The Media Thought Misleaders
Journalism Professors Jay Rosen and Margret Sullivan are trying to redefine basic tenets of journalism, to horrible effect
Last Week’s Q&A session between the National Association of Black Journalists and Donald Trump went as well as would an appearance of a rabid coyote before the The Committee of Concerned Shepherds. As is the case almost every time that Trump speaks before an audience not already in thrall to his notions and syntax, Trump embarrassed himself, or would have were he capable of shame. He insulted the audience, the moderators, Kamala Harris, almost all Black people, every president since Abraham Lincoln and the NABJ’s tech crew.
Par for the course. The citizenry benefited from this vivid reminder of how nuts Trump’s ideas are. I came away in agreement with The Bulwark’s Tim Miller.
The other side of this argument, the “deplatforming” side is, I have come to believe, almost always wrong. Even the conceit of “platforming” is a misnomer. Trump is running for President of the United States. He is going to give hundreds of speeches, do hundreds of interviews with outlets who won’t push back, and be seen millions of times on social media in forms controlled by his campaign and its fans. It’s not giving him a “platform” to ask him a hard question, it’s journalism. It might be “platforming” if Trump were given a forum without an opportunity for questions, but the “J” in NABJ is for “Journalists”. The three moderators, including Fox’s Harris Faulkner, were engaged in journalism. The interviewee might clash with, criticize, or be fundamentally objectionable to the sensibilities of the journalists, but none of that means it’s no longer journalism. The hostility or charmlessness of the subject of journalism can, in fact, be instructive to the consumer of the journalism.
This all seems obvious. Yet some prominent journalists disagree.
Enter the Professors
Margaret Sullivan, who currently writes for the Guardian is head of the Center for Journalism Ethics and Security at Columbia University. Jay Rosen is faculty member at NYU’s journalism school. They are leaders of a movement to shame journalists out of covering the news whenever the news is some fact or angle that deviates from their north star of coverage: the threat represented by Donald Trump. They believe that the only appropriate way for the media to take the Trump threat seriously is to suppress coverage of almost every aspect of politics that’s anything other than the impending nightmare. Reports about polling? Out. Profiles fleshing out personalities? An affront to the mission. Taking seriously the deficiencies of Trump’s opponents? That one is always a mistake.
The Problem with Conclusion-First “Journalism”
For the record, I share Sullivan and Rosen’s assertion that a second Trump term would probably test norms and the strength of our institutions, as his first administration did. That’s a very bad thing and why I’ll be voting against him. I came to this conclusion mostly by engaging in the reporting of journalistic organizations, which thankfully would never follow the Sullivan/Rosen proscriptions. It should also be noted that plenty of journalists have in fact extensively documented the dangers of Trump, in quite prominent publications, despite the narrative (dare I say the “misinformation”) that the dangers of a second Trump term have been downplayed or ignored.
Sullivan and Rosen want more of the “Trump Dangerous” coverage and much much less of any other type of coverage. They want virtually no coverage that portrays Democrats in a negative light, if their opponent is Donald Trump. I’m sure they’d say desperate times make for desperate acts, but so desperate as to make the role of journalism indistinguishable from the role of the Democratic National Committee ?
BUT HER EMAILS
Sullivan and Rosen repeatedly cite the 2016 coverage the FBI’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email server as a story where the media engaged in news judgement so skewed it threw the election to Trump. Certain that this was the best explanation of what happened, in subsequent years they began applying the lesson over and over to any news coverage that might hurt Trump’s opponents. There have been three life examples since ”But Her Emails” that Sullivan and Rosen have treated similarly, and they’ve been wrong in their assessment every time.
Rosen phrases his advocacy of media self-censorship as “Not the odds, but the stakes.” By this he means that election news other than news of how bad Trump will be needs to be suppressed. Rosen has been at this game for a while. He was among the more prominent adherents to the idea that Hunter Biden’s laptop was “bullshit”, and that media suppression of its actual existence and validity wasn’t a black eye, but an example of progress.
Also in 2020, when Trump had begun holding nightly press briefings during the pandemic, Rosen issued an imperious decree mixed, with a little cosplay, titled, “Today we are switching our coverage of Donald Trump to an emergency setting.” In it, he advises the press to no longer attend press briefings, broadcasters to no longer broadcast Trump’s words live on TV, and reporters to stop reporting on what Trump actually said.
Wrong in Theory, Disastrous in Practice
Let’s now posit a world in which the media somehow followed Rosen’s advice to suppress presidential news briefings about Covid. This is a hypothetical, so we don’t have to take into account the unlikelihood of this happening given that the media are a) competitive b) profit-seeking c) hostile to censorship d) opposed to being scooped every night by C-SPAN e) disinclined to listen to media professors. But were the media to have ignored Trump’s press conferences, America would not have seen Trump’s scientific experts sighing and eye-rolling behind him. We would not, every night, have been hit over the head with the government’s impotence in the face of a pandemic that Trump promised would go away. We wouldn’t have heard our president toying with the idea of UV rays and bleach injections in a way so instantly stunning that it was the rare nonsensical utterance to break through the dense fog of Trump blather.
Every public opinion poll captured the fact that the public greatly disapproved of Trump’s handling of the pandemic. Political scientists have determined that the pubic’s opinion of Trump’s pandemic response was a significant factor in Trump’s defeat. It was the public’s real-time witnessing of his shambolic, embarrassing moments that cemented these opinions, and that wouldn’t have happened to the degree it did had the networks taken Jay Rosen’s advice and adopted his “emergency setting.”
