Dan Froomkin says there’s no other way to see MSM behavior
I think he‘s right:
The obvious answer to the question in the headline is no. Reporters and editors at establishment news organizations are mostly reality-based, generally anti-totalitarian, quite fond of the First Amendment, reasonably tolerant — and almost without exception are not white supremacist Christian nationalists.
So I am quite certain that as a purely personal or political matter, the vast majority don’t support Donald Trump or his return to power.
But professionally?
Reading and watching how they cover Trump and the Republican Party, it’s getting harder and harder to make the case that the most influential people in our top newsrooms aren’t hankering for his return. What else explains their behavior?
Consider the evidence.
The leaders and top journalists from our major news organization do not seem alarmed.
They treat his official entry into the race as some combination of foregone conclusion and parlor game, rather than as a grave danger.
Trump-channeler Maggie Haberman declared in February 2021 that “Mr. Trump is serious at the moment about running for president a third time in 2024.” Jonathan Allen of NBC wrote in September: “The real question isn’t so much when he’ll start campaigning, but whether he will stop.” The Washington Post has chronicled “a string of thinly veiled hints about his political plans.”
After New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu acknowledged publicly what almost no other elected Republican will – that Trump is “fucking crazy” – Haberman tweeted huffily: “Trump is running, barring a significant change, and all the private laughing at him + lack of standing up to him by other Rs isn’t going to change that.”
They are eagerly awaiting his formal announcement.
When these reporters write about Trump these days, they generally pause to note the centrality of the Big Lie. But they don’t treat him as manifestly unfit for public office and a threat to American democracy. This is what I call the normalization of the profoundly abnormal.
So, for instance, when Shane Goldmacher and Haberman write about his control over the Republican Party, they’ll make note of “Mr. Trump’s false claims of fraud” and explain how his lie has become “an article of faith, and even a litmus test that he is seeking to impose on the 2022 primaries.” But they don’t explain how disqualifying that should be.
Here’s how they present Trump’s downside:
Mr. Trump is also deeply divisive, unpopular among the broader electorate and under investigation for his business practices and his interference with election officials in Fulton County, Ga. He remains the same politician whose White House oversaw four years of devastating Republican losses, including of the House and Senate. And while a scattered few Republicans publicly warn about yoking the party to him, more fret in private about the consequences.
That would be a pretty tough contextualizing paragraph for any other presidential candidate. But for Trump? It’s euphemistic to the point of inaccuracy. This man is a provably hateful, vindictive, lying, cheating, stealing insurrectionist who inspires slavish devotion from a white nationalist base and sycophancy from craven Republican leaders. His even further accelerating authoritarian tendencies — combined with his party’s full-on assault on voting rights and refusal to honor election results – directly threaten key constitutional protections and rights that have defined this country since its founding. It couldn’t be more clear that in a second term, he would ignore even the few rules he adhered to last time. The federal bureaucracy would be purged of expertise and competence, all of government would be turned to serve his whims and fortunes. To the extent that the U.S. remains the leader of the free world, it would cease to be.
This is not hard to support with evidence. Just in the past few weeks, the man who tried to steal an election said his only regret is that he didn’t personally set siege to the Capitol.
I suspect that reporters and editors at our leading news organizations assume that most readers already realize how dangerously unhinged Trump is — and that readers who don’t accept that will be turned off if reporters are blunt about it.
But it has to be said. It can’t just be assumed.
Not saying is enabling. So why don’t they say it?
You can read the rest at the link in which he provides ample evidence for the following:
They still crave access to Trump and still don’t confront him when they get it.
They can’t seem to keep in mind for more than a few hours what their investigative reporter colleagues – or they themselves — have dug up.
This one is especially infuriating. He offers up a number of examples, but this one is really galling considering the right’s relentless flogging of the “Hunter Biden laptop” story:
Every few days, some fantastic, grotesque, fatal-to-anyone-but-Trump “holy shit” news item comes out about something Trump has done.
