Author Name: Fairness and Accuracy in Media.
(C) Fairness and Accuracy in Media - FAIR.
This unaltered story originally appeared on FAIR.org[1][2]



Politico Worries Arms Industry Endorsement of Biden Might Cause Problems — for Arms Industry

Date: 2020-08-01 18:22:09+00:00

By ['Julie Hollar']


The head of a major arms industry group—the Aerospace Industries Association that represents companies like Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon—recently announced his personal endorsement of presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden. As a news outlet, how do you report this story? Who do you interview about it?

We have Politico’s answer (6/29/20) in a piece under the headline, “The Head of the AIA Endorsed Biden for President. Will That Create Problems?”

You might read that and think, “Sure, that could create problems, since most people are against endless war and endlessly increasing budgets for the military/industrial complex.”

You’d be right (see, e.g., The Nation, 6/6/20)—but you wouldn’t be thinking like a Politico reporter.

Politico aspires to be an essential Beltway media outlet; it advertises itself as aiming to “create, inform and engage a global citizen-ry,” but also to “inform the powerful, particularly those who have a political, professional or financial stake in politics and policy.”

With that kind of starting point, perhaps it’s no surprise that the piece looks exclusively within the industry for comment, letting sources from the for-profit arms business frame the story. Thus the potential “problem,” reporter Jacqueline Feldscher explained, is what worries “defense companies and lobbyists”: that the Biden endorsement might mean the “trade group may not be able to represent their interests to the Trump administration.” This, according to her “interviews with 10 industry officials, lobbyists, staffers and experts.”

But what about those opposed to the influence of the military industry on our elections, and on our political system more broadly? For such sources, the obvious questions the endorsement raises would be about how it might influence Biden’s military policy, and perhaps whether such an endorsement would be demotivating for antiwar voters in Biden’s voter base. At the very least, some kind of reference to Biden’s military policy and political record would seem to be pertinent to the story—but no such information can be found in Feldscher’s version.

Politico might argue that such a framing would be for its “Election” news section—except there’s no such article there, nor does siloing news in that way serve any purpose but to shield the “defense” industry from voices it presumably doesn’t want to hear. And so the “powerful” people Politico seeks to inform—as well as the broader “global citizenry” it gestures toward—are left with the impression that such political endorsements have no implications worth considering outside of those directly affecting the military industry, and that the only opinions worth considering on this issue are those of members of that industry.

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[1] Url: https://fair.org/home/politico-worries-arms-industry-endorsement-of-biden-might-cause-problems-for-arms-industry/
[2] Used Under Creative Commons license BY-NC-ND 3.0. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/

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