Mainstream (left of center) journalists clearly despise Trump and want him to lose in elections - I think rightly but that’s not the point. They are also willing to act on these desires, seen by coverage of Trump being very negative and more generally by left-wing media bias being higher since 2016.
And yet… they fail. Yes, Trump narrowly lost re-election and many Trumpy candidates lost in the midterms. But Trump and his ism are still very strong - he is likely to be the next GOP presidential nominee and there’s a good chance he will stay relevant in politics for a long time.
Maybe there’s nothing the media can do. Maybe. But usually assuming you’re powerless is just an excuse for not changing anything, and I think we have good reason to think the media could be doing more. All of Americans politics runs through the media, and they have proven capable of making politicians like Hillary Clinton and Roy Moore very unpopular. The media is bound by many incentives and norms, but not only is there is a lot of wiggle room within these constraints, the constraints themselves can (and have been) challenged.
To speak about one constraint in particular: in this post, while I’m going to be paying attention to how different changes would impact viewership, I’m also going to assume that both individual journalists and entire news outlets are willing to take a hit in viewership for sufficient political damage to Trump / Republicans1. I think established journalists have a decent amount of control over not only how they cover the news but what they cover as well. There’s also precedent for top-down choices in media coverage that are not all about maximizing viewership - I know of one alleged case of this, and in general many of the ethical standards the media holds themselves to probably lead to less viewership.
In this post I’m going to be exploring proposals for changes in media coverage that would hurt either Trump specifically or Republicans more generally. This post is not one with a conclusion - I don’t think anyone, myself included, has a good understanding of media dynamics right now. You might say that because of this uncertainty the media should simply stick by traditional principles (impartiality, some fixed definition of what makes a story newsworthy, etc.) and not try to put their thumb on the scales. My first response is that the media has already broken/changed these principles in response to Trump, so if you agree that sinking Trump is valuable they might as well do it in an effective manner. My second response is an opinionated one, which is that Trump is very bad, and if voters don’t realize that it is the media’s duty to get them to see that - for the same reason that I think 1930s German newspapers should have been working hard to make Hitler unpopular.
There is one more thing that needs discussing before getting into the proposals:
Which media are we talking about here?
First, modality. The two important modalities are TV news and online news articles:
Strangely, this paper by Allen et al. differs greatly from the above poll and says that TV news dominates online news:
I’m guessing what’s happening is that measuring in average minutes/day heavily skews the data toward TV-watchers and especially toward the small part of the population that watches a ton of TV2. So I’m going to consider both TV and online news.
I’m not going to be talking about local news here. Much of this advice probably applies to local news as well, but I really don’t have a good enough understanding of the local news ecosystem and it’s much harder to coordinate explicit strategy there. Going by the Allen et al. paper, local news makes up like half of TV news consumption, so I might be missing a lot of the picture - but again this number seems high given the constant reports of local news dying so I suspect it’s overestimating.
What about the type of news outlet? TV is obviously overwhelmingly mainstream news outlets, and if I’m reading these two links right broadcast is >3x as big as cable (again this is contradicted by the Allen et al. paper which I think is attributable to measuring in avg minutes / day). In terms of online news consumption, this paper finds that about a quarter of an average user’s web visits comes from mainstream news, which seems low to me. Even so the paper finds that the political moderation of people’s news diets depends greatly on mainstream news, which in my mind means it’s probably where the persuasion can happen. Still, I don’t see why the advice I give here can’t be applied to non-mainstream leftist news outlets, so I guess I’m talking about both mainstream and non-mainstream center/left news here.
With that out of the way, let’s get to the meat.
The Proposals
1. Stop covering Republican attack points
The idea here is that the media (a) covers issues that are beneficial to Republicans, such as crime, and (b) covers Republican arguments directly, such as DeSantis’ “war against the woke mob” or Trump’s speeches.
(a) happened a lot in 2016 with illegal immigration stories and 2020 with coverage of BLM protestors burning down Targets (though the latter faded a lot by the time we got to the election), but since then I haven’t seen that much of it3. I guess the message there would be "media, please don't do this again".
(b) definitely continues to happen a lot though. From my experience these days online news will attach a lot of de facto warning labels, like “Trump denies the election (and he’s lying)” or “Republican politician campaigns on crime (even though crime is higher in red states)”. I don’t think this is enough - for subconscious reasons even debunked arguments tend to affect us - but it is at least better than what happened in 2016. On TV however, and maybe on online news I don’t read, inviting Republicans on the show to scare viewers about crime and covering Republican campaigning in a disinterested manner are still frequent occurrences.
