Jan. 6 must be remembered by all, and truth must be told; AP story on vote-fraud investigation is available to weeklies

By Al Cross
Director and Professor, Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, University of Kentucky

If you edit or publish a newspaper in the U.S., please think about your Jan. 6 edition (the publication date for many if not most weeklies). Will it have anything about what happened last Jan. 6?

Please allow me, a former editor and manager of rural weeklies, to suggest that it should.

Yes, the national news media will be full of remembrances and recriminations what happened at the U.S. Capitol that day, so you may think you don't need to say anything. I think you do.

The riot, assault or insurrection (take your pick), an attempt to disrupt or even prevent the certification of the presidential election clearly and fairly won by Joe Biden, was driven by then-President Trump's lie that the election was stolen from him. I say "lie" because there is plenty of evidence that Trump knew the truth but chose to repudiate it, on the longshot hope that he could remain in office.

Think about that. The president of our country violated his oath to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." We can argue about how close he came to his self-coup, but there's no doubt he stood by and let the deadly violence continue for hours, and the evidence indicates that he played an active role in fostering it. Some Republicans voted to impeach and convict him for it.

All this deserves comment from you because millions of Americans, and much of your audience, believe The Big Lie. National polls show that 70 to 75 percent of Republicans believe Biden won the election through fraud. Such a belief undermines faith in our democratic system and lends support to those who like Trump's unconstitutional, undemocratic, authoritarian approach. In one poll, 40% of Republicans said they could imagine circumstances that justify violence against the government.

Many of these people are your readers. Their minds are unlikely to be changed by any piece of writing, but false beliefs that are not confronted with the facts will continue to fester.

Each newspaper's audience is unique, so I wouldn't presume to tell you how to write such an editorial or column. If you don't want to express an opinion, you could republish the story that The Associated Press published last month, after its months-long investigation "of every potential case of voter fraud in the six battleground states disputed by former President Donald Trump has found fewer than 475 — a number that would have made no difference in the 2020 presidential election."

The AP doesn't usually allow non-subscribers to republish its material, but it is doing so in this case. All the wire service asks is that you include links to the story and to the sidebar that gives details of AP's investigations in each state. The request for publication of links does not apply to PDF versions of print editions. And if you use the story, please tell us; the AP folks would like to know.