We\u2019re seeing<\/span> a huge error, and a potential tragedy, unfold in real time.<\/p>\n That\u2019s a sentence that could apply to countless aspects of economic, medical, governmental, and environmental life at the moment. What I have in mind, though, is the almost unbelievable failure of much of the press to respond to the realities of the Trump age.<\/p>\n Many of our most influential editors and reporters are acting as if the rules that prevailed under previous American presidents are still in effect. But this president is different; the rules are different; and if it doesn\u2019t adapt, fast, the press will stand as yet another institution that failed in a moment of crucial pressure.<\/p>\n In some important ways, media outlets are repeating the mistake made by former Special Counsel Robert Mueller. In his book about the Mueller investigation, True Crimes and Misdemeanors<\/em><\/a> (<\/em>and in a New Yorker<\/em><\/a> article<\/a>), Jeffrey Toobin argues that Mueller\u2019s tragic flaw was a kind of anachronistic idealism\u2014which had the same effect as naivete. Mueller knew the ethical standards he would maintain for himself and insist on from his team. He didn\u2019t understand that the people he was dealing with thought standards were for chumps. Mueller didn\u2019t imagine that a sitting attorney general would intentionally misrepresent his report, which is of course what Bill Barr did. Mueller wanted to avoid an unseemly showdown, or the appearance of a \u201cfishing expedition\u201d inquiry, that would come from seeking a grand-jury subpoena for Donald Trump\u2019s testimony, so he never spoke with Trump under oath, or at all. Trump, Barr, and their team viewed this decorousness as a sign of weakness, which they could exploit.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n George Packer: We are living in a failed state<\/a><\/p>\n Something similar is going on now with many members of the press. They\u2019re behaving like Mueller, wanting to be sure they observe proprieties that would have made sense when dealing with other figures in other eras. But now they\u2019re dealing with Donald Trump, and he sees their behavior as a weakness he can exploit relentlessly.<\/p>\n Much as Mueller didn\u2019t recognize these realities in time, neither did much of our print, broadcast, and cable media four years ago. Networks ran Trump\u2019s rally speeches endlessly from mid-2015 onward, giving him free airtime valued at some $2 billion<\/a>. Why his speeches, and not Hillary Clinton\u2019s or Bernie Sanders\u2019s? Because they were deemed great TV, and the channels\u2019 own ratings went up when the rallies were on. As the race continued, cable channels demonstrated their supposed balance by stocking political discussion panels not with representatives of conservative viewpoints but rather with tribalists and die-hard team members, people who would defend whatever Trump had done or said. (One of these people<\/a> is now the White House press secretary, and her press briefings are like her old cable hits.) The choice of panelists did not reflect a range of policy viewpoints; it was sitcom casting, with people playing their predictable, recognizable parts.<\/p>\n Also in pursuit of the ritual of balance, the networks offset coverage of Donald Trump\u2019s ethical liabilities and character defects, which would have proved disqualifying<\/a> in any other candidate for nearly any other job, with intense investigation of what they insisted were Hillary Clinton\u2019s serious email problems. Six weeks before the election, Gallup published a prophetic analysis<\/a> showing what Americans had heard about each candidate. For Trump, the words people most recognized from all the coverage were speech<\/em>, immigration<\/em>, and Mexico<\/em>. For Clinton, one word dwarfed all others: EMAIL<\/em>. The next two on the list, much less recognized, were lie<\/em> and Foundation<\/em>. (The Clinton Foundation, set up by Bill Clinton, was the object of sustained scrutiny for supposedly shady dealings that amount to an average fortnight\u2019s revelations for the Trump empire.) One week before the election, The<\/em> New York Times<\/em> devoted the entire top half of its front page to stories about FBI Director James Comey\u2019s reopening of an investigation into the emails. \u201cNew Emails Jolt Clinton Campaign in Race\u2019s Last Days\u201d was the headline on the front page\u2019s lead story. \u201cWith 11 Days to Go, Trump Says Revelation \u2018Changes Everything,\u2019\u201d read another front-page headline<\/a>.<\/p>\n Just last week came a fresh reminder of the egregiousness of that coverage, often shorthanded as \u201cBut her emails!