As I write in late October of 2020, Joe Biden leads in all major polls, with the Real Clear Politics average putting him ahead nationally by 8 points. Biden leads in all the key battleground states that will ultimately decide the election. From the experience of 2016 we know that poll data must be taken with a huge grain of salt, and we know that the Republican party nationally and in most states is working overtime to depress and suppress voter turnout, especially among Black and Latinx voters. So the race has to be considered a toss up.
I've heard it said that if 2020 is like 1932 (the year we were mired in a Great Depression that flummoxed Republican President Herbert Hoover), Biden could win in a landslide. If on the other hand 2020 is like 1968 (when urban riots and violent Vietnam War protests dominated the public mind), the race should be closer and perhaps favor Trump.
My view is that 2020 is mostly a replay of 2016: Mr. Trump is still the "anti-Washington, anti-establishment" candidate, while the Dems once again nominated someone who for most of his political career has personified the establishment. But unlike Hillary Clinton, Biden is not toxic to large numbers of rural and blue collar voters. Furthermore, we have now had four years of epic corruption and incompetence that should, theoretically at least, attract enough swing state Independents to make "not being Trump" enough to win the election.
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| In April of 2020 Jim Lardner of the American Prospect compiled one of the most thorough accounts of corruption within the executive branch of President Donald Trump |
Regardless of whether the election extends the Trump presidency or delivers up President-elect Biden, the mainstream press needs to face a reckoning over its terrible performance during the Trump years. A step toward that was taken recently in an important special report by Jon Allsop and Pete Vernon in the Columbia Journalism Review, "How the Press Covered the Last Four Years of Trump." Along with two other journalists, the authors have covered media treatment of the Trump presidency daily since 2017 in CJR's The Media Today newsletter.
The piece by Allsop and Vernon is long. I want to highlight some spot-on observations of theirs regarding press performance of the last last four years, and address four key questions they believe should be asked as we move forward.
Looking over their own newsletters over the last four years, Allsop and Vernon discovered "a clear picture of an industry whose basic practices and rhythms have conspired, time and again, to downplay demagoguery, let Trump and his defenders off the hook, and drain resources and attention from crucial longer-term storylines. Much has changed since Inauguration Day, both in the news and the media’s approach to covering it. But in other ways, many of them profoundly important and consequential, the press has simply not learned its lesson."
On some particularly horrifying press habits since 2017:
Journalists reported on the president’s moods, his television habits, his aides’ personalities and infighting; they expressed anguish over the uselessness of press briefings, and then lamented their absence. Editors dispatched journalists to “Trumplandia” to find understanding in the diners of Rust-Belt towns, and sometimes even allowed right-wing internet trolls (when not quoting them) to dictate personnel decisions.
On how the press dealt with Trump's propensity for lying:
Seven months into his administration, it was clear that the president was unwilling or unable to change. It was obvious who he was . . . or it should have been. Instead, news organizations continued to fret over whether to call his untruths “lies” since we can’t see inside his head.
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| Jon Allsop is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in a number of reputable publications including The Atlantic and The Intercept |
On how obsessive Trump coverage has short-changed everything else:
Not only has the Trump obsession often drowned out bigger stories—crises like climate change, racism, immigration, anti-trans discrimination, inadequate healthcare, poverty, and gun violence, all of which predated Trump and will outlast him—it has forced us to see them, when we see them at all, through the distorting, flattening lens of the man himself. A not-insignificant portion of the punditocracy, in particular, seems to believe that America’s problems—the biggest ones, anyway—begin and end with Trump’s tenure in office. Many reporters seem to believe that, too, if less overtly. The truth, of course, is that the systemic problems that Trump came to personify were here before he arrived and will last long after he’s gone; he was simply their embodiment. Journalism’s failure to consistently grasp that difficult, fundamental fact means that laying the groundwork for a meaningful reckoning with these last four years may continue to be pushed off into the future.
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| Pete Vernon is a freelance journalist and teacher. He's the former author of the Columbia Journalism Reviews "The Media Today" newsletter and previously worked for Reuters News Agency |
Four key questions moving forward:
1. Will the brilliant investigative scoops of the Trump
presidency—already the preserve of papers that can afford to invest in
them—inspire a new golden age of muckraking? Or will they dwindle if future
administrations prove less overtly tumultuous?
2. Will the Trump cabal, in the
administration, media, and politics, be held to account for what they did? Or
will the calls to “move on” prevail?
3. When a future president—Biden or
someone else—threatens to drag the US into a foreign war with no demonstrable
evidence, will otherwise-hawkish cable pundits think twice, as many of them did
in January, after Trump assassinated Iran’s top general, Qassem
Suleimani? Or will they insist that we shouldn’t be concerned,
because of the new president’s temperament and qualifications?
(Last year, one of the great undercovered stories of recent times, the Post’s “Afghanistan Papers,” reminded
us that presidents of all stripes tend to lie about war.)
4. Will we go back to an era when politicians can convince the bulk of the media to give them an easy ride so long as they pay lip service to the shibboleths of the political establishment?
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In my judgement, Allsop and Vernon are asking the right questions. My preliminary answers:
1. Will we have a new golden age of muckraking? If we do, it will probably come from independent journalists working at online platforms like Substack that allow them to escape the tendency of mainstream media editors to de-muck works of muckraking so as to maintain friendly relations with "official" sources.
2. Will calls to "move on" prevail over calls to hold the "Trump cabal" accountable for their actions? If we get a President Biden, and if history can inform the present, expect some kind of pardon for the Trump family. Biden came of age during Watergate, and no doubt he's already reflected on Gerald Ford's statement in defense of pardoning Nixon:
“the passions generated by prosecuting him," said President Ford, "would seriously disrupt the healing of our country from the great wounds of the past.”
Moreover, the Obama/Biden administration refused to prosecute bankers responsible for the 2008 economic collapse. It would not be at all surprising if a Biden administration showed a similar inclination to "move on." Will the press let them?
3. Will the press hold the President accountable on foreign wars? Probably not, though there will be a great need to. Given that the Democrats have welcomed the so-called neocons into the anti-Trump "resistance", and given Biden's hawkish tendencies, I don't see much hope for a winding down of the "war on terror" that has now recklessly cut across three administrations. That is as much a journalistic failure as it is a failure of imagination among policy makers.
4. Will a Biden administration convince the bulk of the media to give them an easy ride? What I see happening is this: if we have a Harris/Biden administration, the mainstream press WILL be tough on them, but for the wrong reasons. Biden will almost certainly put forth policy proposals inadequate to meet the scale of crisis we face on the pandemic, the economy, and climate. His Commander in Chief vision will be to put complete trust in the bloated military-industrial-complex and the "intelligence" agencies that gave us two failed wars. All of that will worthy of intense media scrutiny, but will probably receive little.
Instead, the Republicans will harp on the Hunter Biden story for the entire first term, and the mainstream press will dutifully report all the rumors, all the innuendo, and all the lies that emanate from the right wing media ecosphere. That playbook started with with the Whitewater investigation of the 1990s, which consumed inordinate amounts of press time during the Clinton presidency. Russiagate operated within a similar dynamic during the Trump years: the legitimate news value in it got eclipsed by years worth of hyperpartisan harping on every minor detail. Whitewater and Russiagate crowded out scores of vital stories. If Joe Biden does get elected, expect the trials and tribulations of Hunter Biden to become the next installment in this dubious style of "accountability" journalism.
