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On Thursday night, CNN’s Dana Bash declared a “watershed moment” in the presidential campaign and cued up the dramatic music. This was, in part, self-promotion—Bash was introducing an interview she’d conducted with Kamala Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz—but journalists outside of CNN also hyped the sit-down, which was Harris’s first since she took over at the top of the Democratic ticket in July; ahead of time, they proposed questions for Bash to ask, and debated whether Walz’s presence by Harris’s side was appropriate. After it aired, though, major outlets declared that the interview made no real waves beyond the fact that it happened at all. “Everyone will remember exactly where they were when they watched last night’s extravaganza—nodding along, rolling their eyes, dozing off, changing the channel,” The Atlantic’s Mark Leibovich wrote. “The only thing that made this interview a watershed event was the hype and heavy anticipation that preceded it.”
Around the same time, a controversy was developing involving Harris’s opponent, Donald Trump. Earlier in the week, NPR reported that two staffers with Trump’s campaign had been involved in a verbal and physical altercation with an official at Arlington National Cemetery, who had attempted to prevent Trump from filming in a restricted area where recently deceased troops are buried; Trump said he was invited by the families of soldiers who were killed during the US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, but political activity in the area is prohibited under federal law. In the hours before Harris was due to be interviewed on CNN, the Army confirmed that the official in question had been pushed while trying to enforce the rules. The Trump campaign, for its part, said that the official was “clearly suffering from a mental health episode” and promised to release footage disproving the “defamatory” claim of a physical altercation. A week later, no such video has been released.
Trump’s allies characterized the story as a nothingburger and condemned the media for overhyping it. (J.D. Vance, his running mate, said that Trump was at Arlington “providing emotional support to a lot of brave Americans” and that “there happened to be a camera there”—an inconvenience that seems to afflict Trump with unfortunate regularity.) But various critics noted, to the contrary, that the media had largely failed to communicate the full gravity of Trump and his staffers’ alleged conduct. Writing for CJR on Friday, Ben Kesling, a reporter who is himself a veteran, argued that many articles about the episode got bogged down in semantics, allowing the Trump campaign to muddy the waters. “The coverage this week left many readers with the impression that the whole thing might have been a bureaucratic mix-up, or some tedious violation of protocol,” Kesling wrote. “What was missing from the coverage was a willingness to quickly and decisively state what a grievous insult the whole debacle was to the dignity of Arlington. The sacred had been profaned.”
As Kesling noted, there was some sharp initial coverage of the story (not least from NPR, which not only broke the story but accurately characterized the “nastiness” of the Trump team’s response); since Kesling wrote, the New York Times, for example, has deftly captured the unprecedented extent of Trump’s politicization of the cemetery. Still, as Kesling also noted, other articles trafficked in “bland horse-race coverage.” Some headlines about the episode (if not the stories attached to them) glossed over who had actually done what, characterizing the allegations only vaguely or looking right past them to center Trump’s preferred framing of the stunt: an indictment of the Afghanistan withdrawal and the “forever wars” more broadly. Politico suggested yesterday that the former might “weigh on [Harris’s] honeymoon” in the polls (despite the “scant evidence that Harris was a major player in Afghan policy”).
And the split screen (to use a familiar Trump-era cliché) between the wildly overhyped Harris interview and the curiously underhyped Trump cemetery stunt was a useful microcosm of a broader trend that continues to frustrate many media-watchers: a lack of proportion in coverage of politics in general and Trump in particular. Generalizing about the coverage of the two stories is tricky. (And it should be noted that the Harris interview would have been less of a big deal if she hadn’t been so press-shy in her campaign to date.) On the whole, though, a mundane story was elevated to the level of the sacred, while a profane one was treated, if not as mundane exactly, then with a general caution and weariness. This judgment is subjective, of course. But two thought experiments help to clarify it. Swap the candidates around in these stories, and it’s all but impossible to imagine that they’d have been covered in the same way. (Harris aides being accused of shoving a military official would have led the news cycle from now until the heat death of the universe—or at least of CNN.) Keep the stories the same but transport them back to 2016, and a similar conclusion likely applies.
