I keep coming back to this idea that the role of the news today is continually assert The Real. It is to repeat, over and over, the actual reality on the ground, in defiance of attempts to corrode public understanding of what’s *actually happening*.

It is not there to report on what candidates say. It is not there to promote their views even as it fact checks them, although that may be necessary on occasion. It is there to describe the actual reality of what’s going on in the world.

That means at the moment its job is to tell everyone in the US every day that a thousand people have died from COVID, that the US has one of the world’s worse death rates and that it is not dropping fast enough.

That means it’s there to report on widespread protests in America and to make it clear that this includes small groups of people taking advantage of the protests to commit violence, on left and right, but that Portland, Seattle, San Francisco etc are basically fine.

That means it’s there to talk about how mail-in voting works, how it is checked, and why Americans should be generally confident that it is fair and secure and shows no evidence of widespread electoral fraud.

All of these things are *reality*. They are simply *true*. But that reality is being consistently denied and attacked with fictions. YOU DO NOT NEED TO DRAW ATTENTION TO THE FICTION - OR WAIT TO REACT TO THE FICTION - IN ORDER TO DESCRIBE REALITY.