Election Countdown, 80 Days to Go: Media Failure Reaches a Turning Point.
The tone of American politics may finally be brightening. Maybe the mainstream press will recognize that a time for change has come for it as well.
The Australian breakdance competitor known as Raygun received a judges’ score of zero at the Paris Olympics. Sports journalists who covered the controversy over her performance were careful not to equate what she was doing with the feats of other athletes. It’s a useful lesson in avoiding false-equivalence for political reporters when writing about Donald Trump. (Photo Ezra Shaw/Getty Images.)
This post is about a recent convergence of articles, commentaries, broadcasts, and other expressions that together might constitute something like a movement. It is a movement demanding greater reckoning, accountability, or at least awareness from the mainstream press.
The most dramatic and important organic “movement” of the past three weeks is the near-instant coalescence of support around Kamala Harris and then Tim Walz, after Joe Biden’s wise decision to step aside. I’ve been following presidential campaigns for a long time and have never seen anything like the speed or enthusiasm of this change.1
But I’ve been following “what’s wrong with the press?” complaints for a long time too—I wrote a whole book on the subject nearly 30 years ago. What is happening now seems more coherent and urgent than at other times.2 That’s a subjective call, I know. So let me lay out the case for thinking things might be different this time.
Why now?
I think several conditions are focusing attention on the press at this moment. They involve varieties of emperor’s-new-clothes situations: People calling out the gap between what the mainstream press thinks it is doing, and how its choices and impacts look from outside. All lot of these examples are appearing all at once. For instance:
—The hacked documents gap.
Eight years ago, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other leading news organizations raced to publish embarrassing secrets about the Hillary Clinton campaign, extracted and fed through Wikileaks by Russian-led email hackers. Please remember: The flood of leaked documents began just one hour after release of the damning Access Hollywood video—“Grab ‘em by…”—which at the time, less than a month before the election, seemed to have the potential to force Donald Trump out of the race.
Instead, over the next few weeks, the leaked emails rivaled Access Hollywood for press attention. Eventually they were part of the reason that “but her emails” wound up as the dominant piece of information most voters heard about Clinton during the campaign.3
Now the gap, or contrast: This past weekend Politico reported that it, plus the NYT and the Washington Post, had again received hacked data, this time about the Trump campaign. The hacking was again foreign-directed, apparently from Iran. But this time the news outlets thought it wiser not to publish info aimed at disrupting a campaign. That is: Last time, they quickly headlined the stolen info. This time, they are sitting on it. Regardless of rationale, as a blunt reality the editors’ decision in 2016 enabled (and probably elected) Donald Trump. Their decision in 2024 protects him.
Why the difference? No mainstream editor has stepped forward to explain. Instead, Supreme Court-style, they effectively ask us to trust that they are doing the right thing. Brian Beutler summed up the situation in an excellent Substack post:
If Politico and the Washington Post and the New York Times suddenly have … misgivings about their 2016 conduct… they have a choice to make: They can either hold Trump to the same standard as Clinton, and cover the contents of his campaign’s emails breathlessly. Or, for the first time in nearly a decade, they can be candid with their subscribers regarding their past failures. Otherwise, they will have chosen, de facto, to thumb the scales of our elections for Donald Trump.
—The ‘cognition’ gap.
Especially after Robert Hur’s notorious description of Joe Biden as “an elderly man with a poor memory,” the state of Joe Biden’s cognition became the “but her emails!” of 2024. His gaffe in saying “president of Mexico” rather than “president of Egypt” made the front pages of all the major newspapers. Neurologists were sought out for their views. After Biden’s devastating on-camera freezes during his debate with Trump in June, one New York Times reporter usefully tweeted out the long chronology of Times stories on whether Biden’s age made him unfit to govern.
On July 11—two weeks after the debate, ten days before his decision to drop out—Biden showed sweeping factual mastery through an hour-long evening press conference about foreign policy. But press and broadcast coverage was dominated by two split-second gaffes Biden made that same day: Introducing Ukraine’s President Zelensky as “President Putin” (before catching and correcting himself) and calling Vice President Harris “Vice President Trump” (and not catching that in real time).
Those were bad. But then compare:
Over the past ten days, Donald Trump has had one grievance-and-fantasy- filled public appearance after another, in an ever more desperate attempt to reclaim the spotlight from Harris and Walz. He’s had rallies, and rallies packaged as press conferences. He has rambled with Elon Musk. He has told a conference of Black journalists that Kamala Harris was a phony who recently “happened to turn Black.” He has insulted Medal of Honor recipients and remembered events that never occurred. He has acted as if people might believe that his crowd on January 6 was bigger than Martin Luther King Jr’s for the “I have a dream!” address in 1963. He has invented statistics and bounced from topic to topic like a pachinko ball.
Nearly everything he has said in this time has been a fantasy or a lie.
And yet: No major news organization has yet run even one serious story about the state of Trump’s cognition and thus of his fitness for office. We saw dozens of these about Biden; so far, none about Trump. Several have analyzed his “meandering” style—but as a messaging challenge for the campaign, not as a governing threat for the nation.
For years now Trump’s lies—whether about the economy or crowd size—have been buffed up in the major media as “misstatements” or “claims without evidence.” Similarly his disordered, slurring, ever more stumbling presentations are “musings” (in a NYT story today) rather than, as they were for Biden, danger signs.4
As Greg Wilson put it three days ago on Xitter:
The public should demand a press conference by the publishers of the NYTimes, Washington Post, WSJ and make them answer questions as to why they won't print stories analyzing Trump's in-public mental deterioration. This can’t go on.
—The Raygun gap: Or, the brutal sandpaper of normalization.
As noted, almost everything Donald Trump has said in these past ten days has been abnormal by any logical, factual, or historic standard. That’s not the case with Kamala Harris and Tim Walz.