“Journalism of Exclusion” is a concept I developed some years ago, following the footsteps of my mentor Noam Chomsky, and his watershed critique of Manufacturing Consent. I have presented conference papers and articles on this concept, and this fall here at Brooklyn College, I have even created and taught a class on this. The primary thesis of this term is that big media, corporate for-profit media have purposefully built a model where they have all the time for biased, engineered, or trivial news, but zero time or space for news that is based on truth, or those that truly matter to the ordinary people.
By Partha Banerjee
Throughout the three or four months of campaigning on the presidential election trail here in the U.S., especially since when Joe Biden dropped out and Kamala Harris became the Democratic candidate, the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, CBS, NBC, NPR, and such major news media on one hand, and lesser but nevertheless popular media and shows such as MSNBC, The New Yorker, Jon Stewart Daily Show, Stephen Colbert Show, and such outlets have carefully (or casually) bypassed and excluded critically important news and views from public awareness. As usual, they took the ordinary voters for granted, assuming this exclusion would wish it all away.
I shall do my best to expand on this in the coming days, but briefly, I must highlight a couple of things here.
(1) The Israeli genocide turned off a large number of otherwise sure Democratic voters especially young-generation voters and Arab-American and Muslim voters: by some estimates, at least 1.5 million voters did not vote (or voted for Trump out of disgust and protest) — a factor that went against Kamala Harris.
Remember that “Trump’s 2024 raw vote margin was smaller than any popular vote winner since 2000, and the fifth-lowest since 1960” (source: PBS.org).
The grotesque Netanyahu violence on Palestinians and unthinkable slaughtering of civilians including women and children was completely downplayed by the media I have mentioned above, and even after the elections, these media never admit their deliberate, criminal exclusion of this factor swaying the election in Trump’s favor.
Just the same way, the Democratic Party establishment and leadership never came out to admit their grave errors or apologized for their failure — ever — to the American people.
(2) Focusing 24/7 on Trump’s racism, sexism, and court convictions, and thereby making it a negative propaganda against Trump (and it was very blatant, defying any gold standards for the profession of journalism), and rarely highlighting what a Kamala Harris administration would do differently from the Biden government to address the bread and butter issues of the ordinary American people — issues such as (1) massive price rise, (2) unemployment, (3) housing and health crises, (4) war and peace situation across the globe, and (5) the hyped-up “illegal immigration” and associated xenophobia.
The first few valuable weeks since Harris became the Democratic candidate, her stance was no different from Biden and the mainstream Clinton-Obama-Pelosi-Schumer-New York Times Democrats. Bernie Sanders, Ralph Nader and the progressive forces in the Democratic Party were completely bypassed and ignored by the media I have mentioned above; the comedy shows in particular never really cared for such issues as they were busy making fun and accelerating profit and rating, demonizing Trump and the far right.
Dr. Partha Banerjee, Labor Educator and Writer, Brooklyn, New York.
