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A week or what feels like five thousand years ago, Semafor’s Max Tani reported on a recent meeting between journalists and top editors at the New York Times, during which, among other things, the former got to ask the latter about the paper’s coverage of Donald Trump. In the run-up to the election, liberal readers had been increasingly critical of journalism that they saw as insufficiently tough on Trump’s age and authoritarian threats; “sanewashing,” or the idea that the Times (and other publications) were selectively quoting from Trump’s incoherent campaign speeches in ways that made them sound sensible, was a hot new term among media critics. Astead W. Herndon, a Times politics reporter who was moderating the meeting, noted that he’d fielded a lot of concerned questions about sanewashing, in particular—but also an observation inside the newsroom that “in the last month the paper has gotten more direct and more frank about Trump.” Herndon asked the editors present whether this was intentional, and if so, whether it was a response to external criticism.
Joe Kahn, the executive editor, denied that there had been any change in the Times’ coverage and (generally speaking, at least) dismissed the external criticism. (“The most vocal critics,” he said, want the Times to be “a mouthpiece for their already predetermined point of view.”) Still, the fact that the exchange happened at all demonstrated the cut-through of a much broader debate (or, more accurately, the latest iteration thereof) about the language major news outlets were using to describe Trump’s rhetoric during the campaign, as it made sense less and less often but was more and more chilling when it did. Around the same time, media discussion of whether Trump was a fascist spiked, albeit, in all likelihood, spurred more by the testimony of his former top staffers than any lightning-bolt realization on the media’s part.
One week and a decisive Trump victory later, some critics are freshly furious with the mainstream press for failing to convince enough voters of the danger he poses. But in other quarters—including among vocal critics of sanewashing and other such practices—the media meta-debate now feels very different, as if drunk on a potent cocktail of defeatism, self-flagellation, and doubt. Various observers have argued that whatever the media did manage to communicate about Trump’s authoritarianism didn’t matter since our influence is clearly now at a low ebb, swamped by that of podcasts, social media, and the right-wing echo chamber. Writing in Time, Richard Stengel argued that the press was so busy covering Trump himself that it missed the rightward turn the country was taking. Going forward, Stengel advised that reporters steer clear of the word “lie” when discussing Trump’s rhetoric—on the grounds that it “presumes intentionality and has a moral valence that probably alienates some people”—and that there be “a moratorium on any sentence uttered on a TV news show that begins ‘I think.’”
The fear that the mainstream media is losing influence is, of course, a serious one; I wrote last week that fact-based reporting faces structural disadvantages in our information marketplace. Still, as I see it, the idea that the media is now totally powerless is an overstatement, and one that’s all too easy to indulge at a charged moment like this; indeed, switch around some of the particulars (Breitbart for Joe Rogan, say), and the current existential freakout about the loosening purchase of fact-based reporting strikes me as similar to the reaction when Trump won in 2016. Again, this isn’t to diminish the scale of the challenge we face, but to say that panicked post-election litigation is unhelpful, not to mention contingent. (If Trump had lost by the relatively narrow margin—in historical terms—by which he ended up winning, it’s doubtful media-watchers would be talking in quite the same way, even though the problems of trust and relevance would arguably be just as acute.) Sometimes, being a media critic in the Trump era can feel like being trapped in the M.C. Escher lithograph with all the stairs.
And—while some online media critics clearly have urged the press to cover Trump more aggressively as a means of dissuading people from voting for him, or seemed to believe that sharper New York Times fact-checks might save democracy—I have increasingly come to see that sort of mindset as missing the point. When Trump launched his first presidential run, the media was dubious about his chances—but handed him a bunch of free airtime—in ways that I believe were consequential, or at least played into his hands; now everyone knows exactly who Trump is, not least since he freely advertises the fact every chance he gets. To the extent that I’ve agreed with the criticisms of journalistic sanewashing and the like, my impulse has been a desire for the media to tell the truest and clearest story about Trump that it can—because a media that can’t consistently name and shine a light on authoritarianism clearly isn’t equipped to cover a country tilting in an authoritarian direction. But also, more simply, because telling true stories as clearly as possible is a journalist’s job.
Weighing in on the media-influence debate last week, the historian Michael Socolow perhaps put it best when he wrote that “the media can repeatedly publish or broadcast numerous disqualifying truths about a politician, but they can’t ensure the prevention of his or her election. Journalists need to understand how distributing true and useful information out into the world can be its own rewarding service—no matter what happens next.”
