The Media Today

Why this election is all about the last one

October 7, 2024 By Jon Allsop
Jake Angeli, a QAnon believer who was part of the attack on the Capitol. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta, File)

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In early June, George Stephanopoulos, an interviewer on ABC News, found himself on the other side of the desk, as an interviewee on CNN. The sit-down was pegged to a book that Stephanopoulos was promoting, but the conversation soon turned to Donald Trump and his allies’ ongoing refusal to accept the result of the 2020 election, which, Stephanopoulos said, “poses a test for all of us in journalism.” Of his own approach to handling such interviews, he said that he had “made it a point—if they will not accept those facts, I don’t go on to other issues,” adding, “I’m not going to participate in some kind of a sham where you somehow equate the legitimacy of an election or the peaceful transfer of power with a debate over tax cuts or environmental regulation.” Abby Phillip, the host, then asked Stephanopoulos what he thought Trump and Joe Biden, then still the Democratic candidate, should be asked at CNN’s forthcoming presidential debate. “Who won the last election?” he said. “Very simple.”

In the end, CNN’s moderators didn’t put this exact question to the candidates—though they did ask Trump whether he’ll accept the results of the next election even if he doesn’t win, and followed up twice when he failed to give a straight answer. Fast-forward to last week, and an even closer version of Stephanopoulos’s question was asked from the debate stage: not by a journalist, but by Tim Walz, now the Democratic vice presidential nominee, who put it to his Republican counterpart, J.D. Vance—who refused to answer. Initially, the significance of this moment got a bit lost amid vacuous pundit chatter as to the surprising civility of the debate, but Vance’s nonresponse would ultimately return Republican election denialism to “focus” or “center stage” in the news cycle, as various articles put it. (“Nobody planned it this way,” Dan Balz wrote in the Washington Post yesterday, but the issue “emerged as the theme of the presidential campaign last week.”) Zack Beauchamp, of Vox, wrote that Walz’s question was the “only truly important moment” of the debate and regretted that the moderators waited so long before facilitating the exchange, arguing that in doing so, they created “an illusion of normalcy.” (Indeed, both tax cuts and environmental regulation were debated first.)

The vice presidential debate also offered journalists a fresh opportunity to ask allies of Trump to affirm that he lost in 2020; in the aftermath, several did so, and fielded a torrent of sophistry and whataboutism in response. In the post-debate “spin room,” a journalist from the conservative outlet The Dispatch got Katie Britt, the senator from Alabama, to acknowledge that Biden is “obviously” the president, but not that he won; the following morning, CNN’s Jim Acosta sparred with the Trump adviser Corey Lewandowski, who pulled the same rhetorical trick as Britt, insisted that there was fraud in 2020, and also made the case that no one cares anymore. (“Why aren’t we talking about the policy matters that matter to the American people?” Lewandowski asked.) Challenged at a rally in Michigan, Vance himself again dodged the question. “The media’s obsessed with talking about the election of four years ago,” he said. “I’m focused on the election of thirty-three days from now.”

As various interviewers have noted in response to the latter type of deflection, Trump is the one who’s obsessed with the last election, endlessly whining about his loss to Biden. And there’s nothing wrong with the last election—and the insurrection that followed it—remaining a media obsession. Indeed, as I see it, the question is actually whether it’s still enough of one. 

In the years since it happened, Trumpian election denialism and January 6 have, of course, persisted as big stories, particularly when new events have forced them back into the headlines. If Walz’s debate question helped make all of this the theme of the campaign last week, so, too, did the sight of Liz Cheney, the rare rock-ribbed conservative who has broken with the GOP over its embrace of election lies, on the stump for Kamala Harris; even more notably, a judge ordered the publication of a new court filing in the federal criminal case against Trump for trying to subvert the election. Nor was last week the first time this year that TV interviewers asked Trump allies to acknowledge the result in 2020 or to commit to certifying the results of the 2024 election; I noticed a small flurry of anchors doing so in the spring and early summer, including an exchange between CNN’s Kaitlan Collins and the Texas senator Ted Cruz that won praise for Collins on social media. (“You can’t answer yes or no to this question,” Collins said, as Cruz barked back, “WHAT DID CONGRESS DO IN 1876?”)

Even some Trump critics, though, have questioned whether this line of questioning—or, at least, the future-facing version of it—is an effective means of holding election deniers to account. (In June, the comedian Jon Stewart suggested that it was uselessly speculative: “Voting irregularities! Ant overlords! Voting machines that suddenly transform into fighting robots… WILL YOU STILL CERTIFY?! WHO FUCKIN’ CARES?!”) Whatever the precise framing of the question, these interviews, while laudable in intent, can sometimes feel unsatisfying. This speaks, in turn, to the ongoing coverage of the 2020 election as a whole—a gigantic event that looms over coverage of this election, even as one of America’s two major political parties works, variously, to relitigate or memory-hole it. Fighting back has sometimes felt like a task at odds with the conventions and rhythms of political journalism—and, perhaps, with a more human problem: the numbing march of time.

