Not the odds, but the stakes

Here’s the advice Jay Rosen gave to his colleagues 17 months ago:

Let’s see how that’s going, now that Trump has spent the last 17 months making it clearer with every passing day that he intends to replace liberal democracy with an autocratic cult of personality, which will employ theocratic ethno-nationalist ideology for the personal enrichment and aggrandizement of Donald Trump, as well as that of those working toward the Donald:

Rupar’s claim that “voting for Trump is a profoundly ugly and irresponsible choice that should not be normalized” is of course true on the merits, but what is our profit-driven mass media going to to with the fact that a minimum of 45% of the electorate — 75 million voters or more — is going to make that choice? The answer is, normalize it, because as a descriptive rather than a normative matter, it is completely normal.

To fight normalizing it, you would have to talk about the stakes in a truthful way, which would make it impossible to continue the tradition of horse race/both sides coverage that is required of the media to the extent that they remain “neutral.” But remaining neutral in this circumstance is a profoundly ugly and irresponsible choice.

I’m sure a lot of these people at some earlier point in their lives played the dorm room or parlor or cocktail party game of “what would you have done at X moment of moral crisis if you had been there?” Well now they are there, and they and we know the answer.