This is not to say that 2016 was a model of proportionate political coverage; indeed, media critics still often hold it up as something like a byword for the opposite. In many ways, it feels like we’re stuck in a discourse rerun of the media criticism that has continued to surround that election and all that followed it. (Did the Times try to tank Biden? Is the Times trying to tank Harris? Is the media making Trump sound coherent when he isn’t? “Here’s Why We Shouldn’t Demean Trump Voters.”) Still, if Trump had pulled the Arlington stunt in 2016, it’s not hard to imagine that the media’s response would have been several decibels louder. The same is true of several other stories from this long weekend alone: Trump saying that “the transgender thing is incredible” because “your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation”; a man attempting to climb into the press area at a Trump rally—and being halted with a Taser—after Trump slammed the media as “the enemy of the people”; Trump telling Fox that he has “every right” to interfere with an election. Various major outlets wrote up or discussed each of these stories. But none was a big story.
Again, this sort of judgment is subjective. The relative proportionality with which “the media” treats one story vis-à-vis another is difficult to measure (and impossible to measure in a way that inspires consensus among media critics); nor does “the media” share a single Proportionality Editor whose job it is to divvy up coverage between individual outlets. Those outlets’ individual coverage priorities are easier to judge, but traditional metrics for doing so—front-page story placement, for instance—are less relevant than they used to be in an age of online disaggregation of news content. Over the summer, Erik Wemple, a media critic at the Washington Post, hit back at claims that the media is “ignoring” stories about the threat of Trump by listing over two hundred examples of such stories since his campaign launch in 2022—a drop in the media ocean, to be sure, but not an exhaustive list, either.
And yet as I wrote in 2022 (with reference, as it happens, to coverage of the Afghanistan pullout and what followed it), the criticism that the media is ignoring something, while often irritating, isn’t best understood literally; it is itself, ultimately, a critique of proportionality. When it comes to Trump, I can’t avoid the conclusion that our collective sense of proportion is profoundly broken—perhaps more so now than at any other point in his political career (however flawed the coverage of its previous installments may have been). Apparently, I’m not alone. I (mostly) agreed with Jon Ralston, of the Nevada Independent, when he wrote, in the wake of the CNN interview, that while some current media criticism (of journalists who ask tough questions of Harris, for instance) is annoying, proportionality “has been lost in this election and in political discourse generally.” I (mostly) agreed with James Risen, of The Intercept, when he wrote last week that Trump-threat coverage has been overwhelmed by business-as-usual horse-race journalism that fetishizes the idea of politics as a marketing exercise. (See: the infuriating current vein of coverage about Trump’s advisers and their supposed anguish at his supposed inability to stay on message.) I (mostly) agreed with Jonathan Chait, of New York, when he wrote earlier in the summer that Trump’s “violations of democratic and civic norms are so widespread that the media have given up on holding him to anything resembling a customary standard of behavior for a presidential candidate.”
As I’ve also written before (including, again, in relation to the Afghanistan pullout), the best answer to this proportionality problem isn’t to be more breathless in our coverage; when it comes to Trump, more breathless coverage has, in the past, been criticized for amplifying his lies or playing into his hands. Still, given that breathlessness is a key mode of much political journalism these days, it’s telling which stories get treated this way and which don’t. Consuming political news during this campaign sometimes feels like being punched in the face by the very serious amid longer divergences into the relatively mundane. On Meet the Press on Sunday, panelists briefly discussed the prospect that Trump could order his future attorney general to prosecute Mark Zuckerberg and get away with doing so, before segueing into a discussion of next week’s “all important” Harris-Trump debate. In Politico’s Playbook newsletter yesterday (which opened with the Harris “honeymoon” observation), Trump’s comment about his right to interfere with an election was listed in a final section often reserved for pithy or funny observations about Beltway characters, right above news of weddings, birthdays, and Walz eating a pork chop. You needn’t go back to the vantage of 2016 to understand how strange this all feels—January 7, 2021, would suffice.