\u201d On Wednesday, September 9, Bob Woodward\u2019s tapes of Trump saying that when it came to the coronavirus, he \u201cwanted to always play it down\u201d came out, along with a whistleblower\u2019s claim that the Department of Homeland Security was falsifying intelligence<\/a> to downplay the risk of Russian election interference and violence from white supremacists. On the merits, either of those stories was far more important than Comey\u2019s short-lived inquiry into what was always an overhyped scandal. But in this election season, each got a demure one-column headline on the Times<\/em>\u2019 front page<\/a>. The<\/em> Washington Post<\/em>, by contrast, gave Woodward\u2019s revelations banner treatment across its front page.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n<\/div>\n Now it\u2019s four years later.<\/span> And we\u2019re waking up in Groundhog Day<\/em>, but so far without Bill Murray\u2019s eventual, hard-earned understanding that he could learn new skills as time went on. For Murray, those were things like playing the piano and speaking French. For the press, in these next 49 days, those can be grappling with (among other things) three of the most destructive habits in dealing with Donald Trump. For shorthand, they are the embrace of false equivalence, or both-sides-ism<\/em>; the campaign-manager mentality, or horse-race-ism<\/em>; and the love of spectacle, or going after the ratings and the clicks<\/em>.<\/p>\n Are these familiar problems? Yes, indeed! As familiar as \u201cI Got You Babe\u201d playing every single morning on the alarm clock in Groundhog Day<\/em>. Over the past few years, they\u2019ve been the object of careful, continued analyses by the likes of Margaret Sullivan<\/a>, now of The Washington Post<\/em> and the last really effective public editor of The<\/em> New York Times<\/em>(before the paper mistakenly abolished<\/a> that position); Dan Froomkin<\/a>, formerly of the Post<\/em> and now of Press Watch<\/a>; Jay Rosen, of New York University and PressThink<\/a>; Eric Boehlert, of Press Run Media<\/a>; Greg Sargent of \u201cThe Plum Line<\/a>\u201d at The Washington Post<\/em>; Brian Beutler of Crooked Media<\/a>; Eric Alterman<\/a> of CUNY Brooklyn College, author of the new book Lying in State<\/em><\/a>; the linguist George Lakoff<\/a>, who has promoted the concept of countering lies with a \u201ctruth sandwich<\/a>\u201d; and many others. For my own part, I wrote a book called Breaking the News<\/em> nearly 25 years ago<\/a>, excerpted as an <\/a>Atlantic<\/em><\/a> cover story<\/a>, about trends like these that were evident then and have metastasized through the years since.<\/p>\n David A. Graham: Some real news about fake news<\/a><\/p>\n But it\u2019s precisely because these trends are familiar that they matter. As Ed Yong has demonstrated in his latest <\/a>Atlantic <\/em><\/a>piece<\/a> on the pandemic, and as Adam Serwer<\/a>, Ibram X. Kendi<\/a>, and others have argued about racial-justice struggles, it\u2019s rarely the new issues that most bedevil us. It\u2019s the same old problems and failures and blind spots and biases, again and again and again.<\/p>\n How are we again seeing these patterns, and what can we do about them?<\/p>\n This is the shorthand term for most journalists\u2019 discomfort with seeming to \u201ctake a side\u201d in political disputes, and the contortions that result.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n<\/div>\n But on the narrow, specific question of Republican-versus-Democratic disagreements, newspaper and broadcast reporters are profoundly uncomfortable with appearing<\/em> to take a side. This issue has been extremely well discussed over the years, for example in a dispatch<\/a> titled \u201cThe View From Nowhere,\u201d by Jay Rosen back in 2010; and in an article from Dan Froomkin<\/a> a few weeks ago. The simplest version of the point is that reporters are most at ease when they can quote first one side and then the other, seeming to be neutral between the two\u2014or when they present a charge, and then the response. It\u2019s a role idealized by John Roberts asserting, during his confirmation hearings to become chief justice of the Supreme Court, that his role as jurist was just \u201cto call balls and strikes<\/a>,\u201d or by Fox News\u2019s amusing motto \u201cWe report, you decide.\u201d<\/p>\n Everyone in journalism has sat through countless discussions of the limits of objectivity. But the power of the impulse still shows up now, in 2020, in several distinctive ways.<\/p>\n One is a habitual, even reflexive presentation of claims or statements that a reporter knows<\/em> are not of equivalent truthfulness, as if they were. (Thus, \u201cfalse equivalence.\u201d) A stark recent example was an AP story<\/a> on September 4, with the headline \u201cDueling Versions of Reality Define 1st Week of Fall Campaign.\u201d It began:<\/p>\n NEW YORK (AP) \u2014 On the campaign trail with President Donald Trump, the pandemic is largely over, the economy is roaring back, and murderous mobs are infiltrating America\u2019s suburbs.