The Year in Politics

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“On Day One, Texas enacted a law banning diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives at publicly funded colleges.” This was how I opened my first CJR newsletter of 2024, before running through other major stories—the resignation of the president of Harvard, the secret hospitalization of the defense secretary, hoax bomb threats to statehouses—that had tumbled forth before the new year was even a week old. I wrote at the time that these stories channeled an unmistakable zeitgeist, and were likely to be of use to future historians looking to describe the national mood. As the year progressed, the zeitgeisty stories kept coming—though, as the election neared, the national mood proved harder for the press to pin down. A breathless and brat-ty summer gave way to a knife-edge fall and now, a winter of media discontent—or, at least, of fatigue and self-doubt.

Before all that, though, there was a sleepy spring, at least as far as political news was concerned. Sure, there were dead dogs and debates about debates, and caucuses and even a conviction. And, as we chronicled in our Election Issue in early June, there was no shortage of important election-year trends for the press to grapple with, both new—from the liberal ventures claiming turf online to the young posters trying to make neoliberalism cool again, profiled expertly for us by Maddy Crowell and Linda Kinstler, respectively—and familiar: bad TV coverage of Trump, fears of disinformation, the role of fact-checking in combating it. The race, though, was a rerun, and news consumers seemed to be tuning it out. “Six months into 2024, it’s become clear that this will not be an enthusiastic political season—for voters or for the media,” Josh Hersh wrote. TV ratings were down; Web traffic, too. Brian Stelter, the once and future king of the CNN media beat, told Hersh that “the overarching emotion among voters is apathy and even burnout.”

Then, suddenly, the race got a massive jolt of drama. In late June, President Biden debated Trump and faltered badly, kicking off a frenzied news cycle and recriminations over his age and cognitive state: some observers howled that the media had ignored—or, worse, covered up—the story of Biden’s condition until unavoidably confronted with it; others that journalists had been—and were now again—covering it too much. There was a more nuanced conversation about aging to be had here: as Lucy Schiller wrote, “Perhaps any serious thinker’s work is not to accept ‘oldness’ for the easy meaning it is typically assigned in this country, but to interrogate how it is built, how it is used, and the variations inside it, while also remembering any number of other ways to evaluate a person’s past, present, and future.” But this would have to wait. Within a month, Biden dropped out.

Even before he did so, news about Trump had rattled the campaigns, too: in mid-July, at a rally in Pennsylvania, a gunman came terrifyingly close to assassinating him. Photos of Trump, his face streaked with blood and his fist in the air, instantly seared themselves into the history books; the president’s allies quickly pinned blame on the media and broad political narratives about Trump’s threat to democracy; one such ally, J.D. Vance, was swiftly elevated to join Trump on his ticket at that week’s Republican National Convention. The media’s role in all this was more complicated than the Trumpian caricature would allow: Vance, for all his media-bashing, has built his political career on a kind of symbiosis with the mainstream press, as Camille Bromley documented; photojournalists risked their lives to capture instantly historic photos of the shooting; in the aftermath, no few journalists credited Trump with a change of tone. (Some suggested he had been touched by divine grace.) And yet, ultimately, Trump’s tone stayed much the same: the politicization of the war dead; pet-eating migrants; “the enemy within.” At one point, the National Association of Black Journalists invited Trump onstage at its convention, where he suggested that Vice President Kamala Harris, by now his opponent, wasn’t actually Black. The event was, as Jelani Cobb wrote at the time, “a fiasco.”

Harris entered the race amid a hail of memes and media proclamations of good vibes, but also faced (often tedious) questions as to whether she had defined herself or was doing enough real interviews. “She has a personality of a lot of Black women in their fifties and sixties who were in the public eye. She can be very guarded of her messaging and her image. She likes to project what she wants to; she wants people to see her a certain way,” Erika D. Smith, who covered Harris in her days as a California politician, told Kevin Lind over the summer. “But to talk to her one-on-one—I mean, she’s extremely open and engaging and she has a great sense of humor.” In a noisy and fractured national media environment, though, that did not scale. In the end, Trump won the election—in no small part, we were told, because he won the noisy and fractured media environment. (The election was also perceived as a victory for political betting markets, which appeared to see Trump’s win coming when polls did not—though, as Meghnad Bose reported before and after the election, the reality was more complex.)

What now, then? There are credible fears that, in the wake of Trump’s win, the mainstream media is irrelevant; out of touch; cowed, even. (On that last point, these fears were apparent even before the election, both in the wake of the assassination attempt and when the billionaire owners of the Washington Post and the LA Times pulled endorsements of Harris for motives they insisted were pure, but many observers suspected had a lot to do with their other business interests; as those controversies developed, Sewell Chan, our new executive editor, broke important developments out of both papers.) Fears of Trumpian retribution are credible, too; as Kyle Paoletta—who reported before the election on how Trump might weaponize the Espionage Act against reporters in a second term—put it in the hours after Trump won, his assault on the press is now likely to become “a fusillade of discrete attempts to quash whatever reporting he views as antagonistic.” Since then, his nominees to key posts—not least Kash Patel, who has explicitly promised to “come after” people in the media, for FBI director—have only reinforced the sense of looming, unprecedented threat.
And yet, while Trump’s threat is real, the fear that the media has lost relevance might be overblown. At the very least, dogged reporters have continued doing their jobs since Trump won, digging into the backgrounds of his nominees and, in at least one case, helping to force them from contention amid a storm of controversy. Either way, major stories that we must cover have kept on coming and will continue to do so, whatever our grip on the country that keeps throwing them up. If there is one sure promise of a second Trump term, it is that.

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Jon Allsop is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic, among other outlets. He writes CJR’s newsletter The Media Today. Find him on Twitter @Jon_Allsop.