Abstract
Liberal US media worry that only one candidate will interest readers and viewers in the election this year
“‘Are we truly so precious?’ Dean Baquet, the executive editor of The New York Times, asked me one Wednesday evening in June 2020.” So began a memorable, if desperately overlong, diatribe in a December issue of The Economist that broke not only with the magazine’s usual commitment to conciseness but also with its aversion to bylines.
The author was James Bennet and he had a lot to get off his chest as he spent 17,000 words answering Baquet’s question with a resounding “Yes”. Bennet, now at The Economist, was the American journalist forced out as comment section editor of the NYT in 2020 for the sin of publishing an opinion piece by a Republican senator that deeply upset many of his more sensitive and progressive colleagues – prompting Baquet’s bemused question.
The senator, Tom Cotton of Arkansas, had suggested President Trump use the military to protect people and businesses from the violent protests and looting during the Black Lives Matter uproar that racked US cities that summer. Even Baquet eventually parroted the line put out by TNYT staff union that Cotton’s article was “a clear threat to the health and safety of the journalists we represent”.
From Twitter-obsessed, woke-behind-the-ears young reporters to cynical, hypocritical senior editors and owners, Bennet didn’t spare anyone in his demolition of a newspaper that had fallen so far from its old mission to report the news without bias – “Without Fear or Favour”, to quote its bold 1896 mission statement – that a senior colleague seriously suggested he might print trigger warnings next to articles written by conservatives.
“The Times’s problem has metastasised from liberal bias to illiberal bias, from an inclination to favour one side of the national debate to an impulse to shut debate down altogether,” he wrote. “Fair-minded, truth-seeking journalism that aspires to be open and objective” has “fallen out of fashion not just with journalists at The Times and other mainstream publications but at some of the most prestigious schools of journalism”.
TNYT’s partisanship was in recent years at its worst, he suggested, over Donald Trump and his supporters. While blindly convincing themselves that there could be no other reason for anyone voting for him other than that they were racist, TNYT journalists did their utmost to damage Trump and help his Democrat opponents, said Bennet. “The Times was slow to break it to its readers that there was less to Trump’s ties to Russia than they were hoping, and more to Hunter Biden’s laptop, that Trump might be right that Covid came from a Chinese lab, that masks were not always effective against the virus, that shutting down schools for many months was a bad idea,” he wrote.
None of this will come as particularly big news to seasoned NYT readers (my biggest shock was to learn that Bennet’s Comment Section had 100 staff – a hundred!), but the essay does provide an interesting perspective on how the US media might report on this year’s presidential election, in which Trump seems more than likely to be the Republican nominee.
The conventional wisdom is that America’s largely pro-Democrat mainstream media got it badly wrong in 2016 when it treated him as a joke and gave him way too much airtime before realising its error too late. In 2020, the media was wiser to him but, for all its disgust, still couldn’t resist being dragged into the tractor beam of his dread charisma and unrelenting talent for creating controversy and novelty.
As in 2016, he remained the centre of attention in election coverage four years later – according to research at Harvard, while right-wing Fox News predictably gave him more coverage than Biden by a ratio of three to two, on left-leaning CBS News the ratio was an even more Trumptastic two to one.
He’ll inevitably hog the limelight again this year as he already proved by snubbing the televised debates between his fellow Republican nominees and still invariably managing to get more media attention just by holding some bog-standard rally the same night. If he’s up against the incumbent president, that dominance will be all the more assured. Unless you enjoy watching a Biden appearance simply to wait for him to mess up his autocue lines or stumble off in the wrong direction at the end, you’d have to agree he’s hardly TV gold.
Determined not to be taken for a ride again and give Trump coverage on his terms, the liberal media is currently twisting itself into knots to work out how to get it right this time. The New York Times (sorry to keep harping on about them but they take such matters very seriously) recently organised a summit to discuss just this question. In grand earnest American journalism style, a group of bigwigs from print, online and broadcasting – and described as a “task force” – gathered around a long conference table and chewed over some bleak facts. These included a Gallup poll showing that only 32 per cent of Americans now trust the media (an all-time low) and another recent survey which found that four out of five voters are worried about the state of democracy in the US.
While a few of the more idealistic members of TNYT’s “task force” suggested that it was time to ignore Trump and concentrate election coverage on local state-level issues such as senate races, one can imagine others had to stifle a yawn. Hate him as they do, they can’t resist him. Especially the extra punters he brings to their stations and websites. “Every joke, every little movement of his body,” rhapsodised the veteran TV journalist Lesley Stahl of CBS’s 60 Minutes as she recalled cable television’s endless coverage of Trump in 2016. “He has so much energy, it really is captivating.”
Time to start taking Trump seriously
Some media observers have warned that Americans have come so accustomed to the craziness of Trump that they simply ignore much of what he says, such as his suggestion that shoplifters should be shot or that he’d like to be a dictator for a day. And they shouldn’t take it seriously anyway, some add, as it’s all rhetoric rather than a statement of intent.
His staunchest media opponents, however, would rather not let him off the hook so easily. He could very easily be president again, they say, so of course everything that comes out of that motormouth needs to be taken seriously. In that vein, Jay Rosen, of New York University’s School of Journalism, has urged journalists to stop covering the election as if it’s a horserace and instead focus on the “stakes” for the US if Trump wins and does what he promises to do. Many news organisations – from The Washington Post, Atlantic magazine and Associated Press to CNN and MSNBC – have already starting doing exactly that.
According to PBS, America’s Mini-Me equivalent of BBC TV, which last month devoted a news programme segment to the media’s approach to the election, Trump’s “anti-democratic” behaviour meant “how to cover the former president’s campaign presents one of the greatest challenges that journalists are facing”.
The conservative media has its own conundrum – who exactly is it going to support? After all, most of it – Fox News, The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post – is controlled by Rupert Murdoch, who ditched Trump after his behaviour in the January 6 attack on the US Capitol. The Murdoch camp then disastrously plumped instead for Florida governor Ron DeSantis. After he proved an electoral damp squib, they secretly hoped that relatively moderate Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin might stand so they could get behind him (but he didn’t stand). Now, the Murdoch press is very likely to be stuck with a Republican nominee they’ve been sticking the knife into for some time.
Of course, there’s another option that’s drastic but not entirely unfeasible. Just as Murdoch once gave up on the Tories and got behind Tony Blair, he might back a Democrat. Of course, it would have to be the right Democrat, which probably isn’t Joe Biden. It’s really hard for a party colleague to run against a sitting president but if the latter were incapacitated or persuaded to step aside for the good of the country, it’s not impossible. There are whispers – that were shared with me by a senior Murdoch journalist, in fact – about US Senator Amy Klobuchar and, particularly, Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer.
The entire mainstream media in lockstep to keep The Donald out of the White House? Now that would put a spring in Trump’s step as he once again delights an election rally with a diatribe against the folks he calls “the enemy of the people”.
