This is the Daily Blast from the New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network.

I'm your host, Greg Sargent.

Over the weekend, the New York Times published a news analysis entitled,

The Biden-Trump Rerun, A Nation-Craving Change, gets more of the same.

This has become a constant refrain in the press.

One headline after another tells us that voters don't want to have to choose between

Donald Trump and Joe Biden. They don't want a rematch. Press critic Mark Jacob, a former journalist

himself, noticed a problem here. As he wrote on his substack, one of the candidates is running on an

explicit set of promises to destroy American democracy, yet the

press keeps calling this a rerun of 2020, almost as if this is a sporting event.

This gets at something important.

Wittingly or not, much of the press coverage functionally sanitizes what Trump and a good

deal of his movement really represent.

Mark writes about this kind of failure regularly,

so he invited him on the show to discuss it. Welcome, Mark.

Thank you for asking me.

First, tell us a bit about your own journalistic background and what led you to launch this

substack. Well, I was in daily newspapering for four decades, and my last job was as Metro editor at the Chicago

Tribune, where I was head of the largest department in the largest newsroom in the Midwest,

so it was pretty challenging. And as I saw the kind of diminishment of local news,

you know, and the fact that everyone seems to be laying off people,

not hiring people, I decided to ask for a buyout, got one, and became a freelance writer.

...