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Even before the owners of the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post overruled their editorial boards and, without warning or explanation, spiked endorsements of Kamala Harris—triggering resignations of journalists, a public uproar, and mass subscription cancellations—liberal disappointment and anger with some of the largest national news organizations was already boiling over.
Of course, the right-wing has had it out for the press across generations and continents, labeling news media Lügenpresse (“the lying press”) or “fake news.” Donald Trump has attacked and threatened the press. That is not new. Nor is liberal loathing of Rupert Murdoch’s bully pulpits, which act as political agents (though the Wall Street Journal editorial board just mined fresh depths, dismissing the threat of fascism as merely a meme and marking Democrats as “the national socialists”).
What is new and striking is the current wave of grievances regarding political coverage coming from once-devoted liberal readers as well as experienced journalists.
Margaret Sullivan, the ne plus ultra of public editors at the Times before the job was eliminated there and elsewhere, took to The Guardian to accuse media of failing to fairly cover Harris, as multiple outlets uncritically amplified the racist slur of “DEI candidate.” In her Substack newsletter, Sullivan aired the outrage of former Times investigative reporter James Risen over a Times story that he believed equated Harris’s housing policy with Trump’s threat to free up housing stock via mass deportation, dignifying the latter by treating it as a serious plan.
James Fallows is hardly new to media criticism, having written Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy in 1996. Lately on his Substack newsletter of the same name and on Twitter (I won’t call it X), he examines the Times’ vast overcoverage of Hillary Clinton’s emails in 2016 compared with its sotto voce display of unsealed documents in Trump’s election interference case. Michael Podhorzer, a fellow at the Center for American Progress, performed a similar analysis in a post titled “Sleepwalking Our Way to Fascism,” measuring “how much less attention this presidential contest is receiving in general, and Trump’s fascist intentions in particular.”
Mark Jacob, a former metro editor of the Chicago Tribune who left the field in frustration, vents his despair in tweets: “The New York Times keeps tiptoeing up to calling Trump a fascist. If the Times went ahead and stated that obvious fact, they’d recover some of the credibility they’ve lost in recent years.… It’s amazing to me that news people keep doing the same job day after day with a sense of detachment and calm, as if they somehow don’t know that HOLY CRAP—A FASCIST MADMAN IS RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT AND JUST MIGHT WIN.”
Similar criticism comes from journalists of various backgrounds, including former broadcast news executive Jennifer Schulze, columnist Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Daily News, former Washington Post journalist Dan Froomkin, New Republic writer Greg Sargent, former News & Record editor John L. Robinson, author David Simon, and blogger Parker Molloy. It comes, too, from inside the mass-media house. MSNBC’s Joy Reid, Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezinski, Stephanie Ruhle, and Mike Barnicle call out news media for euphemizing Trump’s rhetoric and behavior. Even from within the Times, Jamelle Bouie and Nikole Hannah-Jones take to social media to carefully offer journalism lessons. And, of course, there is the New York Times Pitchbot’s daily reminder of the self-parody that much of political journalism has become.
The critiques follow common themes:
- Bothsidesing: the attempt, as NYU’s Jay Rosen has explained, to impose false balance and symmetry on the right’s clearly asymmetrical attack on institutions as foundational as elections, democracy, expertise, and truth. “The conflict with honest journalism,” Rosen wrote, “is structural.”
- False equivalence: newsrooms and columnists alike harped on Joe Biden’s age and its effects and hounded him from the race but practically shrugged at Trump’s unstable and unfit behavior. When Times chief White House correspondent Peter Baker did examine Trump’s “increasingly angry and rambling” speeches, he did so as a “question of age,” attributing malevolent and threatening behavior to senility over venality. Two weeks before Election Day, Baker finally delivered a comprehensive catalogue of Trump’s scandals and failures, which could have been written a year ago, not after voting had already begun.
- Sanewashing: the term, coined by the journalist Aaron Rupar, describes the practice of attempting to explain, excuse, and normalize demented, deranged, and extremist behavior.
- Horse-race coverage: an obsession with poll numbers and attempts to predict electoral outcomes rather than examine public policy proposals—or covering the odds rather than the stakes, as Rosen puts it. (The Times recently began running “What’s at Stake” on the top of its homepage, but it’s more a promotional vehicle than a change in practice.)
- Selective fact-checking: out-of-context nitpicks make fact-checking—which was all the rage as a cure for disinformation after 2016—increasingly seem like a kind of pedantry. The podcast If Books Could Kill cited Post fact-checker Amy Gardner’s dinging of Biden’s Democratic National Convention speech for saying that Trump “will refuse to accept the election results if he loses again.” (Gardner’s check: “That’s not true. Trump just hasn’t said that he would accept.”) Over Chris Lehmann’s skewering of such “elite impartiality,” The Nation’s headline declared, “Quibbling over technical errors is a fool’s errand when one major faction is seizing on organized lying as a mass recruitment tactic.”
The avalanche of liberal criticism became so unavoidable that NPR’s Steve Inskeep had to ask Times executive editor Joe Kahn to respond.
