AN EXISTENTIAL CHOICE faces America in these final days before November 3rd.

And how are the nation’s media rising to this epochal challenge?

Patchily, as always. And for far too many outlets, it’s merely a matter of taking sides, in essence taking the feckless route of simply identifying with polarized political camps and doing what the loudest-voiced extremists do – close-mindedly denying whatever realities may lie within their opponents’ world-views.

But amid all the argy-bargy, some more responsible media organizations are stepping back and providing us with a journalistically thorough, fact-based overview. They have, thank goodness, not forgotten the fundamental mandate we carry out as media workers, to function as the people’s eyes and ears, drawing attention to basic truths that otherwise might go unheeded.

One such basic truth requires close attention: the matter of just WHOSE voices will count (quite literally) as we make our forthcoming choice as a nation. In a country that supposedly practices universal suffrage – after a tortuous history away from the most egregious denials of voting-rights – how can it be that efforts to limit and suppress the people’s vote are still being perpetrated?

My home-town public radio station, WNYC, has rightly been foregrounding a program it previously formatted as a podcast and provocatively, if for me a little too vaguely, named The United States of Anxiety; it’s now being broadcast over the traditional airwaves, and in a prime-time, early evening spot. 

The host Kai Wright (right) has revealingly highlighted stubborn efforts at voter-suppression that have continued ever since the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and are still as I write being litigated in our courts-of-law. 

The pointed end of such effort is the slew of cases being pursued by attorney William Consovoy of the boutique law-firm Consovoy McCarthy, acting for the Trump Campaign and the Republican National Committee. These have ranged across moves to halt California’s mailing of ballots to all to all registered voters … to shorten the deadline for mail-in ballots in Wisconsin … and to prevent Nevada from expanding its number of in-person polling-places. And of course there are more, including cases being pressed by another, much bigger Trump-favored firm, Jones Day. Still more cases are in the pipeline heading to the US Supreme Court, in particular some troubling threats under Arizona’s state laws to make voting harder, especially for minorities.

We must remember that this is all taking place against a background of the Supreme Court having already (by a 5-4 vote) significantly weakened the Voting Rights Act itself, in the 2013 case Shelby County V. Holder. That grim landmark decision claimed that voting protections in the Act – its enforcement provisions, in essence – now have “no logical relation to the present day”. As a practical result, many voting opportunities were swiftly curtailed, in the South especially. In the wake of that judgement a thousand polling places were shuttered within five years, mainly in black-majority counties. 

Dr Carol Anderson, chair of African-American Studies at Emory University (above left), points out that today’s ongoing backlash against the Voting Rights Act is a form of “bureaucratic violence”, every bit as vicious as the beatings meted out against marchers for votes on Alabama’s Edmund Pettus Bridge. It comes in the form of “policies, judicial decisions, laws and executive orders that come down to undermine full access to our citizenship rights”. 

If we filter out the raucous and unnecessary media cacophony about ‘voter fraud’ … ‘manipulated mail ballots’ … ‘unreliable absentee voting’ and the like, one clear message resonates: forces are afoot to deny many of us our democratic voice. 

With the help of alert, alarm-raising media, these forces are to be resisted.