There’s been a lot written lately by media observers urging our top political reporters to stop the contorted bothsidesing horse-race coverage that diminishes the stakes of the upcoming election.
And for good reason! It’s been particularly terrible lately. See, e.g., James Risen, Will Bunch, Margaret Sullivan, John Harwood, Parker Molloy, and myself, among others.
But trying to get entitled, self-satisfied political reporters and editors to change their ways appears to be hopeless.
So allow me to focus for a few minutes on three missions the rest of the newsroom could adopt to actually inform the electorate in a constructive way.
I’m talking about the reporters on the national desks and the business desks, the ones covering beats like climate and housing and labor and immigration.
Here are the three missions I would like them to embrace.
- Identify a key issue. Explain what’s at stake. Discuss possible solutions. Then explain what the candidates are proposing.
- Identify highly trafficked falsehoods. Then debunk them, trace their origin, and report on who’s spreading them and why.
- Similarly, take a poll to determine what people believe about the current state of affairs in this country. Then identify those beliefs that are factually incorrect and commit to assiduously and repeatedly correcting the record until those numbers change.
There. That’s three positive steps any newsroom can take to create what I think would be compelling content that is also pro-democracy in the most basic way: it informs the electorate.
Addressing the Stakes
The reality, of course, is that all three of these missions will tend to reflect very poorly on Donald Trump. But whose fault is that?
There are real challenges facing the country and the world, most notably climate change, income inequality, and the rise of authoritarianism.
Trump doesn’t even acknowledge their existence. So not surprisingly his energy and tax policies are horribly regressive and would make things much worse. And he represents the authoritarian menace, not its solution.
Sure, Kamala Harris hasn’t fully defined her views on some issues. But they clearly fall within the existing Democratic spectrum, so reporters don’t have to pretend they don’t know what she would do.
This AP story on the “starkly different divisions” between the two candidates on climate change and energy is a partial attempt to do what I’m talking about, thought it badly lacks context on how dire the current situation is and what the effects of their policy differences would be.
This New York Times story on housing policies is an example of what not to do. It’s a bothsidesing mess that bizarrely credits Trump with proposing to ease housing demand through the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants — something so twisted I don’t think the Trump campaign has actually suggested it themselves.
The Misinformation Crisis
Fully and enthusiastically exposing and debunking the falsehoods being trafficked by the Trump campaign is even more important.
I’ve been arguing for a while now that the journalism industry needs to fight misinformation, disinformation and gaslighting with more vigor. It’s the calling of our time.
It’s particularly damning that poor journalism has allowed so many people to believe Trump’s lies about a country on the brink of economic and moral collapse. It’s our obligation to set the record straight.
With the notable exception of CNN’s Daniel Dale, the “fact-checkers” have failed miserably, warped by their quest to be impartial.
Dale, incidentally, just published a terrific piece about how Trump’s “lying is most exceptional in its relentlessness, a never-ending avalanche of wrongness.”
None of the missions I describe are partisan, or involve taking sides. They judge both parties by the same standards, and let the chips fall where they may.
To the extent that they are activist missions, it’s because they are advocating for truth over lies, something every journalist should be proud to do.