If McCain was good, he was like us, so we feel better about ourselves.
FEs are related to the “middle ground fallacy”, the assertion that a compromise between two opposing positions must be the truth, and to false dichotomies. From a radical perspective, the U.S. empire relies on dichotomies like Democrats vs Republicans to keep everyone arguing over domestic issues which don’t affect its functioning overseas.
Countless websites and books offer narratives that marginalize those who question the dominant paradigms of the culture. They typically do this by offering lists of “loony”, “fringe” theories from the perspective of the “rational center.” Most of these gatekeepers lump all the questioners together. Then with patronizing, pseudo-psychology, they explore the unconscious motivations of “conspiracy theorists”, be they fascists or anarchists, Christians or Pagans, oligarchs or street people.
Radical Middle – The Politics We Need Now, by Mark Satin, was praised by a former adviser to Ronald Reagan. It received a blurb from Ted Halstead, author of The Radical Center: The Future of American Politics, who called it “an antidote to the Al Frankens and Ann Coulters who dominate contemporary political discourse.” Can you see the FE?
Such styles are well within one of two American traditions of gatekeeping, the purpose of which is to shore up the cracks in the myth of American Innocence. One is to lie outright about American history. Here’s the logic:
A is a story that makes us feel good about ourselves.
There is no other story, no “B”.
We feel better about ourselves.
Noam Chomsky, however, argued:
The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum — even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking happening, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.
Some call that spectrum of acceptable opinion and discourse the “Overton window”.
The gatekeepers of culture – traditionally, the priesthood – regularly determine just how wide it will be, and how far outside it other opinions are allowed to flourish. These days, the Overton Window is moving subtly but constantly to the right.
During the Ukraine war, journalists have wondered why the Biden administration, despite its massive arms shipments, wasn’t confronting the Russians in direct combat. Fortunately, they had no effect, but such calls for hot war between nuclear superpowers pushed the Overton window, leaving people more open to imagining extreme nuclear brinkmanship.
In America, which has always lacked an official church, it begins in academia, where most prospective gatekeepers receive their training. The process of initiation into higher education (and the careers it enables) guarantees that those admitted within the pale are already thinking within very narrow boundaries. Chomsky calls this “a system of imposed ignorance” in which the most highly educated people are the most highly indoctrinated:
A good education instills in you the intuitive comprehension – it becomes unconscious and reflexive – that you just don’t think certain things…that are threatening to power interests.
Polls confirm that the higher one’s education, the more one is likely to unquestioningly support America’s wars – and the reverse is also true. Despite the public stereotypes of rebellious students during the Viet Nam years, resistance to the draft varied inversely with income and educational levels. The poorer and less educated you were, the more likely you were to resist.
The other tradition is to ridicule political positions further out on the spectrum (left or right) to deprive them of legitimacy and, by contrast, manufacture the legitimacy of the “center.” Here’s the logic:
A is too far out in one direction. It may be admirable, but it’s unrealistic.
B is too far in the other direction – and is mendacious and hateful.
C lies in between them.
A and B should negotiate until they compromise at C.
Therefore, C is legitimate, practical, realistic, moral and workable.
This, “realists” tell us, is how things get accomplished in the real world. Especially since the upheavals of the 1960s, countless news aggregators have extolled the innate wisdom of the great middle and the need for idealists to find common ground with their adversaries. It’s often very good advice. The pro-business “New Democrat Coalition” positions itself as “a solutions oriented coalition seeking to bridge the gap between left and right by challenging outmoded partisan approaches to governing”. But it holds the moderate position in the most conservative Democratic Party since the 1970s, one in which only ten Congresspersons refuse AIPAC money.
I’m not talking about people who see good in both sides of a debate, who play by the same rules and share visions of the common good. I’m talking about spokespersons for the corporate-consumerist, business-as-usual, consensual reality of American empire. I’m talking about people whose jobs depend on their knowing that allowing actual alternative ideas into public discourse would threaten that consensus. People who want us to forget about radical change because some of its adherents and some of their proposals are as laughably, preposterously unacceptable as are those on the other extreme.
