Everyone Now Realizes That Mainstream Media Devalues Democracy In Favor Of Profit And Access
Good News, Bad News for August 29, 2024. With 68 days left until Election Day we need political coverage that uplifts and defends democracy.
Every week until the election, we’ll compare 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
Everyone Now Realizes That Mainstream Media Devalues Democracy In Favor Of Profit And Access
Donald Trump is an unhinged threat to our democracy who regularly engages in stochastic terrorism. According to an August 28th MMFA report:
Former President Donald Trump used his Truth Social account to “retruth” a supporter’s meme calling for the imprisonment of Vice President Kamala Harris, President Joe Biden, and other prominent figures. A review of that supporter's account also found numerous calls for Trump’s political opponents to be killed.
This isn’t an aberration. Media Matters recently documented that Trump promoted an account which spews the N-word, praises Hitler as a hero, and denies the Holocaust.
Trump has also frequently interacted with the account Patriot4Life, including this month. That account has repeatedly promoted calls for political killings, including recently retruthing an image calling for Harris and Gov. Tim Walz to be killed.
In spite of this terrifying reality, our mainstream media downplays the Trump threat with stuff like this:
Thankfully, current and former journalists are joining a chorus of media critics in calling out major media’s abject failure to apply the same standards to Donald Trump and MAGA extremists that they use for everyone else. Below is a compilation of the righteous criticism we at MAD have been seeing in the last week or so.
“It’s 2016 all over again,” O’Donnell added. “The same mistakes are being made. I have never seen an industry slower at learning from its own stupid mistakes than the American news business, and you cannot expect them in the next 89 days to figure out what they haven’t been able to figure out in nine years: how to cover a Trump for president campaign.”
…so much of what Trump said seems too bonkers to have come from a former president and the nominee of a major party that journalists are left trying to piece together a story as if Trump were a normal person. This is what The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, has described as the “bias toward coherence,” and it leads to careful circumlocutions instead of stunned headlines.
John Harwood for Nieman Reports:
Trump hasn’t changed against his new opponent. Yet when he asserted preposterously that the biracial Harris had recently decided to “turn Black” for political advantage, some headlines cast it as her problem rather than his.
“Harris faces a pivotal moment as Trump questions her identity,” The Washington Post declared. The New York Times asked: “Should Harris talk much about her racial identity? Many voters say no.”
Republicans grouse that Harris has climbed in the polls on the back of a friendly media. But to prominent press critics, some of the coverage has had the effect of legitimizing Trump’s smears rather than dismissing them as demagogic nonsense.
Robert Hubbell for his Substack newsletter:
We are witnessing the near universal moral collapse of the media. They have created the monster that is Donald Trump. They are allowing him to “slut shame” the first Black South Asian female presidential candidate with impunity. Until the press finds its backbone and moral compass, Trump will continue to slander women, minorities, veterans, LGBTQ people without consequence. That is the lesson Trump takes from our collective silence.
The first question in every press conference with Donald Trump henceforth must be “Will you apologize for and renounce your statement that Kamala Harris used sexual acts to succeed as a female politician?” If Trump refuses to answer that question, the media should walk out of the press conference. Cut off his oxygen—media exposure.
Will Bunch for the Philadelphia Inquirer:
The nattering nabobs of negativism had accomplished their mission in a year when the elite mainstream media has lost its doggone mind — going after small daily clickbait like a puppy chasing its tail, demanding news conferences only to ask trivial questions, issuing ludicrous “fact checks,” and desperately seeking gravitas in the candidate just found guilty on 34 felony counts and liable for rape and financial fraud, who was dinged by NPR for 162 lies or distortions in just one news conference.
Asawin Suebsaeng for Rolling Stone:
What I am saying is that much of the mainstream political press has been (correctly) programming its audience to believe this year’s race is not a normal presidential election, and then too many in that media elite get upset when the public points out that they’re covering it like a normal presidential election, armed with the exact same petty obsessions and pathologies. It is not, per se, an angry readership screaming at us that the stakes are too high for this shit — we are the ones who’ve been yelling at them, for at least a year now, that the stakes of this presidential contest are that high!
