San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Democracy, Trumpism and the role of the press
There is a school of thought that holds that if Donald Trump sweeps back into power in 2024, or loses narrowly but then plunges the United States into the kind of constitutional crisis he sought in 2020, the officially nonpartisan news media will have been an accessory to Trumpism. It will have failed to adequately emphasize Trump’s threat to democracy, chosen a disastrous evenhandedness over moral clarity and covered President Joe Biden (or perhaps Vice President Kamala Harris) like a normal politician instead of the republic’s last best hope.
This view, that media “neutrality” has a tacit pro-Trump tilt, recently found data-driven expression in a column by the Post’s Dana Milbank. In a study “using algorithms that give weight to certain adjectives based on their placement in the story,” Milbank reported that after a honeymoon, Biden’s media coverage has lately been as negative, or even more negative, than Trump’s coverage through most of 2020. Given the perils of a Trump resurgence, Milbank warned, this negativity means that “my colleagues in the media are serving as accessories to the murder of democracy.”
I think this point of view is wrong. Indeed, I think it’s this view of the press’ role that empowers demagogues, feeds polarization and makes crises in our system much more likely.
To understand why, let’s look at a case study where, at one level, the people emphasizing the press’ obligation to defend democracy have a point. This would be the Georgia Republican primary for governor, which will pit David Perdue, a former senator who lost his re-election bid in a 2021 runoff, against Brian Kemp, the conservative incumbent who is famously hated by Trump.
That hatred is the only reason this matchup exists: He is angry at Kemp for fulfilling his obligations as Georgia’s governor instead of going along with the “Stop the Steal” charade, he’s eager to see the incumbent beaten, and he’s hoping that either Perdue or Vernon Jones, a more overtly MAGA-ish candidate, can do the job for him.
As a result, the Georgia governor’s primary will effectively be a referendum not just on Trump’s general power in the GOP but also on his specific ability to bully Republican elected officials in the event of a contested election. And reporters have an obligation to stress the reasons this matchup is happening and its dangerous implications for how GOP officials might respond to a future attempt to overturn a presidential vote.
But now comes the question: Is that the only thing that a responsible press is allowed to report during the campaign? Suppose that midway through the race, a huge scandal erupts involving corruption that implicates Kemp. Should journalists decline to cover it because a Kemp loss would empower anti-democratic forces? Or suppose the economy in Georgia tanks just before the primary or COVID cases surge. Should civic-minded reporters highlight those stories, knowing they may help Perdue win, or should they bury them, because democracy is in the balance?
Or suppose a woman comes forward with an allegation of harassment against Perdue that doesn’t meet the normal standards for publication. Should journalists run with it anyway, on the theory it would be good for American democracy if Perdue goes the way of Roy Moore and they can always correct the record later if the story falls apart?
You can guess my answers to these questions. They are principled answers, reflecting a journalistic obligation to the truth that cannot be set aside for the sake of certain political results, however desirable for democracy those results may seem.
But they are also pragmatic answers, because a journalism that conspicuously shades the truth or tries to hide self-evident realities for the sake of some higher cause will lose the trust of some of the people it’s trying to steer away from demagogy — undercutting the very democratic order it’s setting out to save.
I think this has happened already. The national news media helped Trump through the Republican primaries in 2016, by giving him celebrity-level hype at every other candidate’s expense. But from his shocking November victory onward, much of the press adopted exactly the selfunderstanding that its critics are still urging as the Only Way to Stop Trump — positioning itself as the guardian of democracy, a moral arbiter rather than a neutral referee, determined to make Trump’s abnormal qualities and authoritarian tendencies the central story of his presidency.
The results of this mindset, unfortunately, included a lot of not particularly great journalism. The emergency mentality conflated Trumpian sordidness with something world-historical and treasonous, as in the overwrought Russia coverage seeded by the Steele dossier. It turned figures peripheral to national politics, from Nick Sandmann to Kyle Rittenhouse, into temporary avatars of incipient fascism. It invented anti-Trump paladins, from Michael Avenatti to Andrew Cuomo, who turned out to embody their own sort of moral turpitude. And it instilled an industrywide fear, palpable throughout the 2020 election, of any kind of coverage that might give too much aid and comfort to Trumpism — whether it touched on the summertime riots or Hunter Biden’s business dealings.
Now you could argue that this mindset achieved practical success, since Trump did lose in 2020. But he didn’t lose overwhelmingly, he gained voters in places the establishment did not expect, and he was able to turn media hostility to his advantage in his quest to keep control of his party. Meanwhile, the public’s trust in the national press declined during the Trump era and became radically more polarized, with Democrats and Democraticleaning independents maintaining a degree of confidence in the media and Republicans and Republican-leaning independents going very much the other way.
This points to the essential problem with the idea that just a little less media neutrality, a little more overt alarmism, would put Trumpism in its place. You can’t suppress a populist insurgency just by rallying the establishment if suspicion of the establishment is precisely what’s generating support for populism in the first place. Instead, you need to tell the truth about populism’s dangers while convincing skeptical readers you can be trusted to describe reality in full.
Which brings us to Joe Biden’s press coverage. I have a lot of doubts about the Milbank negativity algorithms, both because of the methodological problems identified by analysts like Nate Silver and also because, as a newsreader, my sense is that Trump’s negative coverage reflected more stalwart opposition (the president we oppose is being terrible again) while in Biden’s case the negativity often coexists with implicit sympathy (the president we support is blowing it).
But there’s no question that the current administration’s coverage has been pretty grim of late.
But it’s turned grim for reasons that an objective and serious press corps would need to acknowledge to have any credibility. Piece by piece, you can critique the media’s handling of the past few months — I think the press coverage of the Afghanistan withdrawal was overwrought, for instance — but here’s the overall picture: A president who ran on restoring normalcy is dealing with a pandemic that refuses to depart, rising inflation that his own White House didn’t predict, a border-crossing crisis that was likewise unanticipated, increasing military bellicosity from our major adversaries, stubbornly high homicide rates in liberal cities, a party that just lost a critical gubernatorial race and a stalled legislative agenda.
Moreover, he’s confronting all this while showing the effects of advancing age, even as his semianointed successor appears more and more like the protagonist of her own private “Veep.”
Can some of these challenges recede and Biden’s situation improve? No doubt. But a news media charged with describing reality would accomplish absolutely nothing for the country if it tried to bury all these problems under headlines about Trump.
And one of the people for whom this approach would accomplish nothing is Biden himself. We just had an object lesson in what happens when the public dissatisfied with liberal governance gets a long lecture on why it should never vote Republican because of Trump: That was
Terry McAuliffe’s argument in a state that went for Biden by 10 points, and McAuliffe lost. Having the media deliver that lecture nationally is likely to yield the same result for Democrats — not Trumpism’s defeat but their own.
Far wiser, instead, to treat negative coverage as an example of the press living up to its primary mission, the accurate description of reality — which is still the place where the Biden administration and liberalism need a better strategy if they hope to keep the country on their side.