Part Two – Conspiracies
(Condoleezza) Rice stared at me. I had received information so sensitive that I had an obligation to...never discuss the matter with anyone...I secretly met with another national news organization...I told a senior editor that I had a major story that the NYT had refused to run under pressure from the White House...He replied that their publication would never run a piece if the White House objected on national security grounds. – James Risen
We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the public believes is false. – William J. Casey
A newspaper is a private enterprise, owing nothing whatever to the public...the property of the owner who is selling a manufactured product at his own risk. – Wall Street Journal, 1925
If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged. – Noam Chomsky
Middle-class people used to hear the stories that tell us who we are by reading the reasonable, well-written giants of the press: the NYT, the WAPO, the New Yorker, the NYRB, etc, and from the reassuring voices of the networks, public television and NPR. Social media has replaced them, but most online news purveyors, especially those claiming the “reasonable center”, still function as gatekeepers to the commonly acknowledged sense of acceptable discourse. Here are two of my articles discussing media gatekeepers.
A prime way to marginalize legitimate criticism of those in power to the realm of the truly illegitimate is to speak of “conspiracy theories”. The intent is insidious, even if sincere. Hearing it repeated often enough, people hold to that center and reaffirm their innocence.
For decades, as Yeats wrote, things have been falling apart; the center cannot hold. But business depends on political and cultural stability and shared basic assumptions. The fact that so many journalists and commentators have taken on the role of confirming them is one of the major reasons why so many no longer trust them. Charles Eisenstein writes:
Our institutions of knowledge production have betrayed public trust repeatedly...Now, many people won’t believe them even when they tell the truth...The loss of trust in science, journalism, and government reflects their long corruption: their arrogance and elitism, their alliance with corporate interests, and their institutionalized suppression of dissent…a political culture opaque to the ordinary citizen, a world of secrecy, image, PR, spin, optics, talking points, perception management, narrative management, and information warfare. No wonder people suspect that there is another reality operating behind the curtains.
Jonathan Cook argues that most of us have been gravitating toward one of two major camps, the “trusters” and the “dissenters”, and these groups have
…starkly different conceptions of what their societies are and where they need to head. In a very real sense, these two camps no longer speak the same language. There has been a rupture, and they can find no common ground.
Trumpus and the right wing have understood that white rage is addictive, whether from a Christian or a racist perspective, that people on the edges make alliances with other people on other edges. Well before COVID, many libertarian New Age adherents formed bizarre coalitions with right-wingers over their shared vaccine skepticism, as I write in “Breathing Together: QAnon and the New Age”.
Meanwhile, academia trains prospective gatekeepers how to marginalize everyone outside the pale. To see how the History profession is one of our primary gatekeeping institutions, read my series Old White Men: Historians as the Gatekeepers of American Myth. Chomsky discusses what actually makes mainstream media “mainstream.”
The educational system is very highly geared to rewarding conformity and obedience… which ends up with people who really honestly (they aren’t lying) internalize the beliefs and attitudes of the power system...At places like Harvard, most of what goes on is teaching manners; how to behave like the upper classes, how to think the right thoughts, and so on…there are certain things it’s not proper to say and there are certain thoughts that are not proper to have. That is the socialization role of elite institutions and if you don’t adapt to that, you’re usually out.
When you critique the media…They say, quite correctly, “nobody ever tells me what to write. I write anything I like...” which is true, but the point is that they wouldn’t be there unless they had already demonstrated that nobody has to tell them what to write…
Studies consistently show that – when polled on specific issues such as abortion, defense spending and progressive taxation – great majorities of us are well to the left of both parties. So liberal politicians, knowing both the weakness of their positions and the sources of their financial support, fall back on FE’s, which require far less skill (or ethics) than it would take to formulate real arguments.
“Raving” will be our working modifier for those outside the pale. Consider the mythic implications. While Apollo is the Greek god of fine arts, beauty, truth and reasonable discourse, Dionysus, the archetypal “Other”, is the ecstatic and irrational shadow of American innocence. For 400 years, white Americans have repressed their Dionysian nature and projected it onto convenient scapegoats. Gatekeepers know that if they can tar radicals with the Dionysian label – raving – the middle class will be terrified of the implications and the FEs will follow.
To deliberately equate 9-11 skeptics (by calling them “truthers”) or those who question the conventional narratives of the Kennedy assassinations with outright racists and paranoids who label Barack Obama as a Muslim socialist, or to cruelly claim that survivors of school shootings are “crisis actors” is not simply to delegitimize both; it is to imply that both are equally irrational and (in mythic terms) Dionysian. “We,” by contrast, are safely, acceptably Apollonian. Again, in an uncertain world, we know who we are. The logic:
We laugh at Trumpus and MAGA paranoia.
