How the media blew 2024′s election | Will Bunch Newsletter

I’m back — back from Chicago and also back, inshallah, with weekly newsletters from now until Election Day. Friends and neighbors who watched on TV keep asking me what covering the Democratic National Convention was really like. It was the difference between seeing Springsteen or the Stones in a documentary versus being at the show for a few pulsating hours.

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This column, about the decline and fall of America’s political news media in such a pivotal election year, has proved very hard to write — not for a lack of material, but because I can’t keep pace with every day’s new and stunning examples of bad journalism, each one spiraling a tad lower.

I’ll start with the weekend’s lowlight: a news story that worked up the media food chain from the muck of smaller right-wing outlets, then got boosted on X/Twitter by Alex Thompson, a widely read national political correspondent for Axios, before the New York Post hyped it in your local Wawa and eventually the New York Times felt compelled to address it. You see, an idea that has animated the right for the last couple of weeks is the fantasy that Democratic vice presidential nominee Gov. Tim Walz is a phony. Sunday’s purported news slammed Walz for a 2006 episode when his then-congressional campaign claimed he’d won a youth award from the Nebraska Chamber of Commerce when really it was — get this! — the Nebraska Junior Chamber of Commerce!

Never mind that the 2006 Walz campaign had corrected this tiny mistake (picture Barack Obama doing the hand thing, but even smaller), probably the work of a junior staffer, the second they learned about it. The nattering nabobs of negativism had accomplished their mission in a year when the elite mainstream media has lost its doggone mind — going after small daily clickbait like a puppy chasing its tail, demanding news conferences only to ask trivial questions, issuing ludicrous “fact checks,” and desperately seeking gravitas in the candidate just found guilty on 34 felony counts and liable for rape and financial fraud, who was dinged by NPR for 162 lies or distortions in just one news conference.

Indeed, the outrageous overinflation of the Walz story was nearly forgotten by Monday morning when the Times, which has bent over backwards to belittle the joy of Kamala Harris’ wildly successful Democratic National Convention in Chicago last week, published an op-ed from the editor of the conservative National Review, Rich Lowry, headlined simply: “Trump Can Win on Character.” Perhaps that’s true, as critics noted, if voters do what Lowry did in his piece and pretend that inconvenient facts like the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection or the fraud verdict had never happened. But while the column was ridiculed on social media, few people said they were giving up on the Times — because in this annus horribilis for the American media, many had already tuned out the NYT weeks or months ago.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. The NYU professor and media critic Jay Rosen urged journalists to cover “the stakes, not the odds” of the 2024 election while Margaret Sullivan — who writes for the Guardian and her Substack after stints at the Times and the Washington Post — was more blunt in beseeching the press to ignore the pull of both-sides journalism and take seriously the threat to democracy posed by Trump, who tried to override his 2020 election loss and has made no comforting assurances that he won’t try to do the same after Nov. 5, 2024.

Few journalists — if any — have listened. Much of the righteous fury during the Chicago DNC was directed at fact-checkers from the Times, Post, and independent organizations like PolitiFact. These organizations or practices were mostly established after the endemic political lying of the 2000s — remember the Iraq War? But while no one would argue with their stated approach of tough, unbiased scrutiny of all sides, the fact-checking industrial complex can’t handle the truth when one party’s platform is based on a firehouse of lies and the other party is trying to be serious, if not always literal, about reality.

So Democratic convention week brought absurdities like PolitiFact tackling a DNC video that showed an actual Trump 2016 quote that “there has to be some form of punishment” for women who have abortions and labeled it “mostly false” (!!) because his panicked aides later told him to walk back such a politically damaging statement. Also typical was USA Today calling it “false” when the DNC talks about “Trump’s Project 2025″ because the blueprint for his presidency was produced by the Heritage Foundation, even though most of its authors are former and would-be future Trump staffers and it offers the only program for filling jobs in a Trump administration.

C’mon, man.

It would require another column — maybe a book — to explain why this is happening. I see it as less the public’s main complaint (corporate control of the media) and more about our profession’s weird value structure, where it’s more important to be savvy, cynical, and not be portrayed as naive shills for liberalism than to care about saving democracy from authoritarian rule, on top of maybe a new and not always healthy brand of careerism from younger journalists.

The Chicago-based media critic Mark Jacob, a retired veteran editor of that city’s Tribune and Sun Times, nailed it Monday with a piece headlined “Mainstream media on a path to irrelevance.” Jacob has harsh words for how reporters have covered the race, writing that “too many political journalists are marinating in the Washington cocktail culture, writing for each other and for their sources — in service to the political industry, not the public.” But he also notes that traditional media can’t figure out how to compete for young eyeballs against sites like edgy and fast-paced TikTok. Jacob pointed out that public faith in mass media has plunged from 72% in 1976, after Watergate, to just 32% today.

You know who gets the new landscape better than anyone else? Kamala Harris.

The vice president and Democratic nominee is running to be America’s first post-media president. In Chicago, much was made of the fact that Team Harris and the Democrats invited 200 sometimes fawning internet “content creators” who got VIP treatment while mainstream journalists fought over nosebleed-level seats and refrained from eating or going to the bathroom for fear of losing them.

But more broadly, Harris and her campaign is 100% focused on message discipline to build her brand and sell it to the American people in a few short weeks. The surest way to get thrown off that message discipline would be a stray answer at an open news conference or in an interview with the likes of NBC’s Lester Holt — so for now, Harris is simply not doing that.