It’s kind of hard to imagine TV news where Republican arguments aren’t presented. Outlets thrive on debate segments and seem to think the only way of covering elections is to discuss which issues the candidates are campaigning on. Creative journalists should try new ideas and see which ones can get viewership. One idea, just to throw it out, is John Oliver-style deep dives on political issues - ones that don’t benefit Republicans - although I’m not sure how you would fill hours of nonstop coverage with this.
If you, a member of the media, need a principled reason to stop covering GOP attack points, I would say that most of it - especially with Trump - is based on pure lies. But you know what? You don’t need a principled reason. You can cover the news you find important and think readers should find important, and that doesn’t include GOP attacks.
2. Stop covering culture wars and start covering fiscal policy debates and abortion
This point can be similar to above but is fundamentally different. Proposal 1 when applied to 2020 would see the media stop covering violent BLM protestors. This proposal would say to cover the BLM protests as a whole a lot less and cover the Trump tax cuts a lot more.
The media, for all it has learned since 2016, still goes absolutely nuts for culture war debates. To be harsh here: journalists simply cannot comprehend that covering culture war debates even while arguing from the liberal POV probably just helps Republicans. Ron DeSantis sends a couple of migrants to Harper’s Ferry and it’s all the media can talk about for a week. Trump makes his 10 millionth racist comment and it fills hours of cable news. Journalists and liberal audiences have such visceral reactions to immigration and racism (and mass shootings though I think that’s a smaller issue) that the press cannot help themselves but cover it.
If I was writing this piece in 2021, I would say that Democrats’ dream would be for 2024 media coverage to play out like the 2012 election, where all people talk is about the candidates' budget and healthcare proposals. I would say that this is ultimately impossible because of the numerous differences between 2024 and 2012, among them that Mitt Romney wanted to talk about fiscal policy while Trump doesn’t, but that the media should try as hard to cover fiscal policy anyway. Creative journalists should experiment with new types of framing for fiscal policy articles to get clicks that compare to culture war stories. I would still say this and I still believe it would help defeat Trump. Today, however, another good issue has appeared for Democrats, one that the media should find much more gratifying to cover: abortion4.
Talking about abortion seems to be like stepping on hot coal for Republicans right now. Trump said that he would support a federal ban on abortion, and the media can make this a big theme in the 2024 election. It’s actually weird to me how little abortion was covered up to the 2022 midterms - for the few months after Dobbs v. Jackson there were constant stories about overly restrictive abortion laws which seemed to fade as we got closer to the elections (even though I’m guessing they get a lot of clicks). If the media wants to defeat Trump in 2024, they should be banging the abortion drum nonstop.
One last note on this proposal. There’s one easy suggestion here that would clearly hurt Republicans and is equally clearly not going to be done: stop with the dumb op-eds. Op-eds are consistently the worst left-wing media coverage on the planet. They are always5 substantively wrong, they are specifically designed to captivate or enrage leftists rather than persuade anyone, and they mislead other journalists and politicians on good political strategy. Unfortunately, they get a lot of clicks, so they're probably not going anywhere.
3. Go hard on Trump’s scandals
I can think of three main categories of Trump scandals aside from assaulting democracy which I’ll talk about later. The first is the 10 million sexual misconduct accusations he has racked up, including one of rape that’s currently in trial. The second is the business dealings, including the Stormy Daniels case that’s underway and the tax fraud he got fined for. The third are the horrible and probably illegal (or if not should be) things he did as president and in 2016, including the swamp of corruption that was his administration and the quid pro quo with Ukraine.
FiveThirtyEight has found that scandals don’t mean much when they happened before a politician’s previous election, so maybe it’s too late now for many of these to matter. But FiveThirtyEight’s findings might be a result of the media finding such scandals uninteresting and covering them less, which they can change. There have also been plenty of new developments in many of his scandals since the 2020 election, so there is plenty of new information to report on.
That being said… I don’t know. The common wisdom seems sensible to me, that if voters don’t care about Trump’s scandals so far they never will. Somehow voters have checked the “scandal” box for Trump, don’t care much that this box is checked, and are unresponsive to new information. Maybe more targeted scandal coverage will hurt Trump, but there’s also opportunity cost to covering scandals so I don’t know if it’s actually worth it.
4. Cover Trump and the GOP as threats to democracy
It's not super clear looking at the data how much Stop The Steal actually hurt GOP candidates in 2022 general elections (as opposed to, say, positions on abortions), but it’s certainly not as much as you’d expect based on pre-2016 democratic norms6. You could say the same thing about Trump’s performance in 2020 and even 2016. Why don’t voters understand and/or care about the threat to US democracy?
