The media learned all the wrong lessons from 2024 -- Chauncey DeVega - Salon

[erronis]

https://www.salon.com/2025/03/28/the-media-learned-all-the-lessons-from-2024/

Why the press is ramping up its acts of anticipatory obedience to the Trump regime

This includes a very good set of excerpts from by Solnit, Froomkin, Kuttner, Snyder, and others. Please read the article.

There are annual conferences where medical professionals and other experts discuss the deaths and illnesses of historic figures through the lens of modern medicine. At some point in the future, historians, political scientists, journalists and other experts will convene to discuss and debate the Age of Trump and how the “world’s greatest democracy” succumbed to autocracy and authoritarianism. The role of the mainstream news media is sure to be prominently featured in any political autopsy.

During the 2024 election, the American mainstream news media continued to practice its obsolete norms of “fairness,” “balance,” “objectivity,” and “neutrality.” Coverage remained steadfastly focused on “bothsidesism,” an obsession with the polls and the “horserace,” and inside the Beltway gossip rather than critical coverage of Trump’s campaign and his MAGA authoritarian populist movement. As an institution, the news media did not treat Donald Trump’s chances of victory over the Democrats in the 2024 election with the seriousness and alarm it merited. The result was to normalize and minimize the existential harm that Trump’s return to power would cause the nation.

In this future political autopsy, media scholar Jay Rosen’s advice and warning to the American news media to emphasize “Not the odds, but the stakes” in its coverage of the Age of Trump will be written in bold or repeatedly underlined.

. . .

Donald Trump and his MAGA movement are quickly consolidating their power. The American news media is almost out of time to learn new habits and norms by being brave defenders of democracy and freedom. The American news media is now facing an existential collective action problem, where to paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, they need to work together or be defeated alone. The future of America’s news media is clear: If they continue with their bad culture and acts of anticipatory obedience, they will become de facto ministries of state propaganda that are owned by the autocrat and his friends and allies, like in Orban’s Hungary or Putin’s Russia.

Thanks to bumbles for sending me this article!