“What we do need is for the press to continue, and intensify, the function of bearing witness. Whatever is coming, people need to know about it. We need to mark the actions and abuses, for the present and for posterity. That means not glossing over, not pretending everything is normal, not letting traditional mores or some vestigial respect for the office get in the way of reporting on what is happening.” — The Philadelphia Inquirer
In the eyes of the coming administration, any criticism of the Glorious Supreme Leader is treason and will be punished. That shouldn’t stop the media from doing its job, but “shouldn’t” isn’t always how it works. We have the sanewashing of RFK to avoid saying TFG’s appointing a completely unfit crackpot. Even before the election we had stories painting Trump’s deportation plan for immigrants as a way to make housing more affordable. Republicans have been masters at working the refs — waaah, this story says bad things about us, why are you so biased!!! — for years. Now some of the media are rewarding them for lying by hand-waving and not fact-checking.
Part of this is the longstanding press view that both sides are just as bad and the truth lies in the middle, with the objective media. Which means both sides are just as good, which means they can’t say Trump is unfit for office. Part of it is just bias: lots of stories about Biden’s age while Trump’s goes unmentioned. Part of it, as I’ve mentioned before, is Republican branding: when they do horrible things it’s normal, when Democrats do it it’s a betrayal of principles. I remember one editor during the debates saying that yes, they’d rated Trump on a curve because what else can you do — hold him to normal standards?
On top of which, as Republicans — either through loyalty to Glorious Supreme Leader or through existence in the Fox/Newsmax bubble — are immune to scandal where Democrats aren’t. “The watchdog only bites what the watchdog can get its teeth into. The press still knows how to destroy the president of Harvard; the president of Harvard still exists in the same established social order. Chris Rufo, the controversy-manufacturing entrepreneur, knows the words and gestures that would send the press after the president of Harvard. No one knows how to send the press after Chris Rufo.“
Then again, as Jamelle Bouie says, the press can make the Hunter Biden pardon into a front-page scandal, it can cover and report on genuine Republican scandals instead of assuming they no longer matter (again, the sliding scale). See this summing-up.
There’s the fear of the government attacking them if they speak up; there’s also self-interest. Jeff Bezos refuses to endorse Harris in the WaPo; now Bezos, facing calls to unionize Amazon, wants to end the National Labor Relations Board. He’d never get that from Harris; he might get it from Trump. Though I still have my WaPo subscription because they can still deliver stories like this.
There’s also the easy way language can mislead us. As Empty Wheel says, Trump suing the media is not retribution: “Trump’s authoritarian project depends on convincing masses of people that accurate descriptions about him, or equal application of the law to him, or good faith if flawed efforts to measure the number of Iowans who prefer someone else to be president harm not just him, but them, his followers. Trump’s authoritarian project depends on convincing people that because he can’t withstand truthful descriptions, his followers must oppose the truth as a grievous harm, a crime.”
And there’s the perennial problem that if it bleeds it leads, adjusted for the modern age: “We have created a world where the most outrageous characters, memes, stories and movements are given the most power to shape bespoke communities by our social media platforms & their engagement algorithms.”
What the LA Times publisher wants with a new AI system to supposedly spot bias in stories, I don’t know. Could be fear, could be self-interest. Twenty years ago, rich people buying papers — rich enough they didn’t have to nickel and dime the media into uselessness — seemed like a possible solution to print journalism’s financial woes. Not so much. I do agree with Fred Clark that the real bias is often whether news is Good News or Bad News and for whom.
There’s still lots of good journalism out there. ProPublica, for example, shows how to do it fairly. The 19th. Lots of local journalism — I think The Local Reporter qualifies, though I’m obviously biased — though our reporting is correspondingly limited in scope. And much as I criticize WaPo and NYT, they’re far from pure Pravda — they still do some amazing work (not enough to balance the scales in my eyes, though).
The long and the short of it: the odds of the media bringing down Trump with a Watergate-level exposé is slim to none. That doesn’t mean they’re not useful. As Henry Farrell says, “the key to keeping sane for the next four years is going to be paying zero attention to the daily outrage circus, while focusing relentlessly on the actual substance of what is happening, what can be done now and how to build for what comes after.”
I think that’s good advice for me personally. Constantly listening to Trump whine about how he’s the bestest widdle baby in the world and nobody must criticize him for anything ever will be insufferable — but whining won’t get anyone killed. A lot of his actions and decisions will.
