Every week until the election we’ll bring you Good News, Bad News, a column comparing our pro-democracy election coverage guidelines with ongoing election coverage to highlight which newsrooms are standing up for democracy and which are sleepwalking us towards a dictatorship. We hope this inspires you to make more informed choices about where you get your news and strengthens your resolve to join us in advocating for the pro-democracy media Americans need. And now…
THE GOOD NEWS
A Movement Is Forming That Rejects Low-Quality Mainstream Political Coverage
It’s a groundswell that is long overdue. More and more reasoned and respected voices are denouncing mainstream media’s dangerous normalization of the extremist MAGA faction, its fascist leader, and the existential threats they pose to American democracy. This movement has even coined a new term (or at least a new definition for it that specifically applies to Trump), sanewashing, the act of making a politician’s incoherent or extreme remarks seem more rational and less threatening.
The executives at our largest newsrooms can see and hear the righteous flak but, to avoid engaging in good faith, purposefully misinterpret valid criticisms.
New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger recently wrote, “I disagree with those who have suggested that the risk Trump poses to the free press is so high that news organizations such as mine should cast aside neutrality and directly oppose his reelection.”
As I pointed out elsewhere, no one wants Sulzberger’s paper to cast aside neutrality. Everyone wants the Times to stop casting aside neutrality. The Times is not neutral when it regularly sanewashes Trump’s ramblings and extremism. In fact, that is effectively pro-Trump.
On Wednesday, Trump posted this to his Truth Social account:
Will this be sanewashed?
Media executives like A.G. Sulzberger would have us believe that refusing to frequently and prominently expose a man who stands in opposition to democracy is a high-minded pursuit called “independent journalism.” They argue that accurately describing the danger of a stochastic terrorist who lies about fake conspiracies to get non-citizens to vote for his opponent would be to cast aside neutrality. People are getting fed up with the obtuseness of it all. Democracy does, indeed, die in darkness.
Below is a continuation of our compilation from August, surveying the righteous criticism we at MAD have been seeing in the last couple of weeks. As ever, thank you to my MAD colleagues who do such great research. Some of these excerpts are long. That’s because they’re exceptional. Please do yourself a favor and read them all anyway. Then let your voice be heard too.
Sulzberger is always raging against critics who, he claims, want him to skew and censor his paper’s reporting (FAIR.org, 5/19/23). The Times must instead be steadfastly “neutral,” he claims. But those very political coverage decisions that media outlets make on a daily basis make it impossible for the outlets to be neutral in the way Sulzberger imagines.
Neutrality could mean, as he suggests, independent or free from the influence of the powerful in our society. This is possible—if difficult—for media outlets to achieve. Yet the Times, like all corporate media, doesn’t even try to do this.
Instead, the Times seems to take neutrality as not appearing to take sides, which in practice means finding similar faults among both parties, or not appearing overly critical of one party or the other (FAIR.org, 1/26/24). This strategy didn’t work particularly well when Republicans and Democrats played by the same set of rules, as both parties took the same anti-equality, pro-oligarchy positions on many issues.
But it’s particularly ill-suited to the current moment, when Republicans have discarded any notion that facts, truth or democracy have any meaning. If one team ceases to play by any rules, should the ref continue to try to call roughly similar numbers of violations on each side in order to appear unbiased? It would obviously be absurd and unfair. But that’s Sulzberger’s notion of “neutrality.”
It would be brave for a media outlet like the Times to take a stand and oppose Trump’s candidacy. But it would make a big difference if the paper would even do the bare minimum of calling fouls fairly rather than evenly.
This “sanewashing” of Trump’s statements isn’t just poor journalism; it’s a form of misinformation that poses a threat to democracy. By continually reframing Trump’s incoherent and often dangerous rhetoric as conventional political discourse, major news outlets are failing in their duty to inform the public and are instead providing cover for increasingly erratic behavior from a former—and potentially future—president.
The consequences of this journalistic malpractice extend far beyond misleading headlines. By laundering Trump’s words in this fashion, the media is actively participating in the erosion of our shared reality. When major news outlets consistently present a polished version of Trump’s statements, they create an alternate narrative that exists alongside the unfiltered truth available on social media and in unedited footage.
In the early months of 2024, and certainly after his disastrous debate performance in late June, the New York Times was on nothing less than a crusade to highlight the “age issue” presented by the 81-year-old president’s candidacy, taking every single opportunity to call out every stumble or verbal flaw as further proof that he was unfit to run again and to demand that he drop out of the race…
According to Sulzberger, though, their coverage was merely part of their responsibility to present a “full, fair and accurate picture” of what was going on with the campaign. An elderly candidate’s struggles with memory and inability to grasp basic facts was alarming and they had a duty to press the issue, even aggressively.
