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In pursuit of clickbait content centered on conflicts and personalities, they follow each other into informational stampedes and confirmation bubbles.
The first thing to say about the hate and scorn currently directed at the mainstream US media is that they worked hard to earn it. They’ve done so by failing, repeatedly, determinedly, spectacularly to do their job, which is to maintain their independence, inform the electorate, and speak truth to power. While the left has long had reasons to dismiss centrist media, and the right has loathed it most when it did do its job well, the moderates who are furious at it now seem to be something new – and a host of former editors, media experts and independent journalists have been going after them hard this summer.
Longtime journalist James Fallows declares that three institutions – the Republican party, the supreme court, and the mainstream political press – “have catastrophically failed to ‘meet the moment’ under pressure of [the] Trump era”. Centrist political reformer and columnist Norm Ornstein states that these news institutions “have had no reflection, no willingness to think through how irresponsible and reckless so much of our mainstream press and so many of our journalists have been and continue to be”.
Most voters, he says, “have no clue what a second Trump term would actually be like. Instead, we get the same insipid focus on the horse race and the polls, while normalizing abnormal behavior and treating this like a typical presidential election, not one that is an existential threat to democracy.”
Lamenting the state of the media recently on X, Jeff Jarvis, another former editor and newspaper columnist, said: “What ‘press’? The broken and vindictive Times? The newly Murdochian Post? Hedge-fund newspaper husks? Rudderless CNN or NPR? Murdoch’s fascist media?”
These critics are responding to how the behemoths of the industry seem intent on bending the facts to fit their frameworks and agendas. In pursuit of clickbait content centered on conflicts and personalities, they follow each other into informational stampedes and confirmation bubbles.
They pursue the appearance of fairness and balance by treating the true and the false, the normal and the outrageous, as equally valid and by normalizing Republicans, especially Donald Trump, whose gibberish gets translated into English and whose past crimes and present-day lies and threats get glossed over. They neglect, again and again, important stories with real consequences. This is not entirely new – in a scathing analysis of 2016 election coverage, the Columbia Journalism Review noted that “in just six days, The New York Times ran as many cover stories about Hillary Clinton’s emails as they did about all policy issues combined in the 69 days leading up to the election” – but it’s gotten worse, and a lot of insiders have gotten sick of it.
In July, ordinary people on social media decided to share information about the rightwing Project 2025 and did a superb job of raising public awareness about it, while the press obsessed about Joe Biden’s age and health. NBC did report on this grassroots education effort, but did so using the “both sides are equally valid” framework often deployed by mainstream media, saying the agenda is “championed by some creators as a guide to less government oversight and slammed by others as a road map to an authoritarian takeover of America”. There is no valid case it brings less government oversight.
In an even more outrageous case, the New York Times ran a story comparing the Democratic and Republican plans to increase the housing supply – which treated Trump’s plans for mass deportation of undocumented immigrants as just another housing-supply strategy that might work or might not. (That it would create massive human rights violations and likely lead to huge civil disturbances was one overlooked factor, though the fact that some of these immigrants are key to the building trades was mentioned.)Other stories of pressing concern are either picked up and dropped or just neglected overall, as with Trump’s threats to dismantle a huge portion of the climate legislation that is both the Biden administration’s signal achievement and crucial for the fate of the planet. The Washington Post editorial board did offer this risibly feeble critique on 17 August: “It would no doubt be better for the climate if the US president acknowledged the reality of global warming – rather than calling it a scam, as Mr Trump has.”
While the press blamed Biden for failing to communicate his achievements, which is part of his job, it’s their whole job to do so. The Climate Jobs National Resource Center reports that the Inflation Reduction Act has created “a combined potential of over $2tn in investment, 1,091,966 megawatts of clean power, and approximately 3,947,670 jobs,” but few Americans have any sense of what the bill has achieved or even that the economy is by many measures strong.