Last week, in his review of the Harris-Walz sit-down on CNN, Leibovich noted that “sometimes, history gets interspersed seamlessly with the mundane pace of everyday life.” He was referring to a section of the interview—in which Harris recounted what she was doing when she learned of Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race—that CNN kept teasing ahead of commercial breaks but that turned out not to be very interesting at all. As I see it, his words also apply to media coverage and are worth bearing in mind as such, as this election enters its crucial final stretch. To some extent, keeping track of both the historic and the mundane is the job of journalism—and it can sometimes be hard, in the present, to know which events are which. But it isn’t always that hard to know. To borrow from Leibovich, the CNN interview was a nothingburger. The Arlington story was certainly something.
Other notable stories:
- For CJR, Haley Mlotek profiles The Business of Fashion, a publication that “is part trade reporting, part networking, for the industry professional who reads financial reports more than the enthusiast who follows Vogue covers,” and has become “required reading” since Imran Amed, a former consultant who “never set out to be a journalist,” started it as a blog in 2007. “What is fashion? It’s the zeitgeist of the time,” the designer Diane von Furstenberg told Mlotek. “I think Imran is so clever because his work is about the business of the zeitgeist of the time.” Von Furstenberg described Amed as “an outsider who became the symbol of an insider,” but he told Mlotek that he still feels like the former, adding, “I believe an outsider’s perspective is valuable. You are able to ask questions about how things could be done differently.”
- Over the weekend, Israel’s military recovered the bodies of six hostages in Gaza who, officials said, had recently been murdered by Hamas. The news inflamed the largest protests against the government of Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, since Hamas attacked on October 7; yesterday, Israel’s largest trade union called a strike, while police officers used what the Times of Israel described as “considerable violence” against demonstrators near Netanyahu’s residence, with one reportedly grabbing a journalist from that paper by the throat. At a rare press conference, however, Netanyahu doubled down on his terms for a ceasefire deal with Hamas (including by pointing to a map marked with cartoons of militants and missiles).
- Also over the weekend, Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland party won an election in the eastern state of Thuringia and came close to doing so in neighboring Saxony—the first time since the days of Nazi rule that a far-right party had come out on top in such a vote. (It is unlikely that the party will enter government in either state since other political formations have ruled out working with it.) Ahead of time, a court rebuked the AfD for excluding journalists with several mainstream outlets from an election party in Thuringia, ruling that it could not discriminate against them. In the end, the party shut out journalists entirely, citing “overcrowding” as the reason.
- Late last week, Alexandre de Moraes, a supreme court justice in Brazil who has been tasked with policing online disinformation, ordered X to be blocked in the country after Elon Musk, its owner, refused to comply with court orders to block certain accounts then closed the company’s physical offices in Brazil after Moraes threatened to arrest staff. Yesterday, a panel of five justices upheld Moraes’s decision—but, as the Times reports, even defenders of Moraes’s efforts to fight falsehoods have expressed concern that he might have gone too far this time.
- And the BBC’s Sarah Rainsford spoke with Zhanna Nemtsova—the daughter of Boris Nemtsov, a critic of Vladimir Putin who was assassinated in Moscow in 2015—about Pablo González, a freelance journalist for the Spanish news agency EFE and other outlets who was arrested in Poland on suspicion of espionage before being sent to Russia as part of a recent prisoner swap. Nemtsova says that González was spying on her. “I want other people to be very careful,” she told Rainsford. “The threat is not something you can just read in books or watch at the movies. It’s very close.”
New from CJR: How The Business of Fashion became an unlikely insider’s guide.
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.