We repeatedly hear of progressives in the same sentences.
We laugh at progressives.
We know who we are.
As I first wrote this in 2018, Alex Jones told millions that an approaching hurricane had been split in two by an energy beam shot from Antarctica, possibly by John Kerry. So, what should we think – what do the gatekeepers want us to think – when they mention craziness like this in the same sentences as parents who note that 97% of western Europeans drink non-fluoridated water?
Often, the major gatekeepers don’t bother with FEs, because liberals still cling to a naïve faith in traditional media and American exceptionalism. Simple attacks will usually do. For example, the U.S. fomented a 2014 military coup in Ukraine. But the NYT smeared journalist Ben Norton (without asking for a rebuttal), calling his assertion of that fact a “conspiracy theory” – even though the Times itself had reported the same evidence.
This is the process of identity-formation in what Joseph Campbell called our “demythologized world”. We are taught to know who we are because we “know” that we are not those on the margins. I imagine that in other times and places people knew who they were because they had endured the process of initiation. They had made the terrifying transition from innocence to experience. And because of this, they were nobles. They knew who they were, not who they were not. This is why the mythology of kingship retains its power in the collective unconscious, and why modern culture has reduced it to celebrity worship.
The word “noble” comes from the same root as gnosis, or knowledge. A noble understands that, as the Hindu sage Ramana Maharshi said, there are no others.
Part Three – Elections
We are grateful to the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time Magazine…whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost 40 years. – David Rockefeller
Gatekeepers, whether academics or media puppets, delight in the power to subtly determine boundaries, to let everyone know exactly who is “beyond the pale.” The word “pale” refers to the pointed wooden poles that once were used in fortifications. Anyone who threatened the innocent community within the pale risked being impaled on the sharp stakes of irrefutable “argument” and ridicule.
Gatekeepers know what is expected of them, and they know each other very well. Here’s one of them (NYT book reviewer Jacob Heilbrunn) praising another one, Jonathan Kay in 2011:
Among the Truthers is a remarkable book…Some of Kay’s most illuminating passages center not on what conspiracy theorists believe – even to dignify it with the word “theory” grants them more legitimacy than they deserve – but on why they are attracted to such tedious rubbish in the first place. He divides them into different camps, including the “cranks” and the “firebrands.” Cranks are often reacting to male midlife crises – combating conspiracies, Kay says, offers a new sense of mission. Cranks, he adds, are frequently math teachers, computer scientists or investigative journalists.
Notice how a NYT book reviewer (gatekeeping’s top level) subtly allows his subject two freedoms. First, to psychologize people, reducing them men in midlife crises. Second, to include “investigative journalists” among the “cranks”.
Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels allegedly said, “If you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth.” The state, in its ongoing effort to shore up broken timbers in the pale of American innocence, has long worked directly with the media. By now, we all should know about government lies and media collusion around Iraq, Afghanistan, Gaza and Iran.
But long before, in “Operation Mockingbird,” the CIA infiltrated major news organizations, planted stories, thwarted criticism of the Warren Commission Report and labeled its critics as the original “conspiracy theorists.” Of the hundreds of journalists who have colluded with the CIA, wrote Carl Bernstein almost 30 years ago, “By far the most valuable of these associations, according to CIA officials, have been with the NYT, CBS and Time.”
We’d best follow the money (Cui bono? Who profits?) when we hear arguments about the equivalency of access to the airwaves. Even the NYT admitted that long before the Citizen’s United Supreme Court decision, the Tea Party (precursor to MAGA) was created by the Koch brothers. The “populist uprising” that “spontaneously” developed in 2009, eventually propelling Trumpus into the White House was nothing without its corporate subsidies.
At this level of influence and media consolidation, they can simply buy or create entire gatekeeping institutions and “think tanks”. Rupert Murdoch owned The Wall Street Journal; CIA contractor Jeff Bezos owns the WAPO; NBC, formerly owned by General Electric, is now owned by Comcast. Disney owns ABC. CBS, previously owned by Westinghouse, is now owned by hyper-Zionist Larry Ellison.
