The Media is Complicit for the Political Mess We Are In, But There Is A Way Out
The political news media is not doing its job, and I want to change that.
I love journalism and the function journalists play in society. At its best, journalism is the search for truth as part of the media ecosystem. In a hypothetical world, that is enough.
But in the real world, there are other dynamics that also play a role. As someone who has worked in digital media and advertising for a long time, I’ve seen it first-hand: slim margins, the quest for virality, the desire for speed, and the push for ever-greater monetization.
The business model of media is straightforward: content is created. It gets monetized by ads, subscriptions, purchases, or some combination of all three. This is the model for all of it now: news, books, movies, YouTube, TikTok (the discussion around whether social platforms are technology or media companies can be had another day).
It took a long time to get here. America Online and others debuted their portals in the early 1990s and ushered in a new digital era. We are still navigating the dynamics of this generational shift (see the streaming industry circa 2023). And yet the need for journalism — for truth — hasn’t changed. And this is true whether covering news, world affairs, technology, culture, or politics.
For political journalism, if digital was the start of turning the world upside down, serial liar and master manipulator Donald Trump was the accelerant. His appearance on the political scene in 2015 disrupted how the political news media did just about everything. And it forced a lot of questions:
What is truth?
How do we report on the truth?
How should we treat lies — especially when lies drive page views and tune-in?
Donald Trump descended down that escalator and declared he was running for President. And by doing so, he also declared a new era of journalism, though we didn’t know it. Over the course of four years in the White House, he told 30,573 lies — and the news media talked about most of them, spreading them to the four corners of the world.
By 2020, I started to question my own hold on reality.
Donald Trump knew how the media worked: people tune in for spectacle. What will he say next? He knew that if he lied, the media would repeat it, until it became accepted as truth by some subset of the population.
Are Mexicans really rapists?
Did he really build 400 miles of the wall between the U.S. and Mexico?
Is he really a billionaire?
Donald came along to a struggling journalism business and gave it exactly what it needed: ratings. Don’t take my word for it, take Les Moonves’: “Trump May Not Be Good for America, but He’s Damn Good for CBS.”
I would argue it’s tough to be prepared for something that you’ve never dealt with, though we all knew what Donald Trump was. But the news media was used to covering what was said, and what was happening. So they did exactly that: covered what Donald said, and what Donald did. Terrible stuff. But people tuned in.
In the process, the news media inadvertently advanced anti-democratic ideas into the mainstream, because the media isn’t pro-democracy, it is pro-revenue, even if The Washington Post claims that “Democracy Dies in Darkness” on its masthead.
Some examples:
The New York Times gave “alternative facts” Kellyanne Conway a guest column espousing the supposed normalcy of MAGA.
The media consistently gives space to Trump spokespeople to tell their side of the story, when it’s often a lie.
In general, it has been very hard for the news media to even call a lie, a lie.
The common justification is: well, people need to know these perspectives. I don’t disagree. But there are unintended consequences: abnormal things become normal. Lies become believed. But I believe the news media’s job is to report the truth, not to report what was said. The media can inform us of these perspectives without interviewing known liars, and they can also provide what is said in the context of what is and isn’t a lie. This is what the truth sandwich technique is for. And many journalists do their best here — but not near enough to contain the damage that’s been done.
Today, Donald Trump is facing 91 felony counts — and counting. But one third of Americans think he should not be charged with a crime. How can this be? Because the news media consistently questions whether Donald really broke the law, or offers platforms to people who call it a fake-election-interference-witch-hunt-whatever, and we hear this over and over. This introduces just enough doubt for us to wonder. But this is serious business and the media shouldn’t be offering “alternative facts.” These felony counts could send Donald and his cohorts to prison for the rest of their lives. January 6 was a serious attack on the American experiment of democracy. The two impeachments were also serious business. I have hoped with each of these events that the media would change its ways.
It hasn’t.
Chuck Todd just gave new MAGA candidate Vivek Ramaswamy a platform discussing why he would not have certified the election if he were VP in 2020. And CNN did the same thing. By Mr. Todd doing this, he normalizes these extreme perspectives.
If we are on a mission to help the news media adapt to the new political age we are in, we have to get specific on what it is doing wrong, and how to fix it.
I see four areas worth exploring:
Bothsidesism
Legacy media’s political framing has been Democrat vs. Republican. And so the conventional wisdom is to make sure “both sides” are represented, or to imply that both sides are guilty of the same thing. But the framing should actually be Democracy vs. Authoritarianism. The media needs to acknowledge that until the GOP changes, or dies, it is no longer what it used to be. This is why Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger are politically homeless in the GOP.
Doomsdaying
On the left, we have “tune in, Donald is going to get away with it all.” On the right, we have “tune in, the Democrats are coming for your guns .” Fear and rage drive tune-in, but this also drives an exhaustion that is not good for us. MSNBC and Fox News are both guilty, as are others. There’s an opening here for journalists to minimize mountains and maximize molehills with better context, likelihood of outcomes, and expertise. Donald Trump can’t make 91 felony counts magically disappear. And Democrats — even if they wanted to — will never be able to take away your guns.
Access Journalism
The New York Times and others need access to politicians in order to break news and attract audiences, so they will often agree to platforming political views. Access journalism like this leads to the viral, anonymous “I am part of the resistance” column from inside the Trump administration in 2018. And journalist Maggie Haberman is buddies with Donald in order to get interviews with him and to help sell her book. If all the media stopped playing this game, we could stop playing this game. We’d get information for free, because politicians need the media.
Fascist-normalizing
If we treat something as normal, people will believe it is. Politics used to be normal. But in 2023, this is not just a normal Republican primary debate, and it isn’t normal for the media to ask if charging Donald for all these crimes is too mean. The Overton Window has shifted dramatically.
As Historian Thomas Zimmer put it, “The New York Times has successfully played by the rules of neutrality-theater journalism, which prizes being above the fray and performing civil discourse from a position of nonpartisanship above all else — including accuracy and honesty.”
Or as The New York Times itself put it in 1939, Hitler was an ok guy:
And yikes, as I write this, The Wall Street Journal gave Donald Trump himself space for a letter to the editor. I can’t keep up.
I don’t have a problem with the news media making money. But there’s got to be a path forward to reporting on the news without hindering democracy itself. Donald Trump introduced the accelerant, and it is time for the news media to adjust. I’m hoping Fox News’s $787 million lawsuit loss will be a wake-up call that telling lies does not pay.
To wrap, there are disputed sources for this quote, but it should be a north star for the media:
“If one person says it’s raining and the other person says it is not, it is not your job to quote them both. It’s your job to look out of the window and see which is the truth.”
I’ve been calling out the political news media for years on Twitter. I had this idea to formalize it and write about it here. I do not know if people will find it interesting, but I hope my own interest is contagious. The political news media is doing it wrong and I want to change that. My mission is to help them adapt to the new political age we are in, in a way that is constructive to America’s future.
If we are successful in this mission, I won’t need to write about it.
An important and timely argument for shifting how the media reports on politics. We need more of this truth telling from journalists and less pandering for maximum reach and moneymaking schemes