Last winter, the New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who has a Nobel prize in economics, told Greg Sargent on the latter’s Daily Blast podcast that when he writes positive pieces about the Biden economy, his editor asks “don’t you want to qualify” it; “aren’t people upset by X, Y and Z and shouldn’t you be acknowledging that?”
Meanwhile in an accusatory piece about Kamala Harris headlined "When your opponent calls you ‘communist,’ maybe don’t propose price controls?" a Washington Post columnist declares in another case of bothsiderism: “Voters want to blame someone for high grocery bills, and the presidential candidates have apparently decided the choices are either the Biden administration or corporate greed. Harris has chosen the latter.” The evidence that corporations have jacked up prices and are reaping huge profits is easy to find, but facts don’t matter much in this kind of opining.
It’s hard to gloat over the decline of these dinosaurs of American media, when a free press and a well-informed electorate are both crucial to democracy. The alternatives to the major news outlets simply don’t reach enough readers and listeners, though the non-profit investigative outfit ProPublica and progressive magazines such as the New Republic and Mother Jones, are doing a lot of the best reporting and commentary.
Earlier this year, when Alabama senator Katie Britt gave her loopy rebuttal to Biden’s State of the Union address, it was an independent journalist, Jonathan Katz, who broke the story on TikTok that her claims about a victim of sex trafficking contained significant falsehoods. The big news outlets picked up the scoop from him, making me wonder what their staffs of hundreds were doing that night.
A host of brilliant journalists young and old, have started independent newsletters, covering tech, the state of the media, politics, climate, reproductive rights and virtually everything else, but their reach is too modest to make them a replacement for the big newspapers and networks. The great exception might be historian Heather Cox Richardson, whose newsletter and Facebook followers give her a readership not much smaller than that of the Washington Post. The tremendous success of her sober, historically grounded (and footnoted!) news summaries and reflections bespeaks a hunger for real news.
Major outlets have proved so bad at this, many candidates—and increasingly the voting public as well—would just as soon get by without them. Are they wrong?
This column, about the decline and fall of America’s political news media in such a pivotal election year, has proved very hard to write — not for a lack of material, but because I can’t keep pace with every day’s new and stunning examples of bad journalism, each one spiraling a tad lower.
I’ll start with the weekend’s lowlight: a news story that worked up the media food chain from the muck of smaller right-wing outlets, then got boosted on X/Twitter by Alex Thompson, a widely read national political correspondent for Axios, before the New York Post hyped it in your local Wawa and eventually the New York Times felt compelled to address it. You see, an idea that has animated the right for the last couple of weeks is the fantasy that Democratic vice presidential nominee Gov. Tim Walz is a phony. Sunday’s purported news slammed Walz for a 2006 episode when his then-congressional campaign claimed he’d won a youth award from the Nebraska Chamber of Commerce when really it was — get this! — the Nebraska Junior Chamber of Commerce!
Never mind that the 2006 Walz campaign had corrected this tiny mistake (picture Barack Obama doing the hand thing, but even smaller), probably the work of a junior staffer, the second they learned about it. The nattering nabobs of negativism had accomplished their mission in a year when the elite mainstream media has lost its doggone mind — going after small daily clickbait like a puppy chasing its tail, demanding news conferences only to ask trivial questions, issuing ludicrous “fact checks,” and desperately seeking gravitas in the candidate just found guilty on 34 felony counts and liable for rape and financial fraud, who was dinged by NPR for 162 lies or distortions in just one news conference.
Indeed, the outrageous overinflation of the Walz story was nearly forgotten by Monday morning when the Times, which has bent over backwards to belittle the joy of Kamala Harris’ wildly successful Democratic National Convention in Chicago last week, published an op-ed from the editor of the conservative National Review, Rich Lowry, headlined simply: “Trump Can Win on Character.” Perhaps that’s true, as critics noted, if voters do what Lowry did in his piece and pretend that inconvenient facts like the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection or the fraud verdict had never happened. But while the column was ridiculed on social media, few people said they were giving up on the Times — because in this annus horribilis for the American media, many had already tuned out the NYT weeks or months ago.
