Is News Media Setting Trump Up For Another Win?

Matter of Opinion

New York Times Opinion

Society & Culture, Ross Douthat, News, New York Times, Journalism

4.2 • 7.2K Ratings

🗓️ 15 December 2021

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

With the midterms just months away and the 2024 presidential race around the corner, the press is gearing up to cover more deeply polarizing election cycles. And how it should do that is an equally polarizing question. The media’s role in preserving — and reporting on — our democratic institutions is up for discussion. Last week, the New York Times Opinion columnist Ross Douthat pushed back on media critics like the N.Y.U. associate professor Jay Rosen. Jay asserts that the press should strive to be “pro-truth, pro-voting, anti-racist, and aggressively pro-democracy.” Ross disagrees, claiming that such a stance could feed more polarization. So, this week Jane Coaston invited Ross and Jay to the show for a lively debate over how the press should cover politics in a democratic society. Mentioned in this episode: “Can the Press Prevent a Trump Restoration?” by Ross Douthat, published last week “You Cannot Keep From Getting Swept up in Trump’s Agenda Without a Firm Grasp on Your Own” and “Two Paths Forward for the American Press,” by Jay Rosen, published in PressThink in May 2020 and November 2020, respectively.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Today on the argument, if American democracy fails, is it the media's fault?
0:10.4	I'm Jane Kostin.
0:12.1	We love to blame the media for everything, including who wins or loses presidential elections.
0:17.2	And let's be real.
0:19.0	Occasionally, we deserve it.
0:23.4	J. Rosen is a media critic who thinks that journalists need to learn some heart lessons
0:27.4	from the last few election cycles.
0:29.9	It's an associate professor of journalism at NYU.
0:32.9	He says that with voting rights under attack and people planning coups and PowerPoint presentations,
0:38.2	journalists need to seriously rethink the way they've covered politics.
0:42.4	What's happening there is that journalists want to assure themselves, their colleagues,
0:47.9	and the audience that they can be fair, that they can be balanced.
0:53.1	And as my friend Norm Armstein says, a balanced treatment of an unbalanced phenomenon is distortion.
1:01.9	But from my colleague, Rostovet, a balanced treatment of an unbalanced phenomenon is just
1:07.3	good journalism.
1:09.8	Rost thinks that in the wake of the 2016 election, the media seriously overcorrected when
1:14.2	it came to covering the Trump presidency.
1:16.7	I think that it led to a lot of highly exaggerated stories where Trump's real swordiness
1:22.6	was blown out of proportion.
1:24.4	A lot of cases where Trump did things, sometimes that were reasonable policy that got covered
1:30.1	as if they were the work of Hitler.
1:35.7	Rost wrote a column all about this last week called Can the Press Prevent a Trump Restoration?
	...

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