Investigative reporters have been doing amazing work. Just last week, the New York Times ran a jaw-dropper by David D. Kirkpatrick and Kate Kelly about Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman paying off Jared Kushner to the tune of a $2 billion investment fund.
And needless to say the ongoing revelations about the attempted coup should make Trump a total pariah. But the press reports on them like they are the weather. Here today, gone tomorrow.
And more:
They’re constantly assuring us that Republicans really aren’t that extremist.
They express great admiration for winning Republican tactics.
Covering a rational president is so much less rewarding.
As he points out:
For White House reporters in particular, covering Trump was exhilarating and easy.
Trump would say something crazy, they would write it down, they’d stick in a paragraph way down about how “Democrats disagree,” their stories would led their newscasts, websites and front pages, and they became TV stars talking about it.
Over and over again.
The Biden White House is normal, filled with people doing the real work of government and it’s boring for them. So:
To make things exciting, they trot out GOP talking points and push for kinetic violence. They ignore the good news for Joe Biden, and focus almost exclusively on the bad. (No one made that case better than the late Eric Boehlert, whose humanity and voice are sorely missed.)
The result is a voting public that thinks the booming economy is a disaster and wants to put a “check” on Biden by putting Republicans back in power.
As I wrote a few weeks back, “When the public thinks up is down, it’s time to rethink coverage“. Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan said the same thing the other day.
So what else could it be, besides wanting Trump to win?
One of the first pieces I wrote upon launching Press Watch was: “It would be insane for America to re-elect Trump. Why can’t journalists say that?”
I still don’t really understand why not.
I can think of a variety of explanations other than that the media wants Trump to win.
One is the media business’s hankering for a close race. Close races are good for journalism, from both a coverage and revenue standpoint. (Then again, most political reporters have already glibly declared that the Republicans will win big in the 2022 congressional elections. That one’s case closed, as far as they’re concerned.)
Political reporters are also suckers for spectacle and drama and conflict, so maybe they’re drawn to Trump like they’re drawn to a train wreck, but that doesn’t mean they’re actually rooting for him.
And the easiest thing for a political reporter to do is split the difference between both parties. They substitute triangulation for analysis. With the Republican Party having gone to such an extreme, even the “middle ground” is effectively right wing.
Or it could just be a coincidence that so many of the failings of modern political journalism end up mimicking a preference for chaos.
One thing we know for sure is that Trump was very good for the news industry’s bottom lines. In 2021, weekday prime-time viewership dropped 38 percent at CNN, 34 percent at Fox News and 25 percent at MSNBC, according to Nielsen. The number of unique visitors to Politico dropped by nearly 50 percent between October 2020 and 2021, according to Comscore. For the Washington Post, it was a 28 percent decline; for the New York Times, 15 percent.
As the Washington Post’s Paul Farhi wrote just a few months into the Biden presidency, “Trump predicted news ratings would ‘tank if I’m not there.’ He wasn’t wrong.”
By comparison, news executives were giddy about Trump, right from the get-to. In 2015, CBS’s then-CEO Les Moonves famously said of the Trump circus that it “may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS, that’s all I got to say.” He added: ” Go Donald! Keep getting out there!”
(I’m leaving the issue of media ownership for another time. All the major broadcast networks and cable networks are owned by huge conglomerates, and the Washington Post is owned by the richest man in the world.)
I suspect it’s cowardice, rather than avarice. They’re afraid that if they sound the alarm, they’ll be written off as biased and untrustworthy. (Surprise! They already are!) And on a personal basis, they don’t want to have to admit that they were wrong for so long, and should have sounded the alarm ages ago. (And not just about Trump, mind you.)
But regardless of their egos, ringing that alarm even this late is a moral imperative.
Maybe one of them will crack, and the others will follow. Or maybe not.
Are there telltale signs of change? I don’t see any.
So no, I don’t think the mainstream media really wants Trump to win again. But I have a hard time explaining its behavior in any other way.
There is no other explanation. It’s an emotional thing, not a rational thing. Biden is boring and covering his government is hard work. Trump was like watching a sporting event (or a circus.) It was fun. They want that back, even if they can’t admit it to themselves.