But some still use the silliest of false equivalencies to argue that “left” and “right” have equal access to media. Psychologist Jonathan Haidt naively claims that the “ascendancy” of Trumpus on the right and the “great awokening” of the left were equally encouraged by social media:
In the Democratic Party, the struggle between the progressive wing and the more moderate factions is open and ongoing, and often, the moderates win. The problem is that the left controls the commanding heights of the culture: universities, news organizations…
While there never was any equivalency, it is pointless to blame the rich for maintaining control. We mythologists should be far more interested in why so many educated Americans support movements that have never served their interests.
To argue that people who must organize bake sales to raise money for public education about global warming are “equivalent” to slick media barrages is to admit the power of authentic ideas. It is to admit the power of the people whose respect they can only buy but never earn. It is to admit that the myth of American Innocence, though very old, is also very unstable.
I wrote essay series from a mythological perspective on the elections of 2016, 2020 and 2024. In 2016, FEs most certainly played a major role.
What did the media want in an election in which Hillary Clinton was the huge favorite? They wanted business, and close elections are good for business. CBS chairman Les Moonves’ appraised Trumpus: “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”
From that perspective, it made sense to emphasize equivalences between Clinton and Trumpus. Many, of course, didn’t need to be reminded that the DNC had done its own job of marginalizing Bernie Sanders, and that Clinton was highly unpopular among progressives, many of whom refused to hold their noses and vote for the lesser of two evils.
What turned the tide in the last weeks of 2016? Russians? Voter suppression? Hacking of voting machines? The media got the close election it wanted, through FEs. The great irony is that the media that Trumpus would come to attack as “fake” had actually created him, built up his image, diminished Clinton, propelled him into office and proceeded to nourish that image through many more months of FE’s. The NYT even implied that Clinton was equally responsible for violence at Trumpus rallies.
When Lester Holt, moderating the presidential debates, spoke of “healing the divide” between the races, he was implying another equivalency. After the election, the Times’ primary gatekeeper David Brooks attacked “political correctness,” casually equating racists and those who fight them:
It’s not only racists who reduce people to a single identity. These days it’s the anti-racists, too…Bias incidents on both sides have been reported. A student walking near a campus was threatened with being lit on fire because she wore a hijab. Other students were accused of being racist for supporting Trump…
To the NYT fact-checkers, accusing Trumpers as racist was equivalent to setting a woman on fire. Eric Alterman responded that “the media’s addiction to false equivalencies has left them vulnerable to Trump”:
The thinking boils down to this: “We’re running an article about Trump supporters’ violence against immigrants, people of color, Muslims and Jews, so shouldn’t we also say something mean about liberals too?
The perspective of the reasonable center (occupied by moderate Democrats and traditional Republicans) was that Trump and Sanders were two sides of the same coin:
NPR: 5 Ways Sanders and Trump are More Alike Than You Think
The Atlantic: What Trump and Sanders Have in Common
Huffington Post: Sanders and Trump’s Campaigns Are Similar
The Guardian: Sanders and Trump Look Like Saviors
And this whopper from the WAPO:
Three years later, the gatekeepers again demonized Sanders with FEs. Julie Hollar wrote:
The Post‘s executive editor Martin Baron retorted that Sanders was spouting a “conspiracy theory,” insisting that “Jeff Bezos allows our newsroom to operate with full independence…” NPR accused Sanders of “echoing the president’s language,” and CNN accused him of using Trump’s “playbook”… (However) We could start with the 16 negative stories the Post ran in 16 hours…the Post “factchecked” Sanders’ claim that the world’s six wealthiest people are worth as much as half the global population...one of those six is Bezos...
Some conspiracies are right out there in plain sight. In 2012, under Obama, the U.S. repealed its own propaganda ban, allowing government-made news to be broadcast directly to Americans.
Part Four: Left = Right
I don’t say that you’re self-censoring. I’m sure you believe everything you’re saying...if you believed something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you are sitting. – Noam Chomsky
Trumpus bellowing about fake news implies that the media lies about him and his policies. Of course, all media (they mediate) offer selective versions of the news. The divide is not between biased journalists and unbiased journalists; it’s between journalists who are honest and transparent about their biases and journalists who are not.
Newspapers have always been partisan. Only three generations ago, every major city in the U.S. (and still, in most European and Asian countries) had several daily papers, with some proudly socialist and others being the “papers of record” that fed carefully edited opinion masquerading as news to middle class readers. But even working-class papers could be nativist, racist and pro-war. With recent media consolidation – and increased cooperation with the national state – the differences have diminished further.
