Margaret Sullivan writes:
With less than two weeks until the most consequential
presidential election of the modern era, this is my evaluation of how the media
has done — along with an 11th hour plea.
There are, after all, still a lot of undecided or at
least uncommitted voters, hard as that may be to believe. And the media, while
it won’t determine the outcome, can make a difference.
I’ll grant, up front, that the national news media —
Big Journalism — has done some good work. The reporting on Project 2025, while
not pervasive enough, has been excellent, and some of the best of that has been
in the New York Times. Daniel Dale at CNN has done great, helpful
fact-checking. ABC News did a good job with the single presidential debate. The
Guardian has been publishing
a fine series and a newsletter called The
Stakes. (I contributed a piece about what would happen to press rights.)
The New York Times just launched a link to its extensive coverage of what a
Trump presidency would mean, tagged “What’s
At Stake.”
Some columnists have made sense of the nightmare for
us, like Will Bunch at the Philadelphia Inquirer, who consistently nails what’s
happening, providing reporting and big-picture context; and Jill Lawrence at
the Los Angeles Times, whose most recent column was terrifyingly headlined: “Get
Ready for President Vance.” And I see improvement from the Washington Post,
as Parker Molloy noted in a New Republic piece about Trump’s town-hall dance
party titled “The
Washington Post Covered that Bizarro Trump Rally the Right Way.”
But fundamentally, the media coverage writ large has
fallen far short of what was needed to get the true stakes across to an entire
nation of voters. And that’s been true not just recently, but for more than
nine years, since Trump declared his candidacy in 2015. Too often, the coverage
of Trump has been an embarrassing failure — sanewashing
his lunacy, falsely equating him to his traditional rivals, or treating him
as some sort of amusing sideshow.
The economist Dean Baker, posting on X the
other day, expressed it perfectly: “It says everything you need to
know about the U.S. media that Trump’s clown show at the McDonald’s gets more
attention than his former defense secretary and chair of the Joint Chief of
Staff warning that Trump is a dangerous fascist with no respect for democracy.”
Exactly. And that is true of the mainstream,
supposedly independent media! Now add in Fox News, the beating heart of the
right-wing propaganda monster.
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