5 ways major media can seek redemption
It’s getting late, but there’s still time to repair some of the damage.
The Trump regime is defying the courts. Federal agents are grabbing people off the streets and jailing them for exercising their 1st Amendment rights. Trump is extorting universities and law firms.
It’s a dictatorship-in-progress.
The mainstream news media have helped bring us to this disaster with both-sidesing, sane-washing, and cheap fascination with Trump’s supposed “entertainment” skills. They had a duty to warn, and they largely failed. If our democracy goes down, legacy news outlets will be a key reason why.
But it’s not too late. We’ve seen pushback from some Democratic leaders (though not enough), rulings by principled judges, and a people-power movement gathering steam. Legitimate news outlets should be a part of the defense of democracy, too. Journalists know how to do this. It’s a question of whether their corporate bosses will let them. Here’s what I urge the media to do:
1. Say directly that Trump is overthrowing democracy. Lose the weasel-wording.
The drip-drip-drip of news stories can be exhausting, and some people tune out. The media must get them to understand that all the individual outrages add up to one huge threat to the future of our families and our country. Most people aren’t getting that message when the New York Times’ euphemism desk describes Trump’s authoritarianism as “a maximalist view of his powers,” or when the Washington Post refers to “Trump’s ever-shifting relationship with the Constitution.”
What’s happening now is one of the worst crises in American history. So act like it, media. Write sweeping stories with straightforward headlines that use words like “dictatorship,” “authoritarian,” and “lawless.”
A New York Times headline over the weekend saying that Trump was “Defying the Law and the Courts” gave us some hope that major media might finally be waking up. That story was the first time the Times had used the term “convicted felon” to describe Trump in nearly three months.
2. Cover the mass protests as major news.
It’s frustrating when journalists are bored by seeing people get off their couches and into the streets to express their love for their country. Shallow journalists would rather write about tweets than about a crowd of protesters stretching many blocks down New York’s Fifth Avenue.
An example of media myopia came after the April 5 Hands off rallies when National Public Radio’s public editor, Kelly McBride, defended NPR’s coverage by saying the protests by 3 million people were no big deal. “I went to watch the demonstration in Manhattan so I could judge the newsworthiness myself,” she wrote. “As a news event, it wasn’t very compelling.”
Her logic was mind-blowingly flawed. “Statistically,” she wrote, “most news consumers are not protesting: Of the 300+ million people in the U.S., approximately 3 million protested last Saturday at 1,400 locations.” By that logic, the media shouldn’t cover the NBA playoffs because hardly any news consumers are playing in it.
Protests this past weekend were probably smaller in total numbers, but they were still very well attended at hundreds of locations. Coverage was mixed: hard to find on the New York Times website, but fairly prominent in the Washington Post, NPR, and other outlets.
This outpouring of patriotism is an antidote to widespread disaffection with politics. It’s exciting – and newsworthy.
3. Treat White House briefings as the travesty they are.
Trump and his lying press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, are harassing the Associated Press and other mainstream outlets, using access as a weapon. And they’re getting away with it because the White House Correspondents’ Association hasn’t found an effective response. Meanwhile, Trump is bringing in ringers – right-wing pseudo-journalists who say things to Leavitt like “You look great. You’re doing a great job.”
Yet mainstream reporters keep joining the circus. When they play their part and fail to push back aggressively on Trump’s blatant lies, they’re doing worse than nothing. Their presence at his briefings provides an air of legitimacy, of normalcy.
News outlets should do one of these three things:
Boycott the briefings.
Send interns to the briefings to roll tape but not ask questions.
Send top reporters to the briefings and have them aggressively dispute Team Trump’s lies, including interrupting the liars in the middle of sentences. If the reporters get kicked out, they get kicked out. But they’ll be fighting for the truth, not serving as scenery for Trump’s dishonesty.
Whatever the journalists do, it can’t go on like this.
4. Show how Trump’s cuts will hurt people.
The news of Trump’s political vandalism isn’t just a Washington story, and it doesn’t affect only federal workers. Interview someone whose life was saved because of an early warning about a tornado – the type of warning that may come later or not at all because of National Weather Service cuts. Talk to a victim of a credit card scam who got a refund because of action by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which Trump is eviscerating. Highlight a child who is thriving in school because of the Head Start program, which Trump has targeted for extinction.
Put a human face on the story.
5. Emphasize that fascism is bad for the economy.
This is not hard to do, considering how Trump’s tariffs are battering the previously healthy financial picture. It’s not just that Trump’s policies are incompetent – it’s that his regime is riddled with corruption, which is toxic to the free enterprise system. People may not fully realize the threat of a dictatorship, but they know when their grocery prices go up. It’s up to the media to tell them why prices are going up.
The point of journalism is to deliver facts that improve people’s lives. Tolerance for dishonesty, corruption, and authoritarianism does just the opposite. When the nation’s founders put press freedom in the Constitution, they created both a right and an obligation for journalists. It’s getting late for corporate media to do their duty.
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Why not work together on a string of questions not letting up until Leavitt cancels the briefing? Why not boycott the briefings and collectively go somewhere else or have the WHCA open their own press briefing space and ask leaders to rotate through? That they continue to sit in front of Leavitt and publish her lies is not journalism when her statements are so demonstrably false or without evidence. That journalists did not stand with their ostracized AP counterparts (even after the court’s decision to reinstate) were among the first capitulations—and of course, little analyzed by the media.
Brilliant action plan. He only has the power to cause harm if we give it to him, and no one needs to do that. The people, the senate, the congress, big law firms, the courts, educational systems, medical systems - all need to stand up and say Oh, hell no. (The cowardice is really quite ridiculous.)