<\/p>\n With Democrat Joe Biden, the pandemic is raging, the economy isn\u2019t lifting the working class, and systemic racism threatens Black lives across America.<\/p>\n The first week of the fall sprint to Election Day crystallized dizzyingly different versions of reality as the Republican incumbent and his Democratic challenger trekked from Washington and Delaware to Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and back, each man on an urgent mission to sell his particular message to anxious voters.<\/p>\n All the conflicting messages carry at least a sliver of truth, some much more than others \u2026<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The \u201csome much more than others\u201d phrase is a way to signal what the reporter certainly knows: that Joe Biden\u2019s claims are within the realm of normal political spin and emphasis, while Trump\u2019s are not true<\/em>. The U.S. is nowhere near the end of its pandemic nightmare; the economy has recovered barely half the jobs lost since February, and worse times may be ahead; the urban crime rate remains near its low point in recent decades, and crime is not spilling out to the suburbs. But the story presents them merely as \u201cdizzyingly different\u201d perspectives\u2014gee, it\u2019s all moving so fast; how can we make sense of it?<\/em>\u2014with an insider\u2019s wink and nod that not all these claims are equally true: \u201csome much more than others.\u201d What might the reporter have written instead? Something like \u201cTrump is running on a falsified vision of America, and hoping he can make enough people believe it to win.\u201d A statement like that might have seemed more \u201cintrusive\u201d by the canons of wire-service \u201cobjectivity\u201d in another age, but it is far truer to the realities of this moment, and would stand up far better in history\u2019s view.<\/p>\n Jeffrey Goldberg: Trump: Americans who died in war are \u2018losers\u2019 and \u2018suckers\u2019<\/a><\/p>\n<\/section>\n<\/div>\n People outside the business may not recognize what a step it is, culturally and professionally, for reporters and editors to act on the implications of this reality\u2014the knowledge that what a president or his senior representatives say has exactly zero factual value. If you are trying to inform the public, you\u2019re better off not<\/em> reporting what this president says, contends, or does, unless there are external indications that it\u2019s true.<\/p>\n And there is certainly no reason<\/a> to present Trump\u2019s claims on equal footing with other information. Once again, that is because the track record indicates that if Trump or one of his press representatives says something, it\u2019s probably not true<\/em>. And yet the instinct is so hard to resist, the impulse to add \u201csome critics say \u2026\u201d so powerful.<\/p>\n Take another example that should have been instructive: In March of last year, William Barr released his grossly misleading summary of the Mueller report, claiming that it offered a clean bill of health for Trump. Both The New York Times<\/em> and The Washington Post<\/em> fell for it. \u201cMueller Finds No US-Russia Conspiracy,\u201d read the banner headline in The New York Times<\/em>; \u201cMueller Finds No Conspiracy,\u201d trumpeted The Washington Post<\/em>. Weeks later, after Mueller had complained (delicately<\/a>) about Barr\u2019s behavior and the full report came out, the papers and other outlets ran stories about Barr\u2019s intentional distortions<\/a>. (Early this year, a federal judge criticized Barr<\/a> for presenting a \u201cdistorted\u201d and \u201cmisleading\u201d account.) For the Post, <\/em>the Barr episode was an atypical case of a running a headline that took Trump\u2019s claims at face value. For the Times,<\/em> it was unfortunately more representative.<\/p>\n Last week, after Jeffrey Goldberg reported in<\/a> The Atlantic<\/em> about Trump\u2019s calling veterans \u201csuckers\u201d and \u201closers,\u201d the Post<\/em> ran a story about the claims headline<\/a>d \u201cTrump Said U.S. Soldiers Injured and Killed in War Were \u2018Losers,\u2019 Magazine Reports.\u201d The Times<\/em> framed its story as if Trump\u2019s rebuttals were the news:<\/p>\n Trump Angrily Denies Report He Called Fallen Soldiers \u2018Losers\u2019 and \u2018Suckers.\u2019<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n The subhead (\u201cdek\u201d in journalese\u2014together they are the \u201ched and dek\u201d) was also significant:<\/p>\n \u201cThe report, in The Atlantic, could be problematic for the president because he is counting on strong support from the military for his re-election bid.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n That is: The news was what the contentions would mean politically. The framing was a way to avoid appearing to take sides, while in effect taking them. (And here is something I learned by going back to check the story: The hed and dek have been changed, and now read as follows, with no notation that they have been changed.)