Hey, Media: No Bothsiderism!

Click here for an article at The Guardian by Margaret Sullivan entitled "With democracy on the ballot, the mainstream press must change its ways."

It starts with a quote from one of my favorite journlists, Christiane Amanpour:

Christiane Amanpour has reported all over the world, so she recognizes a democracy on the brink when she sees one.

Last week, as she celebrated her 40 years at CNN, she issued a challenge to her fellow journalists in the US by describing how she would cover Us Politics as a foreign correspondent.

“We have to be truthful, not neutral,” she urged. “I would make sure that you don’t just give a platform … to those who want to crash down the constitution and democracy.”

The article says:

News organizations have turned Biden’s age (granted, a legitimate concern) into the equivalent of a scandal. In story after story, headline after headline, they emphasize not his administration’s accomplishments, but the fact that he’s 80.

And:

The evidence-free Biden impeachment efforts in the House of Representatives are presented to news consumers without sufficient context. In the first round of headlines last week, most news outlets simply reported what speaker Kevin McCarthy was doing as if it were completely legitimate – the result of his likely high crimes and misdemeanors.

And:

Trump continues to be covered mostly as an entertaining sideshow – his mugshot! His latest insults! – not a perilous threat to democracy, despite four indictments and 91 charges against him, and despite his own clear statements that his re-election would bring extreme anti-democratic results; he would replace public servants with the cronies who’ll do his bidding. “We will look back on this and wish more people had understood that Biden is our bulwark of democratic freedoms and the alternative is worse than most Americans can imagine,” commented Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of Strongmen, and an expert in authoritarian regimes.

So what's the solution?

The big solution? Remember at all times what our core mission is: to communicate truthfully, keeping top of mind that we have a public service mission to inform the electorate and hold powerful people to account. If that’s our north star, as it should be, every editorial judgment will reflect that.

Another of my favorites, NYT's Paul Krugman, is mentioned:

The Nobel-winning economist Paul Krugman pointed out last week that the media apparently has failed to communicate something that should be a huge asset for Biden: the US’s current “Goldilocks economy”. Inflation is low, unemployment is low and there’s virtually no hint of a recession. But many Americans, according to surveys, are convinced the economy is terrible.

Two-thirds of Americans are unhappy about the economy despite reports that inflation is easing and unemployment is close to a 50-year low, according to a new Harris poll for the Guardian. Many are unaware of, or – because of mistrust in the government or in the media – simply don’t believe the positive economic news.

“There’s a really profound and peculiar disconnect going on,” Krugman said on CNN.

In the conclusion, Dan Froomkin gets a mention:

“When one of our two political parties has become so extremist and anti-democratic”, the old ways of reporting don’t cut it, wrote the journalist Dan Froomkin in his excellent list of suggestions culled from respected historians and observers.

In fact, such both-sides-equal reporting “actively misinforms the public about the stakes of the coming election”.

The stakes really are enormously high. It’s our job to make sure that those potential consequences – not the horse race, not Biden’s age, not a scam impeachment – are front and center for US citizens before they go to the polls.