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We journalists should have been tougher on Mr. Trump, questioning his every lie and insult. We should not have let him get away with his racism and xenophobia. We should never again allow someone to create an alternative reality in order to seize the presidency.
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Yesyesyes! I said this four years ago. Call him out. Question him. Nail him. Challenge him. It took forever before the MSM even started calling his lies lies!
Under Biden journalists need to start doing their jobs again.
I don’t think this would have had the expected effect at all. The harder the media called out such lies, the more Trumpers would have simply retreated into their alternative-fact bubble (and the more such a bubble would have nourished such sentiment.) The alternate-reality was going to happen whether you like it or not, unless somehow Fox, OANN, Newsmax, Breitbart, Free Republic, etc. were all banned.
The fact that the alternate-reality was going to happen anyway doesn’t excuse the MSM from capitulating to Donnie and softly tap-dancing around him. The MSM are supposed to report something resembling facts, regardless of how wacko, alt-white media outlets react.
It might not have the intended effect, but if could be fun if the main stream media used all their extra time to look back over the past 4 years and reexamine each and every thing Trump has said that they never had time to deal with because it was coming at them so fast.
I don’t remember who I heard it from, Trevor Noah or Seth Meyers maybe, but a while back someone made the comment along the lines of ‘just to remind you, the president isn’t supposed to be in the news every single day’.
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But the Trump era has been especially rewarding to a certain class of Washington reporter. As the White House beat became the biggest story in the world, once-obscure correspondents were recast in the popular imagination as resistance heroes fighting for truth, justice, and the American way. They were showered with book deals, speaking gigs, and hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers. They got glow-ups to accompany their new cable-news contracts, and those glow-ups were covered in glossy magazines. Along the way, many of them adapted their journalism to cover an unusually mendacious and corrupt president (much to the delight of their new fan bases). As the story draws to an end, the reporters who got famous fighting with Trump are facing a question: What do we do now?
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Yamiche Alcindor, a correspondent for PBS NewsHour , told me she hopes her colleagues will retain the lessons they’ve learned from covering Trump. The default skepticism toward government officials, the aversion to euphemism, the refusal to accept approved narratives—to Alcindor, these are features of a healthy press, not signs that something is amiss. She attributes this attitude to her background covering race and policing. “When something is racist, we should just say it’s racist,” she said. “When someone is lying, we should just say they’re lying.” (Trump has repeatedly singled Alcindor out at press conferences, calling her “threatening” and her questions “nasty.”)
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My bold.
YES!
That part in parenthesis sounds like a compliment to me.
My dad feels that the Mainstream Media was played like a violin by Trump. I remember how long (years) it was before the NYT stopped using euphemisms for “lying”, and “baseless”, and “widely disproven”. By the time they realized that their continual efforts at respectable reportage were viewed with utter contempt by the president, who thinks truth is for losers, they were hopelessly outmaneuvered. I mention my dad because he spent about 75 years in mainstream journalism, wearing every possible hat from setting type to being president of the California Newspaper Association. He’s my go to guy for political analysis.
My own more feeble view is that the media will go back to at least a facsimile of what it was before, but with some more boldness in calling out lies. Trump will mostly vanish from public view, except in the conspirofascist media, where he will be omnipresent. But no one will listen to him except the legions of conspirofascists. Why should we? He holds no office, has no power, and all he does is rant senselessly. There is no reason to report on him.
If the plague is managed, if the economy is rebuilt – especially if a huge effort is made to return jobs to depressed areas – those legions are going to experience some attrition. After all, most people of all stripes merely want to pull down a reasonable paycheck, play with their grandkids, walk in the park, and talk about movie stars. Being constantly in a state of fear and anger is not in fact all that pleasant.
But for the first three and a half years they were not “reported as lies.” The MSM did not call them LIES. They used every euphemism in the book— deceit, deception, dishonesty, disinformation, distortion, evasion, fabrication, falsehood, inaccuracy, misrepresentation, falsification, hyperbole, misstatement.
Why? To avoid pissing him off. To avoid getting excluded from press conferences, until Donnie eliminated them, that is. To avoid a tweetstorm of shit. Although, as the article points out, some reporters wore Donnie’s attacks as a badge of honor.
IMO: For most media, back to “business as usual” for the most part. As has been said here, there is no reason for the president to be in the news every day.
Biden will, for the most part, not be “newsworthy”. He will not tweet dumb stuff. He will not fire people via tweet. He will not be a petulant toddler seeking attention by wetting his pants and blaming it on others. A dumpster fire is interesting. Someone making policy is not.
For Fox News, they will focus on THE DEBT! Also, Hunter Biden’s laptop. Also, if Biden says “Pansylvania” instead of “Pennsylvania”, that will be a three part article on how he is senile. Biden might wear a tan suit, or fail to salute in what they deem a proper way. These will all be BIG NEWS.
For other right wing alternative media, they will continue to go off the deep end. Completely and utterly without shame, they will promote the wildest and nuttiest conspiracy theories, each trying to outdo each other on the crazy scale.
When Biden injured his foot a month ago, a Republican acquaintance of mine wouldn’t shut up about it. “He hurt his foot PLAYING with a DOG? How is that even POSSIBLE?!?” That kind of crap. Every trivial thing will be held up as evidence of senility or stupidity or whatever. The bar for what’s considered a gaffe will be reset to the lowest possible level.
Oh, and every time AOC or some other progressive disagrees with Biden about something, the media will breathlessly report it as “turmoil in the Democratic Party.”
Not really. It was more about the culture of political journalism that purported to be “fair and impartial” and “above the fray”. The whole idea of a Fourth Estate which is a kind of watchdog for the whole political system, with a code of ethics which puts a weight of responsibility much like that of the judiciary etc. Trump doesn’t give a fuck for ethics or even the appearance of ethics. It was like someone trained to adhere to Marquess of Queensbury rules fighting with a street thug with a switchblade. Remember that reporters are just the first line; editors decide how to cast the stories.
The question of “media coverage” posed in this thread includes everyone, from the reporter to the editor to the on-air person to the publisher/owner of the station or network. I think I’m missing your point…