<\/p>\n Trump Faces Uproar Over Reported Remarks Disparaging Fallen Soldiers<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cA report in The Atlantic said the president called troops killed in combat \u201closers\u201d and \u201csuckers.\u201d He strenuously denied it, but some close to him said it was in keeping with other private comments he has made disparaging soldiers.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Decades ago in Breaking the News<\/em>, I wrote about the near-irresistible impulse to convert the substance of anything<\/em> into how it would seem<\/a> from a political operative\u2019s point of view. Much as football commentators can remain neutral between teams, but express sharp opinions on the three-four defense or whether the blitz pays off, political writers can avoid taking a side<\/em> by expressing their judgment with tactical commentary.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n<\/div>\n This brings up one other tell, of people struggling with the both-sides impulse: the \u201ccould-raise-questions\u201d technique. Consider a story last week<\/a> in The<\/em> New York Times<\/em>about Douglas Emhoff, the husband of Kamala Harris. Here was the hed and dek on the story:<\/p>\n Will Doug Emhoff\u2019s Legal Career Be an Issue for the Biden-Harris Ticket?<\/strong><\/p>\n Mr. Emhoff, the husband of Senator Kamala Harris, has a long record as a litigator at two of the nation\u2019s top firms, posing potential conflicts that could draw scrutiny.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Note the touches in the presentation that don\u2019t appear to take a side, but actually do:<\/p>\n And from the story, about Emhoff\u2019s association with a law firm, DLA Piper, that has a lobbying arm as well:<\/p>\n It remains unclear whether Mr. Emhoff will continue to practice law in any capacity, but keeping a connection to a firm with a thriving Washington lobbying practice and offices in places like Moscow and Riyadh could prove problematic. Critics are already scouring his client rosters at DLA and a previous firm, which have included representations viewed suspiciously by progressive voters whom Democrats are relying on to help defeat President Trump.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n James Fallows: \u2018Both sides\u2019 and the decline of public institutions<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cRemains unclear \u2026 could prove problematic \u2026 critics are already scouring \u2026 viewed suspiciously by progressive voters.\u201d This is how you take sides and express judgments while striking a pose of not doing so. (An also-familiar phrase with the same effect: From the interviews, a picture emerges \u2026<\/em> When you see that phrase or anything like it, realize that you\u2019re encountering someone who should be writing, \u201cI came to think\u201d or \u201cFrom reporting I learned,\u201d but is working within constraints that make \u201ca picture emerges\u201d seem \u201cobjective\u201d and \u201cI learned\u201d seem judgmental.) Also, it\u2019s a way of showing you will be tough on all sides.<\/p>\n A recent illustration of the powerful draw toward the ever-tightening horse race: This past Sunday, September 12, The New York Times<\/em> ran a poll showing Joe Biden up by nine points in Minnesota. The headline on its article from the state was \u201cMinnesota: Some See an Edge for Trump.\u201d Or just yesterday, as Matt Viser of The Washington Post<\/em>noted in a tweet<\/a>, Joe Biden gave a speech about climate policy, and then got three questions from the press: What would be his message in Florida the next day?<\/em> Why are his numbers among Hispanics so low?<\/em> and, Are the gloves off?<\/em> As I spent much of Breaking the News<\/em> arguing, questions like these are of enormous in-the-minute fascination to political reporters. But they have virtually nothing to do with most voters\u2019 concerns at the election, and even less to do with what historians will say was at stake in our times.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n<\/div>\n Entertainment will always draw a bigger audience than news. During 2015 and 2016, the audiences drawn by Trump\u2019s spectacles proved irresistible for TV programmers. Now the novelty has worn off, and the audience has been distilled to the believers. But still you can see the temptation to cover whatever he does, live, and\u2014most of all\u2014to be diverted by his latest stunt or outrage. Trump\u2019s greatest strategic advantage is distraction: forcing, or tempting, the public mind to forget what happened yesterday, because of the new fireworks he has launched today. The tragedy at the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya\u2014when Hillary Clinton was secretary of state\u2014was in the news for years and was the subject of at least 10 congressional hearings. Less than three months have passed since news broke<\/a> of Russia paying bounties for the deaths of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, and it\u2019s rarely covered.