The media didn’t have to normalize and sanewash a cognitively diminished felon who ran on retribution and destruction. Or memory-hole his disastrous first term. But because they did, we are facing the most terrifying chapter in U.S. history.
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The day after former-President Donald Trump defeated Vice-President Kamala Harris, America’s national media began asking tough questions about how Trump planned to immediately deport millions of immigrants, a key campaign promise.
How exactly would Trump institute high tariffs on foreign goods without cratering the U.S. economy?
Would his stated goal of “firing woke generals” be met with any consternation within the military, or affect the national defense in any way?
Suddenly it was a full-court press to confirm every wild thing Trump had said during his endless rallies, most of which were back-page news if they made the news at all. A media narrative that had been resistant to any talk of the consequences of Trump’s plans turned on a dime to provide information that would have helped voters understand just what would be changing in a second Trump term, and for whom.
This display of hypocrisy is galling to Americans who spent months trying to raise the alarm about Trump and his plans to ban abortion, suspend the Constitution, outlaw gender-affirming care, repeal the Affordable Care Act, and jail anyone who criticized the Supreme Court he installed during his previous term.
Corporate media spent the entire election—both when President Joe Biden was running and when he ceded the campaign to VP Harris—gliding right over the GOP’s nonstop firehose of falsehood and fear on the way to nitpicking “gaffes” and dates and parsing Harris’s every move through a Republican lens.
The Los Angeles Times refused to endorse Harris for president, cloaking the decision in high-minded appeals to objectivity. The Washington Post quickly followed, along with more than three-quarters of American newspapers.
When faced with criticism, media figures defended one another instead of engaging with critics who were basically begging: Please do your jobs, please do them better, please stop promoting outright falsehoods, please be the defenders of democracy you say you are during fund-raising time. Any thoughtful critique was immediately characterized as an attack on journalism just as damaging, if not more so, than Trump’s threats to imprison and murder reporters.
The mildest affronts to the worst offenses prompted this kind of caping:
The @washingtonpost.com has lost 200,000 subscribers, @npr.org says.I understand the anger; many in the newsroom are angry, too. But how many stories won't get reported, and how many journalists will lose their jobs, because of a decision they had nothing to do with?www.npr.org/2024/10/28/n…
As angry readers who counted on the Washington Post to live up to its own dramatic “Democracy Dies in Darkness” motto canceled subscriptions, and New York Times journalists begged their own paper to stop fixating on Biden’s age and focus on the danger Trump presented, higher-ups pushed back with glib dismissals.
Post owner Jeff Bezos wrote that the paper was too cool to endorse candidates for president, essentially:
“No undecided voters in Pennsylvania are going to say, ‘I’m going with Newspaper A’s endorsement.’ None. What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence. Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one.”
Times editor Joe Kahn told staff members to just tune out what he called “left-wing” criticism:
“I don’t think they’re very interested in the hard work that everyone in this room is doing. They’re not interested in genuinely revelatory fact-based reporting that helps people navigate the most polarized issues of our time,” Kahn said of the critics. “What they’re interested in is having us be a mouthpiece for their already predetermined point of view …”
Following the election, Bezos immediately, nauseatingly, congratulated Trump on his victory. The allegedly liberal MSNBC hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski traveled to Trump’s Florida estate to pay homage to the new president. Before the election they’d warned of his fascist tendencies; afterward, afraid of retribution, they cowered.
In the Times, Kahn’s editorial columnists got to work blaming Democrats for what they’ve always blamed Democrats for: too much attention to “identity politics,” or the concerns of anyone but white, cisgender men.
“Maybe now Democrats will address working class pain,” Nick Kristof sniped, as though Harris hadn’t blanketed the Midwest networks with ads about groceries and healthcare. Kristof derided Democrats as the party of elites, ignoring that the GOP had nominated men who attended Ivies over a couple of state school graduates.
“It’s not enough for liberals to proclaim that they have better policies, because Democrats increasingly are the party of university-educated elites, and they have an unfortunate knack for coming across as remote and patronizing scolds. This is compounded by the tendency of some on the educated left to scorn religion, which to many voters is a pillar of reassurance in difficult times.”
That Democratic vice-presidential candidate and current Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz spent much of his debate time talking sincerely about the ways his Christian faith motivated him went unmentioned in Kristof’s lament.
Ross Douthat, who spent the campaign blithering about the moral hazards of abortion politics, lectured lawmakers for trying to hold Trump to account for his crimes, saying that prosecutions for trying to overthrow the government and steal classified information “made it easy for Trump to bind Republicans voters back to him with a narrative of persecution.”
And now, as the cost of Trump’s victory begins to add up—with Trump’s nominations for a white nationalist secretary of Defense, a Christian Zionist ambassador to Israel, an anti-vaxxer HHS head who thinks fluoride is bad and raw dairy is good, an attorney general under investigation for sex trafficking, all of whom he wants to push through during a Senate recess period—the national press wants us to turn to them for information about how bad it’s all going to be.
Major national media is not a home for people with any sense of self-examination. Brand columnists like Maureen Dowd and Thomas Friedman, big-name pundits like Peggy Noonan and David Brooks, are not likely to reassess their most beloved hobby horses because they turn out to be wrong on the facts. No one is going to argue them out of their rhetorical tics.
You might as well replace them all with a parrot that screeches WORKING CLASS, WORKING CLASS. At least the parrot is pretty, and can be taught new words.
Behaving like an adult in America’s political landscape requires constant re-evaluation of one’s biases in the face of growth and change. It requires, most of all, the courage to admit one’s mistakes.
We can’t keep looking to people who failed us so profoundly—twice!—to help us survive the consequences of their fecklessness. And we can’t give them a chance to fail us a third time.
Instead, we should be taking this time to build up the information systems that will accurately report on and write about the horrors to come. That media will be built by journalists and readers who share a concern for American democracy and are realistic about the consequences of election: led by women, people of color, LGBTQIA+ people, and those who recognize that authoritarian movements first attack the vulnerable.
That media will focus on voters’ concerns without accepting right-wing propaganda on its face, and will center the voices of those affected by policy, rather than the credulous culture warriors who think this is all worth it so they can say “Merry Christmas” again.