Mainstream journalists can carp and whine about this all they want, but when less than a third of Americans trust the mass media, few folks are listening to them.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. The NYU professor and media critic Jay Rosen urged journalists to cover “the stakes, not the odds” of the 2024 election while Margaret Sullivan — who writes for the Guardian and her Substack after stints at the Times and the Washington Post — was more blunt in beseeching the press to ignore the pull of both-sides journalism and take seriously the threat to democracy posed by Trump, who tried to override his 2020 election loss and has made no comforting assurances that he won’t try to do the same after Nov. 5, 2024.
Few journalists — if any — have listened. Much of the righteous fury during the Chicago DNC was directed at fact-checkers from the Times, Post, and independent organizations like PolitiFact. These organizations or practices were mostly established after the endemic political lying of the 2000s — remember the Iraq War? But while no one would argue with their stated approach of tough, unbiased scrutiny of all sides, the fact-checking industrial complex can’t handle the truth when one party’s platform is based on a firehouse of lies and the other party is trying to be serious, if not always literal, about reality.
So Democratic convention week brought absurdities like PolitiFact tackling a DNC video that showed an actual Trump 2016 quote that “there has to be some form of punishment” for women who have abortions and labeled it “mostly false” (!!) because his panicked aides later told him to walk back such a politically damaging statement. Also typical was USA Today calling it “false” when the DNC talks about “Trump’s Project 2025″ because the blueprint for his presidency was produced by the Heritage Foundation, even though most of its authors are former and would-be future Trump staffers and it offers the only program for filling jobs in a Trump administration.
C’mon, man.
It would require another column — maybe a book — to explain why this is happening. I see it as less the public’s main complaint (corporate control of the media) and more about our profession’s weird value structure, where it’s more important to be savvy, cynical, and not be portrayed as naive shills for liberalism than to care about saving democracy from authoritarian rule, on top of maybe a new and not always healthy brand of careerism from younger journalists.
The Chicago-based media critic Mark Jacob, a retired veteran editor of that city’s Tribune and Sun Times, nailed it Monday with a piece headlined “Mainstream media on a path to irrelevance.” Jacob has harsh words for how reporters have covered the race, writing that “too many political journalists are marinating in the Washington cocktail culture, writing for each other and for their sources — in service to the political industry, not the public.” But he also notes that traditional media can’t figure out how to compete for young eyeballs against sites like edgy and fast-paced TikTok. Jacob pointed out that public faith in mass media has plunged from 72% in 1976, after Watergate, to just 32% today.
You know who gets the new landscape better than anyone else? Kamala Harris.
The vice president and Democratic nominee is running to be America’s first post-media president. In Chicago, much was made of the fact that Team Harris and the Democrats invited 200 sometimes fawning internet “content creators” who got VIP treatment while mainstream journalists fought over nosebleed-level seats and refrained from eating or going to the bathroom for fear of losing them.
Harris feels she doesn’t need journalists at all, and a lot of the public is cheering her on.
But more broadly, Harris and her campaign is 100% focused on message discipline to build her brand and sell it to the American people in a few short weeks. The surest way to get thrown off that message discipline would be a stray answer at an open news conference or in an interview with the likes of NBC’s Lester Holt — so for now, Harris is simply not doing that.
And she’s getting away with it. Mainstream journalists can carp and whine about this all they want, but when less than a third of Americans trust the mass media, few folks are listening to them. What’s been really striking this year is that while traditionally deep distrust of the mainstream press has long been the province of right-wing Republicans, now it’s liberals who once cheered for the media to do better who seem to be giving up on them.
This is not great. For one thing, the plunge in faith leads to cancelled subscriptions that leads to laid-off reporters or shuttered printing plants — not the vision of America’s founders who believed a free press is essential. In this campaign, I think the healthy journalistic mindset is that we want to save democracy in November, but we also want Harris to show she can answer at least a few tough questions and explain her policies beyond hopelessly vague generalities.
