Podcast / The Time of Monsters / Nov 24, 2024

Don’t Believe the Election Myths

On this episode of The Time of Monsters, Branko Marcetic on media narratives that misrepresent what happened.

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Don’t Believe the Election Myths | The Time of Monsters with Jeet Heer
byThe Nation Magazine

On this episode of The Time of Monsters, Jeet Heer is joined by Branko Marcetic to discuss media narratives that misrepresent what happened.

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Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris pauses while speaking during a campaign rally at the Rawhide Event Center on October 10, 2024, in Chandler, Arizona.

Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris pauses while speaking during a campaign rally at the Rawhide Event Center on October 10, 2024, in Chandler, Arizona.

(Brandon Bell / Getty Images)

The one good thing about defeat is you can learn some lessons. But what if the lessons you learn are the wrong ones? In the wake of Donald Trump winning the presidential election, pundits and Democratic strategists have already been drawing lessons.

Unfortunately, as Branko Marcetic documents in a recent piece in Jacobin, many of these lessons are in fact myths, designed to exculpate those responsible for the electoral disaster while scapegoating groups that have much less power. On this episode of The Time of Monsters, I was very happy to talk to Branko about both election myths and the mythmakers who spin them.

The Nation Podcasts
The Nation Podcasts

Here's where to find podcasts from The Nation. Political talk without the boring parts, featuring the writers, activists and artists who shape the news, from a progressive perspective.

Factchecking Won’t Save Democracy | The Time of Monsters with Jeet Heer
byThe Nation Magazine

For this week's edition of The Time of Monsters podcast, we're posting a talk that host Jeet Heer gave at Carleton University earlier this November on how the crisis of democracy is related to the crisis of journalism. In the talk, I argue that we are living in an age where the salient political divide is not so much left/right as system/antisytem. Liberals have tried to fight antisystem politicians like Donald Trump by doubling down on factchecking.

But as I argue, this strategy is deeply flawed since voters who respond to antisystem arguments are also skeptical of institutions that claim to check facts. The talk tries to lay out a strategy for engaging with antisystem anger in a more productive way.

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Jeet Heer

Jeet Heer is a national affairs correspondent for The Nation and host of the weekly Nation podcast, The Time of Monsters. He also pens the monthly column “Morbid Symptoms.” The author of In Love with Art: Francoise Mouly’s Adventures in Comics with Art Spiegelman (2013) and Sweet Lechery: Reviews, Essays and Profiles (2014), Heer has written for numerous publications, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The American Prospect, The GuardianThe New Republic, and The Boston Globe.

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