Inskeep: “There is, as you know very well, a long-standing conservative or Republican critique of the New York Times. But the special passion in criticism of the Times in this election cycle seems to me to be on the left. You’re nodding. Why do you think that is?”
Kahn: “It’s a good question, and I struggle with it often, because the left has really high expectations of the New York Times—I think some of them, honestly, distorted. There’s a desire to see one of the leading journalistic institutions in American life be a full-throated supporter of the view that many on the left have, which is that Donald Trump is an existential threat to our society, and that all of the New York Times’ coverage should be uniform in emphasizing that point day in and day out. And then we would be playing the role that some on the left see as our proper role.”
I would define journalism’s role in this moment differently: to report on the imminent threat of fascism in the context of history. But first, one must recognize it.
I don’t wish to engage in semantic debates over labels—as NPR has over the words lie and racism. General Mark A. Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, did editors everywhere a favor when he brought “fascism” into public discourse, quoted in Bob Woodward’s book War, calling his former commander in chief a “fascist to the core” and “the most dangerous person to this country.” It shouldn’t have taken the top military brass to bring fascism to the front pages of America’s newspapers.
The label itself should merely act as an opening for a deeper explanation of context and history. Bouie, a columnist at the Times, provides a model for that kind of journalism. He did it in regard to Milley’s statement, writing, “There is no precedent for such a thing in American history—no example of another time when a high-ranking leader of the nation’s armed forces felt compelled to warn the public of the danger posed by its once and perhaps future chief executive.”
Bouie regularly calls on history for explanation, something I wish more newsroom journalists would do. He did it in the case of Trump and J.D. Vance’s bilious lie about Haitians eating cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio. In a TikTok video, Bouie explained, “What they’re doing is called a blood libel. It is smearing a group of people with the accusation that they are killing—in the case of Jews in medieval Europe, killing children; in the case of Haitian immigrants in 2024 United States, killing pets and eating them, using them for some malign purpose. And the purpose and the point of a blood libel is to incite violence…to drive people to commit violence against others out of fear, anger, and hatred.”
Bouie said he doesn’t want to engage in media criticism—I regret that journalists in these institutions are discouraged from doing so—but he added that the coverage of this lie in national media does not address the core of what is happening, which is: “Trump and Vance are trying to start a race riot.”
In a debate with NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik recorded for the public-radio podcast Question Everything, I cited the Springfield blood libel as a case of news media’s failure. Folkenflik disagreed, pointing to the Wall Street Journal’s reporting, which confirmed that the accusations were untrue. I argued that fact-checking is not nearly enough when what is needed is an explanation of the evidence, roots, and perils of the racism and fascism at hand.
Journalists like to say they write the first draft of history. Too often that means they ignore history. Today I urge journalists to reread Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (or at least to listen to the podcast) so as to understand her historical antecedents. Arendt observed in Nazi Germany and the Stalinist Soviet Union “such unexpected and unpredicted phenomena as the radical loss of self-interest, the cynical or bored indifference in the face of death or other personal catastrophes, the passionate inclination toward the most abstract notions as guides for life, and the general contempt for even the most obvious rules of common sense.” Abstract notions as guides for life with contempt for common sense—seem familiar? Are guns, abortion, trans prisoners, and Springfield’s cats truly the most pressing everyday concerns in the lives of Trump voters? Or is saying such things to reporters and pollsters a loyalty test, a signal of belonging to this rising authoritarian movement?
Recently, Jacob tweeted a paragraph from a Times report by Jonathan Swan, Maggie Haberman, and Ruth Igielnik that said Trump’s “allies worry that some of his more extreme immigration rhetoric—like his baseless claim that Haitian immigrants are eating cats and dogs—risks turning off moderate voters whose support he needs.” This is what makes us liberal critics sigh. Why “baseless claim” and not “racist lie”? And to paint this as merely a risky campaign tactic instead of what it is—an incitement to race hate and violence—is an abrogation of journalistic responsibility.
I have taken to the socials criticizing our biggest journalistic institutions using the hashtags #BrokenTimes, #BrokenPost, and #MurdochJournal—and praising them with #GoodTimes and #GoodPost, for there is yet much important journalism coming from many reporters there. My posts are often met with calls to cancel subscriptions (it appears as if some people have dozens of subs to drop) and conspiracy theories about reporters and editors wanting Trump to win or publishers risking democracy for the clicks.
The Times’ Haberman counters with a conspiracy theory of her own, telling NPR’s Dave Davies: “I think there is an industry, bluntly, Dave, that is dedicated toward attacking the media, especially as it relates to covering Donald Trump and all coverage of Trump. And I think that Trump is a really difficult figure to cover because he challenges news media.… What happens with this industry on the left that attacks the press is that it gets described as a grand conspiracy to try to help Trump somehow, as opposed to people doing their job on daily deadlines and not always hitting the mark because we are humans. And we are doing our best under a very challenging set of circumstances.”
Here journalists and their audiences are failing to communicate with and appreciate each other: Haberman saying that liberal critics do not understand how hard it is for journalists to cover Trump; critics wondering how journalists can miss adequately covering the story of their lifetimes—fascism at the door.
