Margaret Sullivan writes about the latest pile-on of Joe Biden by the mainstream press (the new book by Jake Tapper and Biden nemesis Alex Thompson) and points out that all the sanctimonious mea culpa’s about how they “failed” to properly destroy him before the election conveniently miss the real story.
At what point will there be a general acknowledgment and some serious self-scrutiny about the way big media failed to adequately convey what would happen if Trump were elected again?
“I have a hard time watching journalists high-five each other over books on [the White House] covering up for Biden,” wrote the political scientist and scholar Norman Ornstein, one of the sanest commentators about politics in recent years.
It’s “a diversion from their own deep culpability in Trump’s election”.
What would be the elements of this reckoning?
Here’s Ornstein again on what the mainstream press wrought with their hubris and their failures.
“False equivalence, normalizing the abnormal, treating Trump as no real danger were the norm, not the exception.”
From 2015 – when Trump first declared his candidacy for president – right through the 2024 election, the press in general didn’t get across the reality.
When the New York Times infamously set the tone in 2016 by vastly overplaying the supposedly shocking scandal of Hillary Clinton’s use of a personal email server, that was only the beginning. But it was a consequential beginning since, even in our fragmented and polarized media system, the Times was then, and is now, still extremely influential.
I’ve long believed that Times editors were so dedicated to proving that they could be tough on Candidate Clinton – convinced she would be the president and that Trump was no real threat – that they went way overboard.
Was the fault for electing Trump entirely theirs or even the fault of the mainstream media in general led by them? Of course not. But they played a destructive role, one that has never been adequately acknowledged.
Then, during Trump’s first term – and especially during the 2024 campaign – the mainstream press constantly normalized the would-be autocrat.
The ever-so-apt term “sanewashing” was born to describe what was going on, and the media’s role. Talk about a cover-up. Trump’s rallies were exercises in lunacy, as he spun tales about sharks and Hannibal Lecter, rambling for hours.
But the coverage seldom came close to getting across the reality. Instead, we’d hear descriptions about his “freewheeling” style or “brash” approach.skip past newsletter promotion
As for the autocracy in waiting, there were excellent stories about the blueprint for his second term known as Project 2025, but it was far from obvious whether news leaders stopped to ask if voters really understood the stakes. Now we see the Trump administration quite literally enacting that same Project 2025 that he claimed he barely knew anything about.
Horserace coverage prevailed, day after day. And then, when Biden’s decline became impossible to ignore – after that earth-shattering presidential debate last June – news organizations changed their tune.
For weeks, there was nothing but “hey, Biden is old” coverage, once again failing to put the emphasis where it belonged: on the dangers of a Trump presidency.
Heads of news organizations and reporters themselves are fond of distancing themselves from their real mission at times like these: to communicate the reality of an election’s actual stakes. Instead, they talk in lofty terms of merely covering the news, as if their daily decisions about the volume, choice and tone of coverage didn’t matter.
Thank you! This is the reckoning that needs to take place. The ongoing navel gazing by the Democrats, particularly this attack on Biden for running again, elides what is the biggest question: what makes them think any other Democrat could have beaten Trump under the circumstances? After all, Harris didn’t. What, is it inevitable that a white male candidates would have beaten Trump?
I submit that for all the reasons Sullivan lays out, the media’s thumb on the scale sure made it less likely. As she writes, ” they ought to have done so in defense of democracy, the rule of law and human decency. The failure to do so is playing out in our shattered world, and at a frightening pace.”
There’s more at the link worth reading.
By the way, I trace Biden’s problems not to his alleged decline but to reporters like Jake Tapper’s coverage of the Afghanistan withdrawal. It was clear they were itching to prove their “unbiased” bone fides by behaving as if the inevitably ugly spectacle of pulling out could have been done cleanly and easily. He knew better. But the pile-on was too inviting and that was when they changed the trajectory of the coverage. The idea that they went easy on Biden is ridiculous.