The reality, though, is that Harris might surge into the White House in January doing very little of this — maybe none at all, especially if Trump actually chickens out of their Sept. 10 debate in Philadelphia. Fifty years ago this summer, Richard Nixon resigned the presidency because people believed what they read about him in the Washington Post. Today, Harris feels she doesn’t need journalists at all, and a lot of the public is cheering her on. And a vainglorious elite news media with severe tunnel vision has no one to blame but themselves.
Regardless of what happens in the halls of justice, it is certain that these media outlets will eventually be held accountable in the court of public opinion.
The ruthlessness of the Israeli genocide machine in Palestine, and the direct complicity of the U.S., UK, and other Western governments are two key pillars in the horrors being perpetrated against the Palestinian people (and in the attacks on human rights defenders around the globe).
But there is an essential third pillar: the role of complicit Western media corporations knowingly disseminating Israeli disinformation and propaganda, justifying war crimes and crimes against humanity, dehumanizing Palestinians, and blacking out information on the genocide in the West. From the perspective of international human rights law, such actions could and should be subject to sanctions. And there are historical precedents.
Seventy-six years ago, when delegates gathered at the newly established United Nations to draft a Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), the importance of protecting freedom of expression was front and center. They would declare that “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”
But, in the wake of a half-century of horrific atrocities, driven in significant part by the dehumanization of millions on the basis of their race, ethnicity, religion, or other status, they were all too well aware that speech could also be used as a powerful weapon to destroy the rights of others, including the right to life itself. Thus, in the same document, the UN made clear that freedom of expression does not grant media corporations or anyone else a right “to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the other rights and freedoms.”
At the same time, in another UN conference room, delegates were gathered to create a new Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. There too, the drafters were aware of the danger of speech that dehumanizes and incites. The final convention would criminalize not just genocide, but also incitement to genocide and complicity in genocide- prohibitions that apply not only to states but to private actors as well.
The drafters of both instruments were aware of the conviction in the Nuremburg Tribunal just two years earlier of publisher Julius Streicher for incitement and “persecution on political and racial grounds.” The court found that Streicher’s media publication Der Sturmer continued to publish articles that included “incitement to murder and extermination” even while he was aware of the horrors that were being perpetrated against European Jews by Nazi Germany.
Fifty years later, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) would convict three media personalities for their role in inciting the Rwanda genocide. Two worked for the Mille Collines television and radio company and one for the Kangura newspaper. All three were found guilty of incitement to genocide (among other crimes). During sentencing, ICTR Judge Navi Pillay (now a commissioner on the UN’s international commission of enquiry investigating Israel’s crimes) admonished the perpetrators: “You were fully aware of the power of words, and you used the…medium of communication with the widest public reach to disseminate hatred and violence…Without a firearm, machete or any physical weapon, you caused the death of thousands of innocent civilians.”
"If your only source of information is mainstream Western media, you may have no idea that Israel is on trial for genocide in the World Court or that Israel’s leaders are the subject of arrest warrant requests for crimes against humanity."
Der Sturmer knew what they were doing. Mille Collines knew what they were doing. And, today, CNN, Fox, BBC, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal know what they are doing. This is not to say that these Western outlets are in every sense the modern equivalents Der Sturmer and Milles Collines (they are not). But, like these historic examples, they have recklessly crossed the boundaries of ethical journalism and, in some cases, may find themselves legally exposed as well.
In the face of the first live-streamed genocide in history unfolding on the screens of people from Boston to Botswana, it is simply not credible to suggest that Western media companies are not aware of the realities on the ground and of what they are doing to obscure them. They have indisputably made conscious choices to hide the genocide from their audiences, to systematically dehumanize the Palestinian victims, and to insulate the Israeli perpetrators from accountability.
In the wake of the findings of the World Court that charges of genocide are plausible, its ordering of provisional measures, the request of the ICC Prosecutor for arrest warrants, and the issuance of successive damning reports on Israel’s conduct by independent international human rights mechanisms, rather than reporting fully on these developments, Western media companies have suppressed information on them and doubled down on running cover for Israel.
