Hey, it's Jane. We first aired this episode almost exactly a year ago. But with Trump's jump

into the presidential nomination pool, two years before the next election, it's more

relevant than ever. For one thing, I think it has a lot of lessons worth reviving about

how the media covered Trump, covers Trump, and how it addresses its biases, a bias towards

centrism or a horse race coverage, for example. I'll be back next week with a brand new episode.

In the meantime, I'm collecting your voice mails about why you changed your political

party. You know, because maybe I'm having that problem now.

If you've changed your party registration, tell me why. Leave me a voice mail 347-915-432-4.

Today on the argument, if American democracy fails, is it the media's fault?

I'm Jane Kostin. We love to blame the media for everything, including who wins or loses

presidential elections. And let's be real. Occasionally we deserve it.

He's an associate professor of journalism at NYU. He says that with voting rights under

attack and people planning coups and PowerPoint presentations, journalists need to seriously

rethink the way they've covered politics.

What's happening there is that journalists want to assure themselves, their colleagues,

and the audience, that they can be fair, that they can be balanced. And as my friend Norm

Arnsene says, a balanced treatment of an unbalanced phenomenon is distortion.

But from my colleague, Rostovet, a balanced treatment of an unbalanced phenomenon is just

good journalism. Ross thinks that in the wake of the 2016 election, the media seriously

overcorrected when it came to covering the Trump presidency.

I think that it led to a lot of highly exaggerated stories where Trump's real swordedness was

blown out of proportion. A lot of cases where Trump did things, sometimes that were reasonable

...