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Again, this is not to say that the media as a whole has been complicit in memory-holing the events leading up to and on January 6. But the clarifying shock that coursed through much of the coverage at the time has largely dissipated; recently, I returned to the first newsletter that I wrote following January 6, which felt like a portal into a different universe. As I wrote, talk was swelling of accountability for Trump and his enablers, and how the media and adjacent industries might help deliver it: Facebook, Instagram, and what was then Twitter banned Trump; Forbes pledged that any company caught hiring someone who lied for Trump would automatically lose all credibility in the magazine’s eyes; I explored some concrete suggestions for permanently tagging those who voted to overturn the election result (say, with routine identifiers that might sit alongside the usual Rep., Sen., or R-Texas). Astead W. Herndon, a reporter at the New York Times, shared advice that was less concrete but arguably even more pertinent. “There will be attempts and minimization and moral massaging so it’s important for people to keep the shock they had at the events on Wednesday close,” he wrote, of the insurrection. “Remember how you feel now.”

Many journalists—especially those who were at the Capitol on January 6—doubtless do still remember how they felt. But in the aggregate of political journalism, that feeling isn’t coming across so much anymore; at least from my point of view, discussions these days tend to feel less visceral and more abstract, as the minimizations have flowed and Trump has returned to the heart of political discourse (if he ever went away). The practice of routinely linking politicians to their complicity never caught on: election deniers have often—if not always—been interviewed without facing questions about it; only one outlet that I’m aware of—WITF, a public radio station in Pennsylvania—devised a shorthand system for tying local lawmakers (whom it placed on an “accountability list”) to their actions. (Last year, WITF said that it would continue to use such language, but only in stories about “elections, voting, or democracy.”) At its worst, political coverage has returned to treating Trump as a normal candidate for office. On the whole, as I wrote earlier in the year, media attempts to reassert January 6 “as a line in the sand have felt sporadic.” (Trump’s social media bans, of course, have been revoked, including by a platform owner last seen jumping around onstage at a Trump rally.)

If the line in the sand has become blurred, the reasons are not all the media’s fault—or at least, not necessarily the fault of individual journalists working within it. It is, quite rightly, not the media’s sole job to enforce political accountability; politicians and voters play bigger roles, and many in both groups have apparently decided to give Trump a hall pass for his election denialism or echo it themselves. It is, of course, deeply cynical when Vance and others dodge simple factual questions about the last election by fixing their focus on kitchen-table issues—but as I’ve written repeatedly, serving democracy does require extensive coverage of ongoing policy debates. The way the media industry is structured privileges news pegs and novelty; if WITF’s insistence on linking lawmakers to their election denialism seemed like a simple step, it was a quietly radical one, cutting against the narrow way in which political stories are often written. If hearing interviewers ask election deniers to state easy truths feels essential, such exchanges sometimes also serve as miniature warnings of the difficulties of debunking disinformation, with interviewees often seeming happy to drag the discussion into the epistemological murk.

And yet, even within such constraints, I think the political press as a whole could do a better job of reinjecting urgency into coverage of the last election as this one heaves ever closer. Following Herndon’s evergreen advice and remembering the headspace we occupied in January 2021 is one good starting point. Covering threats to democracy needn’t come at the expense of covering the policy debates that constitute the stuff of it; we have always needed to be able to do both. I’ve written before that the “news peg” is an imperfect means of determining what journalists should cover—when it comes to 2020 election denialism, our coverage would be fair game even if Trump weren’t still banging on about it—and yet we now have a clear peg to keep that denialism front of mind: the coming election, and Trump and his allies’ clearly telegraphed threats to execute much the same playbook again. And we should continue to put the simple questions about 2020 to those who won’t answer them—whether or not a politician has just put that question back on our radar. The resulting exchanges may be messy, but as Stephanopoulos said earlier in the year, if politicians “can’t pass that fundamental threshold of saying, The last election was not stolen; I will abide by the results of the next election, then I think that’s all voters and viewers need to know.”

Yesterday, Stephanopoulos hosted Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, on his ABC show. In some ways, coverage of Johnson’s speakership has been a microcosm of the trends I’ve talked about in this newsletter: journalists have prominently noted his complicity in Trump’s election lies, but not always, a result both of the pressing weight of new stories but also, to a certain extent, complacency. (Politico opening a podcast interview with Johnson by playing an impersonation he does of Trump was excruciatingly on the nose.) But Stephanopoulos’s interview with Johnson was laser focused. “Can you say unequivocally that Joe Biden won the 2020 election and Donald Trump lost?” Stephanopoulos asked. “This is the game that is always played by mainstream media with leading Republicans,” Johnson complained. It wasn’t the point, but his use of the word always was questionable.


Other notable stories:

  • Following the New York Times editorial board’s recent announcement that it will no longer endorse candidates in local races (and an even more recent scandal involving New York City mayor Eric Adams), CNN’s Brian Stelter reports that a “who’s-who of New York journalists”—including Semafor’s Ben Smith, NY1’s Errol Louis, and The City’s Alyssa Katz—are launching what they’re calling the “New York Editorial Board,” which will interview candidates for office. “Maybe we can shame the Times back into some sense of civic responsibility,” Smith said (speaking in his personal capacity).

New from CJR: The visual-journalist crackdown

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.