There are two credible answers from my view. One is that voters at large simply don’t care (and maybe have never cared) much about issues of democracy, that democratic norms are(/were) really an elite phenomenon. The other, and this is where this proposal comes in, is that the media legitimizes Republicans too much and doesn’t sufficiently treat them as threats to democracy enough.
I’m pretty skeptical of this proposal. The media already does devote a ton of coverage to pointing out how the GOP are threats to democracy. My impression is that, insofar as it is possible to get voters to care enough about these threats to vote very differently, you probably need signals from different parts of society. Maybe a bunch of CEOs get together and say they can’t tolerate the GOP anymore, maybe currently serving military officers publicly disparage Trump, I’m not sure. But it likely isn’t something the mainstream media or any left-wing institutions can do.
5. Try to regain credibility
This last theory is partway toward accepting defeat. The idea is that the media’s ability to persuade is dependent on its credibility, and right now among people who aren’t already solidly left-wing it is sorely lacking. This is fairly non-controversial; the controversial part is when (if ever) the media’s credibility faded and what it can do to regain it. I like Zvi Mowshowitz’s theory that the media used up much of their credibility by openly going against Trump in 2016, failed, and is now limited in its ability to oppose him.
Of course, this post is not going to advocate that they stop opposing Trump. I believe it’s possible for the media to simultaneously regain credibility and use this increased credibility to sink Trump. Maybe they could give more credence to right-wing ideas while also bashing Trump/modern-GOP-specific flaws. Maybe they could explain right-wing policy ideas and the motivations behind them and in doing encourage policy discussion that help Democrats. You can combine most of the aforementioned proposals with some sort of effort to reclaim impartiality.
Bonus: Stop with the horse-race coverage
This isn’t exclusive to Republicans or Trump (though I think it would hurt him slightly), this isn’t at all a recent phenomenon, but I just had to include it.
Horse-race journalism is coverage that focuses on who is likely to win rather than the issues themselves. I’m going to extend the meaning slightly and include coverage of the form “how are voters feeling on [xyz] issue”. Taking a step back, this type of press is just really dumb - a viewer’s opinion on who to vote for or which issues to support should not depend on what other voters think of these candidates or issues. Exposing viewers to such coverage causes them to treat politics as sports and apply a very “both-sides” mindset to everything.
The reason I think this helps Trump in particular is that much of his strength depends on the cynicism that comes from the both-sides and politics-as-sports mindsets. When you treat both sides as the same, you are much more likely to forgive Trump’s unique flaws with “every politician has scandals” or “all politicians lie constantly”. If you are historically Republican and think of politics as sports, you would see it as just natural to support your party and not think too much of Trump’s unique attributes. It’s these attitudes that I think underlied much of Trump’s strength, especially in 2016.
In lack of a true conclusion, I will let go of the impartial facade here and use this ending segment to stress the importance of the media thinking hard about a strategy to sink Trump. Trump lost by 0.6% last time; he is far from inevitable to lose the next election. Despite what Republican elites would like to be believe, you cannot just wish him away.
The media's current strategy for dealing with Trump just does not work. David Shor likes to blame Democrats for the salience of social issues and Republican’s gains among non-college educated voters, but it's also true that half of voters thought Democrats wanted to defund the police in 2022(!) despite three years of messaging to the contrary. The media has to accept its role as a political actor and start acting with intention. Frankly, our democracy depends on it.
This problem is much worse than it seems on the face of it. The most active readers make up a huge share of modern media's revenue, both because they read the news way more frequently than everyone else and because they’re richer so advertisers will pay more for them.
This doesn’t mean that it’s wrong to consider this - if someone spends more time interacting with news it will have more opportunity to affect them. Still I think in terms of electoral impact you should really be focusing on number of viewers rather than watch time
The only exception to this I can think of comes in op-eds, which I discuss later in the piece.
Two notes here. First: some of you might be mad at me for not classifying abortion as “culture wars”, but electorally it plays out differently than the other issues I mentioned. Second: the GOP’s position on abortion is really unpopular but it’s important to note that the voter demographic distribution on abortion is less favorable to Democrats than the demographic distribution on fiscal policy debates. On fiscal policy, the most electorally valuable white working class voters (yes, much more valuable than suburban voters) are more left-wing than their high-class counterparts. On abortion the within-party split is more by religiosity, which is probably also beneficial to Democrats but much less so.
Unless they’re by Ezra Klein
People might argue with the year I’m using here; whatever. Non-conspiratorial right-wingers might claim that I’m exaggerating the threat to democracy here, pointing to the fact that no election has actually been successfully stolen (besides arguably 2000, which is a whole other tangent). I think this leads to the conclusion that voters should and will never care about protecting democracy until it is too late and democracy has already fallen.