In this sense, American media have been “fake” for 150 years, consistently playing two alternating and contradictory roles. On the one hand, they terrorize us about the latest threats (fear of communism shifting smoothly to Islamophobia precisely when the U.S.S.R. collapsed, then back to the Russians and Chinese), each of them deliberately designed to expand the military-industrial state. On the other, they assure us with Disneyesque sweetness and advertising that everything is fine, that the consumer paradise of our dreams is always right around the corner. This is long-term crazy-making, or schizogenetic, behavior.
With few exceptions, the historical evidence is overwhelming: belligerence is highly profitable. Beginning with the 1846 invasion of Mexico, media gatekeepers utilizing narratives of American good intentions have regularly pushed the nation toward intervention. But we’re seeing the collapse of this myth in our time, and the intended effects of FEs. So we return to academia.
In 2017, Harvard University published a list of “fake” online publications. Well before the advent of AI slop – but soon after Clinton’s defeat – it was based on recommendations from a right-wing group called “PropOrNot” that condemned 200 websites as Russian-controlled. The “Harvard Index” established a new normal regarding what students should not trust or even read. The list includes hundreds of authors and dozens of news organizations which are now categorized as unreliable conspiracy mongers.
Students were told that they are incapable of forming their own conclusions, that Mother Harvard, like the cultural guardians of McCarthyism, like the Catholic Church, doesn’t want them exposed to alternative thinking. It was one of the most egregious examples of false equivalency, listing legitimate investigative researchers in the same breathless list as Alex Jones and other misogynistic, racist, anti-immigrant and outright Nazi publications. It went out to hundreds of schools with the message that nothing to the right or left of the major media should be trusted.
The WAPO and other corporate media then cited this index repeatedly in a perfectly circular logic: one of the fact-checking sources that Harvard used was the WAPO.
FEs turn up in all kinds of public discourses, such as “competing victimhood.” A privileged group argues that another group shouldn’t demand special privileges because, they, the first group, had also been treated badly. For example, since large numbers of Irish arrived in the colonies as indentured servants, MAGA supporters invoke the “myth of Irish slavery”, claiming an “equality of suffering”.
The trivial example evokes the more important one of electoral fraud. Trumpus’ ludicrous claim that three-five million illegal voters cost him the Presidency in 2020 continues to be a smokescreen for Republican voter suppression and feeds directly into the bizarre notion that his supporters, despite their 2024 victory, still consider themselves victims of the deep state. However, by July of 2018, even ABC News reported that Republican-run states had purged 16 million voters in the three years prior to the 2016 election.
Some six million others, a third of them Black, have been disenfranchised as ex-felons. This fact, along with blatant voter suppression and hacking of voting machines (not by Russians but by Republicans in at least 20 states) far outweighs any other factors in the contemporary political situation. This may be the most egregious use of FEs – and the most hidden.
Similarly, centrists equated the origin and popularity of the two pre-Trumpus “populist” movements: Occupy and the Tea Party, typically ignoring the unequal treatment the two movements received from law enforcement, the funding disparities and the fact that the Tea Party had Fox, its own TV network. In 2019, during the George Floyd demonstrations, Gregory Shupak wrote:
…the qualitative differences between antifa and the uber-right could hardly be more stark. The latter preclude debate by dehumanizing the majority of people who aren’t white, male and straight, and by enacting violence…Yet when the Proud Boys rallied in Portland, Oregon...in an effort to encourage the government to curb left-wing dissent by classifying antifa as an “organization of terror” – mainstream media repeatedly suggested that these outfits are analogous to antifa.
This FE style has a long pedigree going back to World War One, when the media equated the threats of fascism and communism to marginalize leftists in trade unions. The garbled language continued for generations as Americans internalized a warped distinction between “communism” (an economic term) and “democracy” (a political term), rather than between communism and capitalism.
Subsets of FE’s include the FBI’s invention of fake terror plots and mobilization of agents provocateurs who convert peaceful, demonstrations into violent riots that justify police intervention.
Trumpus doesn’t engage much in FEs, because the media do it for him, and because he continues to manipulate a deliberately indefinable, populist extreme that pretends to attack the establishment. The media also appear unaware that his genocidal foreign policies hardly differ from those of Biden, Clinton and Obama.
Of course, liberals often claim that progressives lump Democrats and Republicans together in our own false equivalencies. Read Oliver Kornetzke’s lengthy response to that charge. For a much shorter one, simply consider whether it matters to a child in Gaza whether the bunker-buster bombs come from Trumpus or from Genocide Joe.
