The 2024 political coverage has 2016 vibes. That’s not good news.
I thought the propaganda-like news coverage of the Republican National Convention was a new low but then this week happened.
Do you remember, it was just three weeks ago, when a determined and relentless press corps yelled and interrupted a White House press briefing? Reporters demanded information about logs showing a Parkinson’s doctor had visited the White House, and were willing to be rude and even a bit hostile if that’s what it took to get the facts. (Some went too far over their skis, wrongly accusing White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre of withholding information.) What happened between then and now? Because that commitment to finding the facts was entirely missing this week at Donald Trump’s press event at Mar-A-Lago. For 93-minutes, Trump did what he always does: Respond to questions not with answers, but lies. And the assembled press corps sat by quietly and let him do it.
Again.
Much like the RNC meeting in Milwaukee and the June presidential debate before that, the news reporters covering Trump’s hastily called ‘news conference’ functioned more as props than as journalists. They are all quite willing to let the former president and convicted felon lie with abandon. I can’t say this enough, real journalists have a sacred bond with the American public, a bond based on a commitment to truth. Journalists break that bond when they use their pens, their video recording devices, their microphones, to platform and amplify lies.
I’m not saying Trump and his lies should be silenced. But after all this time, I think we should expect reporters to call out those lies as part of the reporting. Yet, as MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell noted: “not one of them dared to yell at Donald Trump today. Not one of them. Not one of them dared yell ‘you are not answering the question.’ O’Donnell is correct when he says not much has changed since 2016:
Watch: https://x.com/atrupar/status/1821730651977945228
For 9+ years, the news media has held Trump to a lower standard and even covered for him. Cleaning up Trump’s verbal gibberish -like many reporters did once again in stories about this week’s ‘news conference’ - paints a dishonest picture for Americans. While some outlets like Vanity Fair & The New Republic more accurately report on Trump’s discombobulated media outings, many do not. Guardian columnist Lenore Taylor called out this insult to truth when she wrote this in 2019: “I realized how much the reporting of Trump necessarily edits and parses his words, to force it into sequential paragraphs or impose meaning where it is difficult to detect.”
Five years later, it is still happening. As International Relations Professor Nicholas Grossman noted: “I don't really know why NY Times reporters decided that their job is to edit and sanitize Donald Trump, finding a point of coherence in an absurd rant to highlight for readers, or turning the words he actually said into something much more palpable, moderate, sane. But it sucks.”
Lots of people, in and out of journalism agree.
Lawyer and writer David Lurie added: “An unhinged nutcase ran incoherently and mendaciously, while the assembled press corps collectively pretended it was a normal question and answer session. It was surreal. And it was darkly funny, until one considered the huge price the nation has already paid for the farce.”
And Journalist James Fallows points out that the unhinged performance requires follow-up coverage about Trump’s mental acuity: ”Every *single* a big-media reporter who did a story on "concerns about Biden's cognition" has a journalistic, civic, intellectual, and "both-sides" obligation to devote comparable energy to Trump's neurological state.”
I feel like a broken record on this point but fact checking something after it happens is just not good enough. It has to be done in the moment for it to be meaningful. It’s not like the media outlets do not already have the facts and the technology available to do just that so each one of these news organizations is making a choice to not fact check Trump in real-time.
When he said his January 6th crowd was bigger than 1963 March on Washington, bigger than the crowd assembled to hear Martin Luther King’s I have a Dream speech, reporters should have called him out. The crowd size analysis is wrong, King’s crowd was almost 5 times larger. But also, is he really boasting about the size of the mob he assembled to attack our Capitol?
When he said no one was killed on January 6th, reporters should have not let him say another word until he acknowledged that was simply untrue. Instead they sat there, cameras rolling and let him dishonor the dead and bowdlerize the reporting about that terrible day. There are also the unasked questions including as Columnist Will Bunch wrote: “The only thing more shocking than the allegation that a US president took a $10 million bribe from a foreign dictator is that said bribee held a TV news conference and not a single journalist asked about it.”
I could go on. And on.
The press corps cannot make up for breaking faith with American news consumers by being extra tough on Kamala Harris. Given their easy treatment of Trump, that just makes them look biased. As MSNBC’s Joy Reid says: “The unearned deference Trump gets from the media is a terrible habit that must be broken and ignoring the Democratic candidate while hectoring her for access is not a good look for the media or for democracy. My profession must do better.”
Of course, the Vice President should sit down with journalists for in-depth interviews. Of course, reporters should dig into her positions on issues. But when they get the chance to ask her about these, will they rise to the occasion, or will they just ask her to respond to Mr. Trump’s lies like they did in a short gaggle on Thursday?
Every political reporter knows this is as important an election as they will ever cover. All I ask is that they actually cover it like it’s 2024, not 2016.
Jennifer Schulze is a Chicago journalist reporting on journalism. You can read her columns here and at Heartland Signal. Follow Jennifer on Threads @newsjennifer_schulze or Twitter/X @NewsJennifer.