<\/p>\n Donald Trump is weak on book-learning but extremely canny about attention management. The challenge for reporters and editors is to maintain attention on the \u201cyesterday\u2019s news\u201d items that will matter tomorrow\u2014in the state of the economy, in America\u2019s standing in the world, in the structures of democratic governance. It is to see things steady and see them whole. (That is: Be more like Matthew Arnold, less like a cat chasing a laser dot.)<\/p>\n When a presidential confidant who has been convicted of felonies\u2014one of several<\/a> in that category\u2014and then spared punishment by Trump\u2019s direct intervention calls for \u201cmartial law\u201d if election results go against Trump, that should not be just a one-day story. Roger Stone, who made that call<\/a> last week, is known for histrionics. But if we have learned anything about Trump and his colleagues, it is to question their facts but be deadly earnest about their intent. (Take him \u201cseriously but not factually,\u201d we might say.) So too with Trump\u2019s efforts to delegitimize in advance any vote count that does not go his way. His endless harping that \u201cit\u2019s rigged, folks, rigged\u201d is so destructive that it has only one obvious precedent in modern U.S. history. That was Trump\u2019s insistence on the same point four years ago<\/a>, until the Electoral College swung his way. We can\u2019t be sure now which is more destructive: a president openly encouraging much of the public to mistrust the democratic process, or that same president openly welcoming foreign interference<\/a> in the process. Both are steps toward authoritarianism and danger, and awareness of them should shape coverage every single day.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n<\/div>\n \u201cHistory will not judge us kindly,\u201d Margaret Sullivan wrote recently<\/a>, about this weakness of the media. But there is time to adjust.<\/p>\n Every american institution<\/span> is now being tested. From the police to the postal service, the judiciary to voting systems, public health to education, and city councils to the U.S. Senate\u2014all of them, all of us, are undergoing stresses we hadn\u2019t anticipated, enduring blows that are falling from all directions, all at once. On our response to them, the country\u2019s future may depend.<\/p>\n The institution I am part of, the media, is also being tested. The press isn\u2019t the only part of America\u2019s institutional crisis. But it\u2019s an important part of the predicament we are in, and of the hope for getting out.<\/p>\n For as long as the press has existed, it has been shambling and imperfect and improvisational. At our best we get things right on average, and incrementally, with a lot of getting things wrong along the way. Most of us in this business do our imperfect best. But any hope of doing better<\/em> depends on the ability to learn. Soon the clock will show 6:00 a.m. once more; the alarm will start blaring \u201cI Got You Babe\u201d another time. This day, we can do better.<\/p>\n JAMES FALLOWS<\/a> is a staff writer at The Atlantic<\/em> and has written for the magazine since the late 1970s. He has reported extensively from outside the United States and once worked as President Jimmy Carter’s chief speechwriter. He and his wife, Deborah Fallows<\/a>, are the authors of the 2018 book Our Towns: A 100,000-Mile Journey Into the Heart of America<\/a><\/em>, which was a national best seller and is the basis of a forthcoming HBO documentary.<\/p>\n\nMORE BY THIS WRITER<\/h2>\n
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<\/picture><\/a><\/figure>\nA Note on Ted Halstead<\/a><\/h3>\nJAMES FALLOWS<\/a><\/address>\n<\/div>\n<\/li>\n
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<\/picture><\/a><\/figure>\nThe Sport That\u2019s Like Playing in a Jazz Quartet<\/a><\/h3>\nJAMES FALLOWS<\/a><\/address>\n<\/div>\n<\/li>\n
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<\/picture><\/a><\/figure>\n\u2018A Most Beautiful Thing\u2019 in a Time of Racial Reckoning<\/a><\/h3>\nJAMES FALLOWS<\/a><\/address>\n<\/div>\n<\/li>\n
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<\/picture><\/a><\/figure>\nThe Cool-Media Approach to Conventions<\/a><\/h3>\nJAMES FALLOWS<\/a><\/address>\n<\/div>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n<\/div>\n
Both-sides-ism<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Horse-race-ism<\/strong><\/h3>\n
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The spectacle<\/strong><\/h3>\n