Good Journalism Will Not Save Us From Trump

But bad journalism can doom us.

"President Trump Talks to Reporters" by The White House is marked with Public Domain Mark 1.0.

It’s hard to know precisely how many Americans would cheer for full-on fascism if it were offered to them. Poll questions testing people’s response to the prospect of a leader willing to “break some rules if that’s what it takes” offer hints, but that’s all; it’s one thing to nod at the idea in the abstract, and another to vote for a candidate promising to do away with democracy.

But that’s precisely what Americans will have the opportunity to do in 11 months, and all indications are that at least 48 percent or so of them will do so, as long as they think that the power of the state will be wielded against those they despise. So what can the news media do to confront the fact that Donald Trump is an even greater threat to the continuation of the American political experiment than he was eight years ago? 

The unfortunate answer is that good journalism will not save us from Trump. Bad journalism, however, can ensure his election, just as it did in 2016.

This is an uncomfortable thing for those of us who care about journalism to grapple with. But if Trump poses a genuine danger to the survival of democracy — and he does — how should responsible journalists approach the 2024 campaign? One answer is provided by NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen, who argues that reporters should focus on “not the odds, but the stakes.” Not the latest polls or the strategies the candidates are using to persuade swing voters, but what Trump would do in another term and how it would affect all of us. 

That’s a good place to start, and the more coverage we can get of the stakes, the more informed we’ll be. But that doesn’t mean that coverage of the stakes will ensure that Trump loses. And that, I suspect, is what liberals offering critiques of the news media are really after: not just the most responsible journalism, but journalism that will make it impossible for Trump to win. 

That reflects a charming but probably naïve view of both journalism and the voting public. The trouble is not only that most people aren’t reading lengthy reportage on the alarming details of Trump’s plans to remake the American political system, but that a substantial chunk of them would not be dissuaded from supporting him even if they grasped the full and horrifying implications of another Trump term. In fact, they’d be all too happy to see it. 

We’ve been searching for the answer since 2015, and we still can’t find it

I recently went back to listen to an interview I did in mid-2016 on the NPR show “On The Media” in which then-cohost Bob Garfield and I discussed the right way for the media to describe Trump and what he was doing. Garfield wanted more aggressive condemnations from reporters, but I wasn’t sure what precisely that would look like or what effect it was likely to have, even as I myself (as an opinion writer) was condemning Trump in print literally every day. Would it really make a difference if every Trump story began, “Amoral con man and Republican nominee Donald Trump today gave a speech on immigration…”? I didn’t have an answer, but I doubted it. 

Nor do I have one today, at least not a very satisfying one. We do know, however, that there are bad ways to discuss Trump. For instance, the Associated Press recently wrote a story about Trump’s plans to, among other things, invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy the military to crush civil demonstrations, i.e. dissent against him. It’s good that they’re paying attention to that issue, but the story was headlined, “Trump hints at expanded role for the military within the US. A legacy law gives him few guardrails.” This is a distressingly common halfway approach to reporting on Trump: Detail the terrifying things he either has done or plans to do, but wrap it in a package that downplays its effects.

Even more dangerous is the press’ tendency to look for ways to “balance” the inevitably critical coverage of Trump (even if it isn’t nearly critical enough) by making false equivalences with relatively minor missteps or misdeeds from his opponent. On one hand, Trump is promising fascism, while on the other, Joe Biden is old! Americans have doubts about both candidates. 

In its worst form, you get this:

I can give you a stone-cold guarantee that there will be points in the next year when relatively trivial things Joe Biden has done will be given blanket coverage, as reporters try desperately to show that even in the face of a profound threat to our political system, they retain their commitment to “objectivity.”

The best Trump journalism falls down the memory hole

That’s hardly the only problem. One of the most frustrating things about the way Trump has always been covered is that there will be terrific journalism uncovering the details of his abhorrent wrongdoing, but then it will be forgotten within a day or two. In 2016, for instance, USA Today did a terrific exposé on the enormous number of small businesses Trump had stiffed over the years, in some cases financially ruining people who lacked the resources to fight back. It was extraordinarily revealing of what kind of person he is and how he conducts business. As far as I know, he never had to answer questions about it. 

Then there was the detailed investigation the New York Times performed on years of Trump family documents that clearly demonstrated that Fred Trump and his children, especially Donald, had engaged in a years-long conspiracy that defrauded the U.S. government of hundreds of millions of dollars. I wrote about it at the time, begging that it not fall down the memory hole. Which it quickly did. 

That report came out in 2018, but it didn’t have nearly the effect on the world that the same paper’s frenzied “BUT HER EMAILS!!!” coverage did two years before. Which demonstrates, among other things, that not only is bad journalism likely to be particularly harmful, bad journalism is often easier to do than good journalism. And months of good work can be undone with one giant screwup. 

Journalists realized too late that simply treating Trump as a bizarrely entertaining spectacle — including by airing his rallies in full on cable news — was extremely dangerous, and eventually they stopped doing it. But not calling attention to his appalling utterances — calling his opponents “vermin” in an echo of the rhetoric that has proceeded nearly every genocide in history, or suggesting that a general who had criticized him should be executed — is equally problematic. While it’s possible that voters will tire of hearing “Trump is planning an authoritarian takeover and that would be bad” again and again, there isn’t much else we in the media can do but keep saying it. 

So that’s what we’re left with: Detail the dangers, explore the threat, hope that people understand, but don’t expect it to make millions of voters say, “Hold on — he wants to do what? Well I’m not voting for him again!” It would be nice if that happened, but it won’t.