After the laptops and the press briefings came press coverage of Joe Biden’s decline. The attention paid to this fact, which Biden eventually acknowledged, vowing “to pass the torch to a new generation”, was cited by Sullivan and Rosen as yet another example of a distracted media in need of fundamental reform.
One particularly embarrassing column of Sullivan’s was titled “The Media's Circular Logic and Destructive Obsession with Biden's Age; Yes, it's fast becoming the 2024 version of the media's obsession with Hillary's emails”.
Believing the voters to be idiots, Sullivan writes of the coverage of Biden’s cognitive decline: “For the media to make this the overarching issue of the campaign is nothing short of journalistic malpractice.”
That was back in February. Sullivan has been writing versions of this column ever since, producing one as recently as 3 weeks ago. Two weeks later Biden dropped out, because Biden’s age was in fact an “overarching issue of the campaign.” There was no mea culpa. It’s not clear from her writing that Sullivan has even contemplated her error. Of course, when your project is bending the rules of journalism toward a conclusion-first approach, what hope is there for reflection or humility?
Sullivan of course wasn’t alone among the many media pundits who made the knee-jerk “but her emails” comparison to Biden’s cognition, but few did so as smugly. Sullivan congratulated herself on the bravery it took to name the names of the offending parties:
How about a note from New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger to two key people who report to him directly — the opinion editor and the top newsroom editor — that goes something like this: “Katie and Joe, I’m concerned that we’re going overboard with both coverage and commentary about Biden’s age. Let’s keep this in better perspective and tone it down.” Believe me, those two sentences would make a world of difference.
Good thing Sulzberger didn’t take her advice. Good thing newspapers aren’t in the business of guaranteeing election results. But even if they were, adhering to Sullivan/Rosen information suppression tactics would have gotten the opposite result as intended. They’re misguided journalists but TERRIBLE strategists! As The Bulwark’s Sarah Longwell points out, “One of the things that’s always been true of Donald Trump is that when voters see less of him, his approval ratings tend to go up, when voters see more of him, his approval ratings tend to go down”. In a world where news outlets had succumbed to Sullivan and Rosen’s shaming techniques, had followed their advice to stick with the winning bet in Biden, had regarded concern about Biden’s age as an “ism”, and had suppressed the words Donald Trump was actually saying, the risk of a second Trump term would be greatly increased from where it is today.
It is also very important to note that the reason that the Sullivan/Rosen news suppression advice is wrong isn’t because of some unexpectedly counterintuitive result that couldn’t be foreseen, like when a well-intentioned intervention surprisingly exacerbates the problem. Sullivan and Rosen are wrong because their disdainful opinion of the American news consumer and voter is inaccurate. Normatively, journalists should not suppress information in order to achieve a desired result. But if they do, the suppression is unlikely to take and even the suppression does occur, the result is as likely to backfire as not.
No Meas Culpa.
No matter how wrong, Sullivan and Rosen are still slinging their supercilious slop within their high status worlds.
But their advice can’t simply be consigned to the category of “thought experiment”, that classification that academics and intellectuals have invented to escape scrutiny for what was once known as “bad ideas”. Sullivan isn’t just a columnist for the Guardian; she’s instructed their newsroom on her theories of news suppression. She and Rosen lecture journalism students all over the country. I know of newsrooms where “not the odds but the stakes” has become a mantra, and not just the newsrooms that Rosen brags about influencing.
I imagine a rebuttal to my descriptions of the Sullivan/Rosen news suppression initiative is to say that I’m exaggerating, that all they’re doing is emphasizing well-accepted practices in the profession, and that what I call suppression they call proper discernment. That might be fine if it weren’t for the tangible examples of the types of news they have wanted suppressed, combined with what we know about the veracity of that news and the potential impact of their admonishments. Rosen believed suppression of the laptop story was a proper journalistic decision—exactly the kind of decision that his project was arguing for. He believed that less attention paid to Trump’s covid response would help Trump. Sullivan has gone on and on, arguing that news of Biden’s decline should have been de-emphasized. They are offering not a reasonable tweak but a radical break from journalistic practice, and the results of their advice are in: Terrible for journalism, destructive for democracy, and crippling for any hope of future press credibility.
But as we should learn from the Olympics. A platform is different from a springboard.
Hmm, I wonder why trust in the regime media has absolutely cratered? There’s something terribly wrong when so-called journalists are debating if they should platform the Republican presidential candidate, one who has the support of half the country.
But ya, keep patting yourself on the back as impartial observers of world events. For anyone outside your insular bubble, the mere fact this is a conversation demonstrates why the regime media is unfit for purpose. Just another nail in the coffin of an industry in circling the drain of irrelevancy.
This is a great example of how incompetent and partisan the regime media has become; “We wouldn’t have heard our president toying with the idea of UV rays and bleach injections in a way so instantly stunning that it was the rare nonsensical utterance to break through the dense fog of Trump blather.”
Trump never suggested people inject bleach. A two-minute internet search would reveal the actual text of what he said. Bu ya, keep patting yourself on the back as impartial observers of world events.
Meanwhile, Kamala Harris has been the Dem presidential candidate for nearly three weeks, and has yet to conduct a real interview. Maybe those in the regime media should get off their ass and do real journalism.