In this sense, the valid criticisms leveled at coverage of Trump pre-election—and the truth-based rationale for them—are just as valid now; the result doesn’t wash them away. And yet, clearly, the election happened, and the result poses several sharp and legitimately difficult questions as to how the press should think about the man, his supporters, and his second administration—questions that, to me, are more interesting than generalized despondency about the pointlessness of working out answers. Among them: What does it mean to cover Trump’s nakedly authoritarian behavior in the run-up to and on January 6, 2021, when a majority of voters clearly don’t find it to be disqualifying (even if it would be going too far to suggest that they all endorsed it)? And to what extent should coverage of Trump’s rhetoric and behavior occupy the press going forward? Don’t his actions now matter more?
During the campaign, it’s understandable that debates around Trump coverage centered overwhelmingly on things that he was saying—campaigns, after all, are typically fought on rhetoric, and Trump was not in power. Even when he was in power, though, his rhetoric was still the defining fault line of such debates, as the political press visibly struggled to adapt from covering presidents whose worst excesses had to be pried out of sources and documents, Watergate-style, to a leader who often just said the quiet part out loud, while also brazenly lying all the time. As I wrote earlier this year, the debate as to how the press ought to handle such rhetoric has gone back and forth for so long because, in part, there isn’t a satisfying answer: filter audiences’ exposure to Trump, and they don’t see what he’s really like (enter sanewashing); do the opposite, and you hand him a free platform to mislead and antagonize.
Another long-standing dilemma in coverage of Trump’s rhetoric has been one of proportion: cover his ever more outrageous pronouncements as if you’re on a permanent war footing, and the coverage risks becoming overheated; don’t do that, and he succeeds in lowering the bar for the type of behavior that deserves media scrutiny. After the 2016 election, major mainstream outlets experienced a “Trump bump,” whereby newly engaged audiences tuned in, and often also subscribed, to consume energized journalism about his presidency. High-level industry observers seem to doubt that news consumers will do the same thing this time, at least in any sustained way. As I noted last week, that will likely pose an economic problem for some outlets. On the editorial side of things, there are concerns, too, that there might be less energized journalism this time, not least because those producing it are tired. (CNN’s Brian Stelter noted last week that many journalists—at least, the sort who have talent agents, apparently—are “questioning if they have it in them to report on another Trump cycle.”)
This, clearly, would be a lamentable development. And yet there is also an opportunity to find a happy medium here. If much of the energized, Trump-bump-era journalism was very good, much of it was also frenzied and reactive, chasing after every Trump tweet. Fatigue with that approach needn’t itself be a bad thing—as long as we can redirect the energy into accountability reporting on what Trump and his administration are doing. In his Time column, Stengel offered advice that, to me, was more useful than his anxiety about the word “lie” and effort to do away with opinions on TV: “In a second Trump term, don’t let him shape the narrative. Covering the White House outrage of the day may draw eyeballs but it is playing his game. Focus on what is happening in the agencies and departments where policy is often made and where those policies affect the American public. Cover what is going on in Congressional committees where legislators are trying to turn his diatribes into policy.”
But this doesn’t mean that Trump’s narrative-shaping rhetoric won’t continue to matter, and so the debate will surely swing around again. If nothing else, the line between words and actions is thin, and this is particularly true in authoritarian environments where language can play an outsize role in setting the tone of political discourse, not to mention policy expectations among bureaucrats and other subordinates. And it strikes me as untenable for the press, as an agent of political accountability, to pretend that Trump’s 2020 election denialism and its aftermath—as sharp an example as one can imagine of the correlation between word and deed—never happened just because this election may have seemed to wipe the slate clean; this would be true if Trump had won close to 100 percent of the popular vote, never mind just barely more than half. Last week, The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf made the case that Trump should now be treated like a “normal president”; Friedersdorf was writing about Trump’s political opponents, but it’s not hard to imagine a similar demand being made of the media. And yet Trump still isn’t a normal president, and shouldn’t be covered that way. Indeed, if anything, we should have used his first presidency to explode the notion itself, given how much normalized presidential conduct has long demanded sharper media scrutiny. (Who can forget Trump “becoming president” in 2017 only after bombing Syria?)