Equally importantly, the target audience of these media companies is not limited to uninvolved bystanders. It includes as well Western government officials and policymakers directly complicit in the genocide, through the provision of military, economic, intelligence, and diplomatic support to Israel, as well as the voting public that enables this support. And it includes a significant number of dual Israeli nationals who shuttle back and forth to participate in the killing. The nexus between media incitement and harmful actions is more direct than these media companies might like to admit.
Indeed, if your only source of information is mainstream Western media, you may have no idea that Israel is on trial for genocide in the World Court or that Israel’s leaders are the subject of arrest warrant requests for crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Court. It is likely that you have never heard the numerous statements of genocidal intent by the Israeli President, Prime Minister, cabinet ministers, and military commanders.
You will likely still believe the stories of beheaded Israeli babies (long proven to be fabricated) and be unaware of the many Palestinian babies who actually have been beheaded. You will almost certainly not know of the systematic killing of Palestinian civilians, children, infants, women, older persons, persons with disabilities, and others. You will be unaware of the torture camps, the systematic rape of detainees, and the Israeli snipers targeting small children in Gaza. And you may not even know that Israel now holds the world records for the murder of journalists, of aid workers, of UN officials, and of healthcare workers.
Instead, transparently false Israeli disinformation and propaganda are regularly and uncritically published in Western media to justify war crimes, dehumanize Palestinians, and distract the public from the daily atrocities committed in Israel’s campaign of extermination. Stories covering the genocide are censored. The voices of Palestinians and human rights defenders are suppressed.
Reporters are instructed not to mention “occupied territory”, “Palestinians”, or “refugee camps.” Those Palestinian civilian victims who are not erased entirely are reduced to “collateral damage” or “human shields” at best, or “terrorists” at worst. In massacre after massacre, Palestinians in headlines are not killed by Israel, they simply “die.”
In the rule book of Western corporate media, there is no genocide, only a war of self-defense. And history started on October 7. Absent is any coverage of the context of 76 years of ethnic cleansing, persecution, mass imprisonment, gross violations of human rights and apartheid.
In sum, western media companies have made themselves a part of the mechanism of genocide in Palestine. Absent real accountability, these influential actors will continue to abuse their power, thereby trampling on the human rights of any people who fall on the wrong side of the line between those supported by these companies, and those who they choose to denigrate and dehumanize.
Of course, defenders of Palestinian human rights in the West who oppose Israeli genocide and apartheid know better than anyone how important it is to preserve the right to free speech. No group in modern history has faced more official and corporate silencing or had its speech more criminalized by Western governments. Speech restrictions are never imposed on those with the most power, but always target those most despised by power. This is the time to buttress free speech protections, not to erode them.
But free speech guarantees do not protect incitement to war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. Those acts can and must be subject to criminal accountability. Both defamation and incitement can also bring accountability in civil courts. Action in international tribunals for Israel’s crimes against humanity and genocide in Palestine has already begun, and more is certain to follow. It is not inconceivable that, just as in the cases of the Nuremburg and Rwanda tribunals, some media companies or individuals might face real legal accountability in the months and years to come.
Regardless of what happens in the halls of justice, it is certain that these media outlets will eventually be held accountable in the court of public opinion. For defenders of human rights and people everywhere who care about holding power to account, this process is urgent. And, in fact, it has already begun. The cresting wave of public criticism of the blatant bias demonstrated by Western media during this genocide has forced some companies to begin to adjust their reporting, however slightly. This proves that change can happen if agents of change are mobilized. There is strength in speaking out, in supporting independent media, and in the boycott. As a first step, all those who care should unsubscribe from these outlets, both print and broadcast, switch to independent media sources, and encourage other to do the same.
To again quote Judge Pillay in the Rwanda decision: “The power of the media to create and destroy fundamental human values comes with great responsibility. Those who control such media are accountable for its consequences”. The task of ensuring that accountability falls, ultimately, on all of us.