I do not believe that these journalists at the Times, the Post, CNN, or NPR are in the tank for Trump. I will not cancel my subscriptions, for I both want to support the good and necessary journalism still produced there and to stay on the case of these institutions. But I am disappointed in them, and often angry, particularly at editors, whose job it is to write headlines, decide which stories get promoted, and provide a sense of context and urgency. I wonder what is happening inside.
I have theories. One is that ever since the Times’ first ombudsman, Daniel Okrent, declared in 2004 that of course the paper is liberal, it has been trying to demonstrate that it isn’t; same for most every journalist operating outside of Murdoch’s empire. In his memoir Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos and the Washington Post, former Post executive editor Martin Baron seems to lament learning that “by the fall of 2018, the percentage of our digital subscribers who considered themselves somewhat or very conservative was in the single digits, with slightly more than 80 percent ‘very’ or ‘somewhat’ liberal.” I think an editor should be glad to know who the readers are and how better to serve them—rather than struggling to entice conservatives who would never read the newspaper. The simplest theory, then, is that editors irritate liberals to bolster their bona fides as not liberal for conservatives.
In a variation on this theory, Norm Ornstein, a contributing editor at The Atlantic, proposes that “truly abnormal behavior does not fit in a system framed to deal with normal politics. So normalizing the abnormal is the easy way out. And self-analysis, internal criticism, a feedback mechanism, disappeared with the end of the public editor. Combine that with the sensitivity to appearing to [have] a liberal news bias, and it means: respond to right-wing critiques, but snarl at those they see as coming from the left, no matter how thoughtful or responsible.”
Another theory begins with what Rosen posited in 2018: that once the bulk of revenue for the Times shifted from advertising to subscriptions, the relationship of the newsroom to its public would change. “The readers of the New York Times have more power now,” he wrote. “One of the joys of having a subscription to the Times is threatening to cancel it.” One might think that in such an economic circumstance, the Times would bend over backwards to please its liberal readers. Instead, it seems as if its editors go out of their way to peeve and even insult them. Building on Rosen’s theory, I wonder whether this is their way of saying to readers: “See, you don’t own us.” When A.G. Sulzberger preaches his sermon of independence, I ask: Independent of whom? The paper’s own readers?
My core theory—one I explore in two recent books, The Gutenberg Parenthesis and Magazine—is that we are arriving at the end of the long century of mass media, and mass media are panicked about it. Mass media were born with technology: the mechanization of print with steam-powered presses, cheap paper, and the Linotype in the late nineteenth century. Prior to that industrialization, the average circulation of a daily newspaper in the United States was only 4,000. Afterwards, at the turn of the last century, New York alone still boasted 46 daily and 250 weekly newspapers and magazines, until broadcast would kill most, the internet imperiling the rest. Some in the incumbent institutions of mass media cannot bear to surrender their agenda-setting power over public discourse. They resent new competition and the voices—often critical—in newsletters, podcasts, blogs, and social media. Note well that these are often voices who for too long were not represented in “mainstream” media and its newsrooms, which is all the more reason to hear them now. With the internet, we have the opportunity to return to media at a human scale.
In a time when hedge-fund-owned newspaper chains are cut to the marrow and the news business as a whole faces existential economic jeopardy, why concentrate criticism on national media? As Ornstein explains, “We focus on the NYT because it is the flagship, the paper of record still, the outlet from which other journalists take their cues. It deserves that title, since it still has remarkable journalists and reporting. But when it falls short, as happens all too often, the consequences reverberate.” That, too, explains why the decisions at the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and most recently USA Today to kill endorsements just days before the election are so deeply unsettling. Many critics fear it is an example of what the historian Timothy Snyder calls “anticipatory obedience.” Baron reacted forcefully to the Post’s decision to withhold its endorsement: “This is cowardice, with democracy as its casualty.” He added that Trump “will see this as an invitation to further intimidate” Jeff Bezos, and that the decision exhibited “disturbing spinelessness at an institution famed for courage.”
Bezos responded to criticism of his decision killing the endorsement by arguing that Americans do not trust the news media. What he cannot see is that by his action, Bezos drove away many of the people who still held some measure of faith in established news media: the liberals who are now canceling subscriptions. In some ways worse, Bezos destroyed trust within the newsroom he owns and among opinion journalists who are writing protests, even resigning.
I have been engaging in painful reflection about the field to which I have devoted fifty years of my career, the past eighteen as an educator. My students are my own last, best hope for journalism, as I see them enter and start mostly new news enterprises, questioning and challenging failed precedents from the past. I wonder whether to give up on incumbent, institutional news media. Can these institutions be reformed? I do not know. Their only hope is to listen to and learn from good-faith criticism coming from fellow journalists and loyal readers. Like the Times Pitchbot, I choose not to give up, not yet. As its pseudonymous author, @DougJBalloon, recently tweeted: “I really do wish the Times well. If you want to be a true friend, you have to be honest, and unmerciful.”
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