Trumpus did utilize FE’s after Charlottesville’s “Unite the Right” march. His notorious claim that there were “good people” on both sides clearly invited further abuses. Here’s the FE logic:
Large-scale, non-violent protests occur.
White supremacists attack peaceful marchers.
Police respond, attacking everyone.
Media highlight the violence.
All protestors are violent.
People shouldn’t protest.
But to spread such nonsense, he needed help from the “alt-left,” a term that leftists have never used to describe themselves. FOX created it, but liberal media ran with it, writes Adam Johnson:
…the “alt-left” term morphed into a catch-all smear employed by Clinton partisans... pundits presumably thought equating leftists with Nazis (the logical implication of the “alt” prefix) was an easy way to position themselves on the Reasonable Liberal Left. What they did instead was provide fodder for anyone on the right, looking to trivialize the threat of an emerging neo-Nazism, to “both sides” the problem out of existence.
Meanwhile, the NYT’s coverage of free speech on campus focused on the plight of conservative students by a margin of 7-to-1.
Part Five: Race, Blue Lives, Truthers – and Palestine
In America the majority erects a formidable barrier around thought. Within its limits, a writer is free but woe to him who dares to go beyond. – Alexis de Tocqueville
Do we really want to compare the devastation of systemic racism on racialized people to the discomfort of white guilt? – Robin DiAngelo
Whether they are uttered by FOX-TV clowns or by mainstream pundits, FE’s typically function to marginalize progressive alternatives when actual counterarguments would be unconvincing. Here’s the logic:
A is acceptable.
B is progressive, non-violent.
C is hateful, violent.
Gatekeepers ignore B.
Public opinion forces gatekeepers to acknowledge B.
Gatekeepers then attack B.
Attacks are ineffective, so gatekeepers equate B with C.
Here’s another one:
Russia invades Ukraine; Putin bad.
Trumpus praises Putin; Trumpus bad.
We hate Trumpus.
Progressives explain how the U.S. provoked Russia.
Progressives = Trumpus = Putin.
Progressives must be deplatformed.
“Blue lives Matter”
Even though police were more likely to kill themselves than be killed by criminals, and 2017 was one of the safest in decades for police, it was the third year in a row in which they killed over 1,000 Americans.
So how do we explain that in the first two months of that year, 14 states introduced 32 “Blue Lives Matter” bills that give police hate crime protection except by understanding FEs that equate non-violent, racial justice activists with violent reactionaries? Or that the House passed the “Protect and Serve Act of 2018,” mandating harsher penalties for people who commit violence against police?
The Senate went further, making police a “protected class” after the FBI invented a new category of victim (with a new FE: “Black Identity Extremists”), suggesting that nonviolent anti-racists, like actual racists, are terrorists. Now, an unarmed black teenager and a heavily armed white cop are “equally” potential victims. And when enough of the public becomes normalized to the idea that white supremacists and anti-fascists are two faces of the same coin, it becomes easier for police to cooperate with the former and pursue their actual agenda of persecuting the latter.
In 2019, the FBI, ranking Black “extremists” as a bigger threat than Al Queda, targeted Ferguson activists instead of white supremacists, while CBS News labeled Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez the “Sarah Palin of the Left”.
FEs have stalked the conversation about racial justice for decades, from the old distractor that “Africans enslaved each other, so therefore American slavery wasn’t so bad” to claims that “most Blacks are killed by other Blacks” to Trumpus’ crusade against “white genocide” in South Africa.
Truthers
What about the “9-11 Truthers,” (they don’t use that term, nor, do vaccination sceptics call themselves “anti-vaxxers”), whom gatekeepers had equated with the looniest of Obama haters (Kenya, socialist, Muslim, etc) for years? The issue here is not about veracity. It’s about narrative control.
In 2014, billboards appeared in eleven cities referring to Building Seven, the third building that fell on 9/11. It had not been hit by the planes, and critics alleged that it had been destroyed by controlled demolition.
The event was too big to ignore, so Time reported it with a typical headline: “Sept. 11 ‘Truthers’ Mark Anniversary.” Thirteen years after the event, it now seemed permissible for the article to be surprisingly objective and free of the usual ridicule. Elizabeth Woodworth writes:
…20 stories in major papers have covered the campaign…As time passes our memories of 9/11 become less painful and more open to public discussion. There is increasing skepticism about the credibility of 9/11 as the foundation for the continuing global war on terror…seven congressmen are calling for the release of a secret 2002 congressional study that implicates Saudi Arabia in financing the alleged hijackers.
