Don’t let the media tell you this dumpster fire is normal
Major news outlets under-react to stay out of Trump’s crosshairs
In the summer of 2024, my wife and I took our 12-year-old twin grandsons to Washington, D.C. We sat in the House of Representatives gallery. We saw the names on the Vietnam wall. We visited Abe Lincoln in his big marble chair.
We chose to take the boys to the nation’s capital because we thought there was a strong possibility that the character of our country would vanish if Donald Trump was elected that fall. I remember standing in front of the capital’s classical architecture and worrying that these monuments to democracy would soon become cold symbols of an evil empire.
One of the places we toured was the White House, whose East Wing no longer exists. Trump destroyed it with a un-democratic decree after lying to the public that he would spare it. The East Wing now seems like the perfect example of how much has changed.
Yet some elements of the news industry act as if what’s happened since the 2024 election is normal politics that’s not worth loud headlines or the sounding of public alarms. Among the news events:
Masked federal agents are executing people in the streets.
A massive Homeland Security bureaucracy is building a gulag of concentration camps.
Trump, already convicted of 34 felonies, is taking corrupt payoffs from foreigners.
Trump disparaged Somali Americans, calling them “garbage.”
Trump is trying to dictate who can appear on TV.
Trump is preparing to attack Iran with no input from Congress.
Trump threatens to use the military to seize Greenland, an ally’s territory.
Trump is stealing Venezuela’s oil and has sold it for $1 billion so far.
Trump has murdered at least 148 people on the high seas, claiming they’re drug traffickers but offering zero evidence. (Even if he had evidence, American justice requires a trial. And drug trafficking is not a capital crime.)
Presidential actions that would have been unimaginable in the past are happening daily. Yet there’s still a tone of normality in mainstream media coverage. What we should be seeing is crisis coverage – sweeping news stories with headlines like “Trump is building a dictatorship” and “Trump’s bizarre actions raise doubts about mental fitness.” Even with smaller stories about the daily outrages, the media should be telling the public how unusual the development is.
Instead of a weak headline like “Trump Calls on Netflix to Oust Susan Rice From Its Board” (New York Times), we need headlines like “Trump warns Netflix of ‘consequences’ unless it pulls top Democrat from board” (Guardian). The Guardian’s version nods to the political motive and accurately casts it as a threat, not a suggestion. An even better headline would be: “In new threat against a private business, Trump demands Netflix fire top Democrat from board.”
The media need to make it clear that this is not normal. Americans are not all political science majors or ethicists. Plenty of people don’t understand separation of powers, conflicts of interest, or abuses of power. It’s the media’s job to explain it to them.
Instead of a generic headline reading “Angry Trump slams six Supreme Court justices who nixed his tariffs” (Roll Call), news outlets should have given us headlines that focused on the most outrageous and abnormal aspect of Trump’s reaction: his claim that “foreign interests” influence the Supreme Court. Trump, of course, provided no evidence for this reckless and utterly abnormal accusation.
Too many news outlets underplay Trump’s corrupt authoritarianism because they don’t want to look like they’re taking a partisan stand. But opposition to Trump isn’t inherently partisan – for most of us, it’s simply the defense of decency. Legacy media outlets don’t think like that, though. They’re focused on the bottom line: They don’t want to offend potential conservative customers (who are probably watching Fox News anyway), and they don’t want to get in Trump’s crosshairs and provoke him to sabotage their businesses.
Keeping their heads down and collecting revenue is what corporate media do. They haven’t received a press release to officially announce the arrival of the dictatorship, so they prefer to write small stories instead of sweeping ones. They think it’s safer to describe the symptoms without diagnosing the disease.
If you watch Tuesday’s State of the Union address, pay attention to how much the networks focus on the trappings of tradition, rather than the way Trump’s words and actions are trashing the American way of life.
Our freedoms are slipping away as you read this sentence. Don’t let the media tell you that’s normal.
This week’s media atrocity
I’m just catching up to an AI mini-scandal at the Conde Nast-owned Ars Technica publication on Feb. 13. The tech publication said it published an article that included “fabricated quotations generated by an AI tool and attributed to a source who did not say them. … This appears to be an isolated incident.” As news outlets try to save time and money by reducing their human workforces, we’ll see a lot more “isolated incidents” in the future.