And she’s getting away with it. Mainstream journalists can carp and whine about this all they want, but when less than a third of Americans trust the mass media, few folks are listening to them. What’s been really striking this year is that while traditionally deep distrust of the mainstream press has been the domain of right-wing Republicans, now it’s liberals who once cheered for the media to do better who seem to be giving up on them.

This is not great. For one thing, the plunge in faith leads to cancelled subscriptions that leads to laid-off reporters or shuttered printing plants — not the vision of America’s founders who believed a free press is essential. In this campaign, I think the healthy journalistic mindset is that we want to save democracy in November, but we also want Harris to show she can answer at least a few tough questions and explain her policies beyond hopelessly vague generalities.

The reality, though, is that Harris might surge into the White House in January doing very little of this — maybe none at all, especially if Trump actually chickens out of their Sept. 10 debate in Philadelphia. Fifty years ago this summer, Richard Nixon resigned the presidency because people believed what they read about him in the Washington Post. Today, Harris feels she doesn’t need journalists at all, and a lot of the public is cheering her on. And a vainglorious elite news media with severe tunnel vision has no one to blame but themselves.

Question: If Kamala pulls it out but doesn’t have a blue Senate, what will that mean for her agenda? — Everything’s Fine (@ResistInBux) via X/Twitter

Answer: The odds of this happening are strong — the GOP is guaranteed a pickup in West Virginia, which means Dems would need to defend every vulnerable seat (including Sen. Jon Tester in blood-red Montana) and/or pull an unlikely upset or two to do better than the slimmest 50-50-plus-Tim-Walz majority. A Republican Senate would surely prevent a President Kamala Harris from any Supreme Court picks, and vote down any progressive Cabinet nominees. And any liberal economic or social safety net policies would be dead on arrival. Pray for miracles this November.

I was blown away by your enthusiastic response to the last newsletter’s question about America’s best and worst vice presidential nominees. In a tight race for worst, Sarah Palin (6 votes), a dunce, edged out Spiro Agnew (5), a felon, with 3 votes for Dan Quayle and single tallies for Richard Nixon, Andrew Johnson, Joe Lieberman, JD Vance, and Dick Cheney (from my dad!...so proud). Showing the leftward bent of this crowd, the best veep race was a tie between the most-progressive-ever No, 2, FDR’s Henry Wallace, and anti-poverty warrior Lyndon Johnson. Al Gore and Joe Biden each got two votes, with one apiece for Nelson Rockefeller, Walter Mondale, Hubert Humphrey, and Mike Pence, because, as Armen Pandola put it, “when you refuse to destroy the Republic, it’s about the best that a VP can do.”

📮This week’s question: Let’s go with more of an essay question. I know most of you aren’t happy with media coverage of the election; what’s wrong with the Fourth Estate, and how can it be fixed? For a chance to be featured in my newsletter, email me your answer. Please put “Broken media” in the subject line.

The thousands of red, white and blue balloons have all popped, the echoes of DJ Cassidy segueing from Michigan’s Eminem to Minnesota’s Prince have finally died, and those American flags were all confiscated at O’Hare by the TSA (I’m guessing). But two words from Vice President Kamala Harris in her acceptance speech are still ringing for me, and for some other folks also pondering them. Harris made the somewhat boilerplate promise that her administration would offer the strongest military in the world, but added it will also be “the most lethal.”

It was clear that one of the main purposes of Harris’ speech, in introducing herself as a presidential candidate for little more than a month since President Joe Biden’s abrupt withdrawal from the race, was to get voters picturing the would-be first American woman president behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office, dealing with adversaries like Iran or Russia. And it accomplished that mission. But the seeming bloodlust of the “most lethal” vow was a bit cringe for some listeners — even, according to Newsweek, for her stepdaughter Ella Emhoff and sister Maya Harris, who didn’t join others in applauding. Leftists on X/Twitter spent the weekend tweeting about all the things — like health insurance or free college — they’d prefer over the “most lethal” military. Even Sen. Bernie Sanders, a Harris supporter who agreed America needs a strong defense said our bloated Pentagon budget should be cut, and that “enough is enough!”

Sanders has a point. America currently spends more on defense than the world’s next nine biggest militaries combined, and yet jacking up Pentagon spending every year is the only thing Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill can agree on. And just how lethal do we need to be? One study found that America, mostly through airstrikes from Syria to Afghanistan and elsewhere, killed at least 22,000 civilians since the 2001 terror attack, and maybe as many as 48,000. Some of those folks were anti-American terrorists, but a decent number were Afghanis attending weddings or just living their lives. The United States must be — and by all accounts is — able to defend itself, with deadly force when necessary, but our talent for killing human beings should be reined in, not celebrated by a would-be commander-in-chief. After a week with Stevie Wonder and The Chicks, it was the one false note from Chicago.

Donald Trump was showing his age, and perhaps losing his mentally acuity or worse — on this date five years ago, when he was still our president. I wrote: “Suddenly, a topic that was only discussed by the unfiltered internet masses — is Trump mentally ill, or at age 73 suffering a steep decline in mental acuity — has gone mainstream, discussed openly by pundits like CNN’s Brian Stelter (“It’s getting worse — we all can see it”) or with presidential candidates like New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker calling him “a dangerous president.” In my Aug. 27, 2019 column I wrote that the constitutional remedies for this, such as impeachment or the 25th Amendment, had failed, and that stopping Trump was up to us. Just like today! Check out: “The Constitution’s 3 ways to stop a demagogue like Trump haven’t worked. Now what?”

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