They’re making an effort. Will it be enough?
Columbia Journalism Review’s Jon Allsop takes a look at how the media is handling Trump’s threats to democracy. He notes the flurry of articles in recent days exposing the authoritarian Trump agenda for his second term and examining his increasingly fascistic language and makes the same observation that I did earlier about the Trump campaign obviously getting nervous about it.
Back in January, as part of an article laying out the media dynamics CJR’s staff would be watching this year, I wrote that I would be interested to see how media outlets continued to center—or didn’t—threats to democracy; I’d observed some progress on this front in 2022, but also feared that last year’s midterms—which brought defeat for the most ardent Trumpian election deniers running to assume oversight of the country’s election infrastructure—could push the question down the media agenda even though the threat hadn’t dissipated. That fear has not been realized, not least due to Trump’s frightening rhetoric and multiple indictments, and work like that of the Times and The Atlantic has kept the threat visible. If anything, though, the threat is even more real than it was this time last year, and I’m not convinced that the broad sweep of political coverage has kept pace with that reality. Political media has certainly not undergone the cultural reset required to elevate the future of democracy over more trivial pursuits—to a world where that question is not the subject of special series and issues, but the baseline norm. I also wrote in January that the press serving democracy would require more than just highlighting the loudest threats to it. That subtler work, too, remains incomplete.
Even the clear-eyed coverage has not been beyond reproach: The Nation’s Joan Walsh and Chris Lehmann indicted recent reports for treating the threat of Trumpian authoritarianism as an inevitability, when it can in fact be stopped (“Preachments of authoritarian fatalism are infinitely more seductive than the painful exercise of learning from one’s mistakes,” Lehmann wrote); the media critic Dan Froomkin argued that political reporters don’t seem interested in finding out why such a vision appeals to so many Americans. And much national political coverage this year has not been clear-eyed in the first place: as I’ve tracked in this newsletter, too much of it has remained obsessed with the election horse race, continued to treat Trump as an entertainment draw (particularly in the breathless coverage of his indictments) or otherwise played into his hands (exhibit A: the CNN town hall packed with his cheering partisans), and, most fundamentally, treated him as both an election subverter and a normal candidate.
In recent weeks, I’ve observed more of the same unevenness. When Trump compared his opponents to vermin, some headlines in major outlets centered the fascist lineage of the term, but others euphemized it and the story as a whole was arguably underplayed; the same could be said of other Trump remarks that would have made the front pages a few years ago but now don’t—a function, perhaps, of what the political scientist Brian Klaas has called the “banality of crazy.” Meanwhile, a political-media narrative has coalesced that Nikki Haley, a rival for the Republican presidential nomination, is surging even though she remains miles behind Trump in the polls—a narrative, as Politico’s Jack Shafer noted, that smacks of media wishcasting for horse-race drama. Listening to TV news chatter following last week’s Republican debate—which Trump once again skipped—it sometimes felt as if we were in a normal election, without Trump’s shadow looming over it. In fact, the debate, like others before it, was a sideshow. Sign up for CJR’s daily email
I wrote in January that saving democracy would require media scrutiny of the functioning of America’s political and media systems as a whole, beyond Trump. On its face, this year brought a great deal of that—a central story line was dysfunction in Congress, and much of the coverage I saw was laudably clear-eyed about Republican responsibility for it. Often, though, that same coverage treated the drama more as personalized palace intrigue than a fundamental structural problem. Within the media industry, the debate on Fox between Florida governor Ron DeSantis and California governor Gavin Newsom—while flawed in its execution—offered a template for debating competing political visions absent an immediate horse race (DeSantis is running for president; Newsom is not), only for much of the follow-up coverage to cast the event as a confusing aberration and shove it through the mangle of horse-race analysis anyway. For a 2021 CJR issue on reimagining political coverage, I profiled Mehdi Hasan, of Peacock and MSNBC, whose explicitly pro-democracy approach and tough interviews with politicians from both sides of the aisle themselves were a template for more vigorous political journalism, albeit one rooted in Hasan’s unapologetic progressive views rather than performed neutrality. Last month, his shows were canceled. (He’ll stay at MSNBC as a guest anchor and on-air pundit.)
I continue to believe that American political journalism needs a radical reset to better serve democracy: less focus on the horse race and entertainment; more focus on policy; more cutting interviews; deeper thinking. Bad coverage of Trump is, to my mind, a function of these sorts of broader pathologies, which will take years to fix, if they’re fixable at all. But taking at least a step toward more accurate coverage of Trump and the threat he poses should be easy—increasingly, it only requires reporting what he himself is pledging to do and has already done, and describing it directly and honestly, as Goldberg, Baron, and others have. The potential reasons for downplaying his rhetoric are myriad: boredom (it’s just Trump bloviating), a failure to take it seriously (…it’s just Trump bloviating), a fear that accurate reporting will read as hysterical and biased amid a political-media culture that prizes civility, a vision of politics so gamified that members of the elite press don’t believe Trump will come after them, even as he and his allies promise just that. At this point, all these reasons are indefensible.
I can’t emphasize enough how vitally important it is that the media keeps this up. Only relentless exposure of the threat Trump brings will be able to counter the propaganda and biased narratives that have taken over pour political culture over the past year. People are drastically misinformed about the economy and the administration’s accomplishments and there’s no way in this environment to hold the Democrats responsible when half the country is sticking its fingers in its ears and singing “lalalalalala” to avoid hearing anything from politicians or political parties unless they are already on the team.
It’s up to the media to push the truth out there by repeating it over and over again. And even then, the best hope is that a percentage of swing voters and the Democratic base will come out to vote to keep the worst from happening.
