A few weeks ago, the editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Chris Quinn, became an instant hero to the legion of news consumers who are fed up with the media’s refusal to call Donald Trump what he is. In his weekly “letter from the editor,” under the headline “Our Trump reporting upsets some readers, but there aren’t two sides to facts,” Quinn wrote: The north star here is truth. We tell the truth, even when it offends some of the people who pay us for information. The truth is that Donald Trump undermined faith in our elections in his false bid to retain the presidency. He sparked an insurrec ..read more

Journalists writing about Trump’s ongoing trial in New York need to realize something: Not everybody has been following this story as intently as they have. At the same time, a lot of people may have heard Trump’s constant complaints that the multitudes of charges against him are part of a political witch hunt. As a result, every reporter in every report on the trial needs to clearly explain the extent of Trump’s alleged crimes. And they need to describe the breadth and the strength of the charges, while also explaining that there was no interference from the Biden administration. Instead, mai ..read more

Every day, it seems, we see another example of how not to cover Donald Trump. Monday’s example was a doozy: almost everybody in the mainstream media completely fell for Trump’s abortion fake-out. They gave him credit for saying something he didn’t actually say – and they treated him like a truth-teller rather than a prodigious liar. What was even more depressing than usual about Monday’s performance was that it was fixable in real time, after a handful of journalists quickly pointed out the errors of their colleagues. But our elite political media is way too proud to course correct. Instead, c ..read more

I’ve been away for nearly two weeks, almost entirely unplugged, and let me tell you, a little distance makes the failure of the American political press even more horrifying and inexcusable. The nation stands on the edge of a precipice, and our political media is so addicted to neutrality that it is casting both choices — survival or cataclysm — as equally plausible. It’s sickening. We are one election away from becoming a Christian nationalist state, losing our democracy as we know it, and putting the fate of our country in the hands of a corrupt madman filled with fever dreams of retribution ..read more

Political journalists covering the 2024 presidential election are missing the big picture in a big way. Most of them are covering it like a popularity contest or a horse race, which, given the stakes, is utterly inexcusable. Some of them are at least acknowledging that American democracy as we know it could end. But even those few aren’t fully grasping the magnitude of the tipping point that a victory by Trump and the movement he leads would entail. It’s not just democracy at stake, it’s freedom. That, I believe is the proper and essential framing for all political coverage henceforth. And it ..read more

It’s an increasingly common critique of the New York Times: The largest, most influential news organization in the nation is not warning sufficiently of the threat to democracy — while at the same time bashing President Joe Biden at every opportunity. And it’s been a bit of a mystery. Why would a newsroom full of talented and mostly liberal reporters be engaging in such damaging behavior? Well, mystery solved. It’s because that’s what the publisher wants. Publisher A.G. Sulzberger — perhaps unintentionally — showed his hand in a speech on Monday at Oxford University on “Journalistic Independen ..read more

It seems like every poll result these days is an indictment of the corporate media: a clear indication that it has failed to create an informed electorate. The latest case in point is a new Democratic poll which, according to Greg Sargent of the New Republic, finds that “Large swaths of voters appear to have little awareness of some of Trump’s clearest statements of hostility to democracy and intent to impose authoritarian rule in a second term, from his vow to be ‘dictator for one day’ to his vague threat to enact ‘termination’ of provisions in the Constitution.” Our newsr ..read more

The powerful people who endorsed Donald Trump right away were the true believers – MAGA through and through. If he speaks for you, he speaks for you. Not much of a story there. But the powerful people who knew better — who are bending the knee to Trump only now — are hypocritical, craven opportunists going through a very public and newsworthy moral collapse. That is how the media should be covering them. These people are forsaking the principles they had previously proclaimed — and why? Because they want something (mostly power and money) more than they care about those principles. Every time ..read more

The Hunter Biden impeachment drama has been transformed by the revelation that the most essential witness for the GOP is a pathological liar and Russian intelligence asset. The story is no longer whether Joe Biden committed high crimes and misdemeanors by maintaining relations with his ne’er-do-well son. In fact, there has never been any credible evidence to support that conclusion. The real story is that the ludicrous Republican impeachment investigation has now been exposed as a Russian intelligence op. This, even as Republicans do Russian President Vladimir Putin’s bidding by blocking suppo ..read more

An ever-expanding pack of press watchers is expressing anger about mainstream media political coverage as the nation enters a make-or-break period for democracy. Writing for magazines, in opinion columns, and especially in newsletters, these media critics are particularly upset at how political reporters continue to use the same both-sides constructions that served them in the distant past — effectively normalizing the anti-democratic extremism of Donald Trump and the modern Republican Party. They express concern that the mainstream media is underestimating and underreporting the threat to dem ..read more