Had Joe Biden repeatedly said he was running against someone else, the Times would have issued screaming headlines, or perhaps even released a special issue. But here’s how they covered the press conference:
“We’ve been presented with a man who is so brazenly, manifestly, demonstrably, undeniably, objectively unfit for any office — the fucking school board, let alone the presidency of the United States. And yet political correspondents cannot compute, cannot bring themselves to absorb and acknowledge that fact out loud,” he told us. “Therefore, we pretend that he’s a normal candidate, or even if he’s not a normal candidate, we must treat him in a normal way. That is what breaks the entire model.”
It’s emblematic of what the political media in this country are doing so badly in covering this race. With dizzying regularity, Trump lies. He says toxic, antidemocratic things over and over again. And he still gets treated like a normal candidate. It’s often the case that the media, presented with another one of his addled rants, will dive in, scoop, and separate enough words to make it seem like he’s got enough actual gray matter gooping around in his skull to form a complete sentence, and present their director’s cut of his wandering mind for public consumption.
The first thing to say about the hate and scorn currently directed at the mainstream US media is that they worked hard to earn it. They’ve done so by failing, repeatedly, determinedly, spectacularly to do their job, which is to maintain their independence, inform the electorate, and speak truth to power. While the left has long had reasons to dismiss centrist media, and the right has loathed it most when it did do its job well, the moderates who are furious at it now seem to be something new – and a host of former editors, media experts and independent journalists have been going after them hard this summer…
A host of brilliant journalists young and old, have started independent newsletters, covering tech, the state of the media, politics, climate, reproductive rights and virtually everything else, but their reach is too modest to make them a replacement for the big newspapers and networks. The great exception might be historian Heather Cox Richardson, whose newsletter and Facebook followers give her a readership not much smaller than that of the Washington Post. The tremendous success of her sober, historically grounded (and footnoted!) news summaries and reflections bespeaks a hunger for real news.
As for why any of this is happening, Wajahat Ali and James Fallows had a good discussion about this for Ali’s Substack, The Left Hook:
I’ll sum up it all up with something a little hopeful. Feeling down about the slim chance that the mainstream political press will reform itself, Dan Froomkin offered suggestions of the type of pro-democracy coverage he believes might still be possible. From his website Press Watch:
But trying to get entitled, self-satisfied political reporters and editors to change their ways appears to be hopeless.
So allow me to focus for a few minutes on three missions the rest of the newsroom could adopt to actually inform the electorate in a constructive way.
I’m talking about the reporters on the national desks and the business desks, the ones covering beats like climate and housing and labor and immigration.
Here are the three missions I would like them to embrace.
Identify a key issue. Explain what’s at stake. Discuss possible solutions. Then explain what the candidates are proposing.
Identify highly trafficked falsehoods. Then debunk them, trace their origin, and report on who’s spreading them and why.
Similarly, take a poll to determine what people believe about the current state of affairs in this country. Then identify those beliefs that are factually incorrect and commit to assiduously and repeatedly correcting the record until those numbers change.
There. That’s three positive steps any newsroom can take to create what I think would be compelling content that is also pro-democracy in the most basic way: it informs the electorate.
Informing the electorate. Standing up for reality. Understanding that neutrality means NOT favoring one side by sanewashing its dangerous, anti-democracy extremism. That’s what the public requires at this time. Pro-democracy journalism means clearly articulating threats to our system of government so that voters understand what’s at stake.
We won’t stop standing up for reality. We won’t stop pushing for a necessary change in political coverage. Share the work of the authors above and support other journalists you see doing pro-democracy journalism.
You can join us by reading our 18 pro-democracy election coverage guidelines and signing our open letter to media executives here.
Extra Credit: Pro-Democracy Quote Of The Week
“It’s particularly damning that poor journalism has allowed so many people to believe Trump’s lies about a country on the brink of economic and moral collapse. It’s our obligation to set the record straight.”
-Dan Froomkin
Democracy’s Survival Requires That Newsrooms Reset to Focus on What’s at Stake
You can be part of the solution. We’ve attached our pro-democracy guidelines to an open letter for you to sign on to. This letter has already been signed by thousands of Americans. We will be regularly sending your signatures to the leadership of all major news organizations.
The guidelines serve as a model of what pro-democracy election coverage can—and should—look like. Signing our letter ensures that your frustrations with media’s failure to stand up for American democracy will be heard loud and clear.
Help others advocate for positive change. Share the letter and guidelines with friends, civic organizations, and everyone who cares about the future of America. Ask them to sign on. Demanding better media is an action we must all take.
Tired of paying for corporate media that doesn’t stand up for democracy? Redirect those funds to quality local journalism. Use our Local Journalism Directory to find an outlet and subscribe.
You folks at the Media and Democracy Blog might be interested in this piece on impoverished and low-income Americans not being centered directly in the media-led debates and discourse. That's a a major democracy gap too.
You folks at the Media and Democracy Blog might be interested in this piece on impoverished and low-income Americans not being centered directly in the media-led debates and discourse. That's a a major democracy gap too.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/subramaniamvincent/2024/09/18/the-missing-swing-voters-whose-voices-we-need-to-hear/
Thank you