The Media’s Memorial Day Lip Service Hurts Us All
To really honor those who served, we must protect democracy.
Every year on Memorial Day, the news is filled with reports honoring those who lost their lives while serving in the armed forces. But far too little attention is given to a pillar of what they fought for: democracy.
I saw this when I worked for news giants, and I see it even more clearly now that I fact check the news through the podcast and newsletter They Stand Corrected.
“Democracy must be defended at all costs, for democracy makes all this possible,” former President Joe Biden said in a 2021 Memorial Day speech at Arlington National Cemetery. “Democracy — that’s the soul of America, and I believe it’s a soul worth fighting for, and so do you; a soul worth dying for. Heroes who lie in eternal peace in this beautiful place, this sacred place, they believed that, too.”
Throughout his presidency, Biden spoke out on the growing threat to democracy not just at home but also worldwide. After his remarks about this in 2023, the Atlantic Council’s John E. Herbst called it a “bravura moment.”
It’s difficult to imagine President Donald Trump saying or deeply believing these things, given his history of trashing U.S. prisoners of war (“I like people who weren’t captured”) and praising authoritarian leaders. The Contrarian has covered his own authoritarian instincts.
But that doesn’t mean the dangers to democracy are only coming from the right. “Today’s political violence is occurring across the political spectrum — and there is a corresponding rise in public support for it on both the right and the left,” Robert A. Pape, director of the Chicago Project on Security and Threats, wrote in the New York Times last year. “The political goal that matters most,” he added, “is what has always been the driving force in America’s democracy: free elections — free from intimidation and interference — and the freedom of elected leaders to legally enact the people’s will.”
In September, the Center for Strategic and International Studies said 2025 marked “the first time in more than 30 years that left-wing terrorist attacks outnumber those from the violent far right.” And the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) reports that:
“Those students who are the furthest to the left have been the most accepting of violence for as long as we’ve asked the question. That includes very liberal and democratic socialist students. But a rising tide of acceptance of violence has raised all boats. Now, regardless of party or ideology, students across the board are more open to violence as a way to shut down a speaker… Violence is antithetical to free speech, and political violence is wholly incompatible with — and toxic to — democracy.”
Commitment to democracy itself “appears to be waning by generation,” the Charles F. Kettering Foundation reported. Its survey showed that “80% of adults aged 65 and older say democracy is the best form of government, compared with just 53% of those aged 18 to 29.”
It’s partly a result of young people raised on memetic warfare pouring into their phones. The recent Global Terrorism Index, from the Institute for Economics & Peace, reported on jihadist groups radicalizing adolescents toward glorification of mass violence. The effort is “designed to delegitimize democratic statehood” and erode social cohesion, the report said.
Many Americans want to work together to solve all this. To do so, we need to start with facts. I often liken our situation to a team of doctors trying to help a sick patient. If they’re looking at different data, or X-rays of different patients entirely, they can’t cooperate and build solutions.
We need trustworthy sources of truth. But we don’t have them. Instead of helping people understand reality by sharing only fact-checked information, big news agencies are serving up a steady diet of rage bait. A study found that headlines are increasingly negative and focused on click-through rates “regardless of journalistic quality.” Another found that people who spend more time consuming news are frequently more misinformed about their political opponents.
Fixing this requires a long-term effort. News agencies need to end the era of acting as stenographers for what people said. They should limit themselves to telling us what’s definitively true and how they know it. That could mean giving up short-term clicks, but in the long term it could mean winning back the many who have flocked away from following the news closely.
On Memorial Day, news agencies claim to venerate soldiers who risked, and in many cases sacrificed, their lives to protect our democracy. But these same agencies aren’t even willing to sacrifice short-term click rates to protect our democracy.
The mission is clear: Focus on truth. Demand that people on both sides of the aisle address it. Demand that they provide concrete solutions to our problems, instead of giving them “open mics” to attack each other constantly.
At this point, that’s a pie-in-the-sky hope for the legacy media. But those of us in new, independent media can take up the mantle. The mission doesn’t compare to the sacrifices of the fallen, but it’s crucial nonetheless.
Josh Levs is host of They Stand Corrected, the podcast and newsletter fact-checking the media. Find him at joshlevs.com.