Marcy Wheeler for her website emptywheel.net:
ABC claims that Kamala Harris made misstatements. But their own failure to report on Trump’s false claims is a far, far greater misrepresentation of the truth, and it’s a misrepresentation of the truth they repeat every day.
Meredith Shiner for The New Republic:
It is as if the media are actively trying to direct chaos or uncertainty because chaos and uncertainty would create something new or interesting to them—a good show—which is what they’ve decided the news is about. As our country has inched closer to collapse, as we are not even a full presidential cycle away from Trump sending insurrectionists to the Capitol to murder members of Congress and his own vice president to steal an election, this direction seems clumsier and more desperate than it’s ever been.
Mark Jacob for his Substack, Stop The Presses:
But with Trump’s successful campaign of lies eight years ago should have come an aggressive reassessment by the media. Only in limited cases has that happened. Networks are still letting a deranged criminal traitor tell outrageous falsehoods on live television with no pushback. They’re amplifying disinformation and pretending that amounts to “fairness.”
We don't need journalists to simply turn on the microphones and broadcast whatever politicians say. A machine could do that. The value added of journalism is doing investigations that matter, putting news events in context, confronting prominent liars, and drawing fair conclusions that inform the public.
A shift is taking place in the power balance between news purveyors and news consumers. As Will Bunch pointed out in his piece above, it appears that parts of the American electorate that once cajoled mainstream media to “do better” are now abandoning that cause in favor of seeking alternative sources of information. And much has been made of the Harris campaign eschewing traditional news outlets and getting their message directly to the people via its social media channels and sympathetic influencers.
While we encourage a shift in power towards the consumer, a total dismissal of our most influential press institutions should be avoided. We still need national newsrooms to hold politicians to account and expose corruption and wrongdoing with the attention grabbing ability that only they can muster.
My colleagues and I do the work that we do because we believe strongly in the power, and necessity, of the Fourth Estate. Indeed, while our so-called “elite” journalists flounder, newsrooms all across the country are doing the work of informing their communities about threats to democracy, protecting them from disinformation, and, unlike the DC press corps, treating elections—and their life and death consequences—like they matter more than sports scores. This column has chronicled many examples of that great work.
We, the American electorate, must leverage the groundswell of critical energy while the wind is at our backs. We must use enormous power of our collective voice to further pressure national political journalists into being biased towards democracy.
Our pro-democracy election coverage guidelines, and the open letter we are asking folks like you to sign on to, can be used in multiple ways to bring about needed change. We must continue to urge our most influential newsrooms to adopt practices that are pro-truth and pro-voting. As we close in on 5,000 signatures to our open letter, those voices can be a powerful reminder to the news executives so concerned with their bottom lines that there are consequences to letting the consumer down.
We must engage with the reporters who create the narratives that ultimately shape our national outcomes. The guidelines can be used as a reference when writing letters to the editor or otherwise politely engaging with journalists via their email, DMs, or the comment sections on their articles.
We must educate each other on what’s possible. Availability bias is a hell of a drug. Without knowing that coverage can be better, we can’t clamor for it. Share our guidelines with your friends, family, and neighbors.
Will our national newsrooms finally hear the critiques of their coverage now that more and more of their fellow journalists are sounding the alarm? Will they answer the call and start to deliver the type of clear-eyed coverage of the threats to democracy posed by Trump and his allies that Americans require ahead of November? Or will they fall back on the cynical trope that complaints from all corners must mean their political journalism paradigms are just as perfectly calibrated as ever?
You can play a part in answering those questions.
Read all of our guidelines and sign our open letter to the executives and publishers of our 12 most influential newsrooms here.
Extra Credit: Pro-Democracy Quote Of The Week
As legacy news outlets get battered by both sides, their best way out is to fearlessly tell the whole truth. If they keep normalizing fascists and trying to find a safe space between facts and lies, they’ll be paving a path to their own irrelevance.
Democracy’s Survival Requires That Newsrooms Reset to Focus on What’s at Stake
You can be part of the solution. We’re attaching our pro-democracy guidelines to an open letter for you to sign on to. This letter will be distributed 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.
Brian, here’s my take on what is happening with corporate media:
https://open.substack.com/pub/mmansour/p/the-media-horse-race-coverage?r=tcxup&utm_medium=ios
Critical work!