Four years later, the venerable gatekeeper Newsweek, with surprising objectivity, reviewed a new book that claimed, “CIA and Saudi Arabia Conspired to keep 9/11 details secret.”
I’m not trying to provoke a fight about the truth, but to examine how the gatekeepers plant their flags in the “moderate center” and how they convince us to stop thinking – or at least until the passage of time softens the import of certain events.
Then we have the question of who is “fair and balanced”. Of course, most journals of opinion have always claimed to offer opposing points of view. This is what the free press is supposed to be about. In fact, beginning in 1949, the FCC’s Fairness Doctrine required this of all broadcasters. Ronald Reagan revoked it in 1987 and it was removed from the Federal Register in 2011 by Obama.
Now neither Fox (the house organ of the Republicans) nor MSNBC (for the Democrats) must maintain even a pretense of balance. But when we look at “serious” journals that do claim to do so, we again find common use of FEs. Was it a search for “fairness” that made The Atlantic and CNN give space and airtime to outright racists in 2018? These are examples of the tightening of the “Overton Window”. When war criminals and white supremacists occupy the middle, anyone to the left of them is automatically banished.
Palestine
For decades, media coverage of Palestine has been a litany of the worst of FEs, such as the false claim that equates anti-Zionists with anti-Semites and the “dueling narratives” story lamenting the impossibility of long-term solutions because there is “violence on both sides”.
To claim equivalence between the degrees of power and the levels of violence committed is to ignore the U.N.’s definition that collective punishment – precisely what Israel regularly inflicted upon Gaza and the West Bank for decades before 10/7/23 – is a war crime, or the massive assistance Israel receives from the U.S.
The NYT also regularly makes the false equivalence of anti-Zionists with white nationalists and provides space for Israeli officials to call BDS activists “enemy soldiers” and compare them to Nazis. Partially because of the unrelenting barrage of FEs, the FBI has relied on right-wing blacklists to surveil and harass anti-Zionists, and Congress has passed an “Anti-Semitism Awareness Act”.
On campuses, Jewish “sensitivity” leads to claims that anti-Zionist speech is hate speech and “microaggressions” justify banning Palestinian groups. But there is little coverage of the huge discrepancy in funding, or on the fact that many academics have been fired and/or blacklisted for their pro-Palestinian positions, including Norman Finkelstein and Steven Salaita.
And since the media can choose what to emphasize and whom to equalize, they can also police the voices who don’t police themselves, as when CNN fired Marc Lamont Hill for defending Palestinian rights. Others who call for “empathy”, as Yoav Litvin writes, deploy colonizing language, while their “Liberal Zionist revisionist narrative equates settler colonialist oppressors who hold all levers of power, with their Indigenous Palestinian victims”.
Ramzy Baroud asserts that when liberals endorse the language of empire through FEs, they neutralize their own position:
They suggest, intentionally or not, a form of moral equivalence: the US-Israeli war on Iran is wrong, but Iran is also guilty; the genocide in Gaza is horrific, but Palestinians are also to blame. The result is not balance – it is paralysis...Compare this to the moral clarity of those who support war. Their position is never qualified. It is assertive, absolute, and often built on exaggeration or outright falsehoods, yet it carries conviction because it does not undermine itself...(liberals) acknowledge Israeli crimes but feel compelled to condemn Palestinian “terrorism”...as if Palestinian resistance exists outside the historical and political reality that produced it. They speak of “extremists on both sides,” as though figures like Itamar Ben-Gvir and a Palestinian fighter in Gaza can be meaningfully compared.
The term “extremist” is fundamental to the vocabulary of false equivalency. Extremists are, by definition, outside the pale of acceptable behavior – except for those who serve the empire. In the 1940s the U.S. labeled Menachem Begin an extremist – until he became Israel’s president in the 1980s.
For more on the decades of pro-Israel propaganda, see my series, “The Myth of Israeli Innocence”. Despite the gatekeeping and the FE’s, Americans are now far to the left of both major parties. However, in May 2026, the Democrats released their autopsy of their failed 2024 campaign – without mentioning Gaza at all.
Read Parts 6-10 here.