How to proceed, then? While debates about Trump coverage have often focused on his words, I don’t see a contradiction between the demand to sharpen that type of coverage and the demand to focus more on his actions. At this point, the nub of the former demand, as I see it, is not so much about quantitative attention as qualitative wording; without wishing to speak for other critics, I would be satisfied if the news media used Trump’s return to power as an opportunity to dispense with the clichés and euphemisms—Trump’s new tone and his showmanship; his racially charged language and his misstatements—that have so often marred coverage of him up to now, and to instead just speak plainly. What language this will require will be a matter for day-by-day debate—but it has to be a language that recognizes the truths of authoritarianism, not one that tries to shoehorn the latter into the musty tropes of presidencies gone by. Many journalists, to be clear, are already using such language, but the goal is consistency. After eight years of this, we should see this as a low bar that, inevitable disagreement as to the specifics aside, shouldn’t be hard for anyone to clear—the fundamental line that we need to assert before we can hold it in the face of intensifying political and legal threats, and lost trust and relevance. In this area, at least, now is not the time for self-doubt.
For what it’s worth, I was among those who noticed a late pre-election toughening in the Times’ coverage of Trump—in the consistency and prominence of such coverage, anyway. I noticed the same the day after the election, too: in particular, a story with the headline “America Hires a Strongman” and the subheading “This was a conquering of the nation not by force but with a permission slip. Now, America stands on the precipice of an authoritarian style of governance never before seen in its 248-year history.” Liberal media critics might have appreciated such blunt language. So, apparently, did Kahn and the paper’s other top editors—they sent Times journalists a note of praise for their election coverage, and quoted this language directly.
Other notable stories:
- For CJR, Bill McKibben writes that election coverage in US media crowded out alarming news about the climate crisis. “The longtime human (and journalistic) conceit that the natural world is a subset of the economic one, and that the political reality is the most important one, will now be tested,” McKibben writes. “Our political campaigns—thanks to the candidates and to the people who cover them—have not prepared us for the moment now dawning.” Also for CJR, Lauren Watson reports from an election watch party hosted by Hell Gate, a news-and-culture cooperative that covers New York City. And on our podcast The Kicker, Josh Hersh spoke with Jack Herrera, a CJR contributor who has covered the changing habits of Latino voters and wasn’t surprised that so many broke for Trump this time.
- Charles Ashby, a veteran journalist at the Daily Sentinel newspaper in Colorado, reported on sharp restrictions placed on reporters at an election night event for Jeff Hurd, a Republican who won the congressional seat currently held by Lauren Boebert; Hurd was courteous when he spoke to the reporters, Ashby writes, but otherwise “sequestered the media in a curtained area away from everyone, but then required any of them to be escorted by a Hurd staffer if they attempted to go anywhere in the establishment, including to the bathroom.” “My one-word summation of that gathering would be ‘weird,’” Nancy Lofholm, of the Colorado Sun, said, adding, “as a political newbie, does he maybe not realize that this is not normal?”
- In media business news, a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit in which the news outlets Raw Story and AlterNet alleged that OpenAI had infringed their copyright by using their articles to train its AI engines, though the judge said that the outlets could refile the suit. Elsewhere, Henry Blodget, the cofounder of Business Insider, is leaving the company; he stepped down as its CEO last year, but had remained on the board. And OpenSecrets—a nonpartisan nonprofit that publishes research on big money in politics, and is a popular resource among journalists—laid off ten staffers, citing financial difficulties; Politico’s Daniel Lippman has more details.
- In Equatorial Guinea, hundreds of sextapes filmed by Baltasar Ebang Engonga, a senior official who led an agency that investigates financial crime, have recently been uploaded to social media and gone viral; the president removed Engonga from his post, while state TV accused him of retaining the videos without consent. His devices were recently confiscated after he was arrested on different charges; the BBC reports that the leaks may be part of a presidential succession drama, but notes that the episode is hard to report on since Equatorial Guinea doesn’t have a free press.
- And the Wall Street Journal’s Neil Shah explores why Bob Dylan has recently started posting on X (“and to be clear, it is Dylan tweeting, according to a person familiar with the matter”). “Dylan has long avoided the kind of fan service that’s become common for popular musicians,” Shah writes. “If anything, he’s constantly misleading journalists and sparking endless interpretations of his inscrutable behavior.” Ultimately, “he seems to be just having fun, evoking an earlier period of social media when musicians didn’t take themselves so seriously online.”
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