Advertisement
Commentary: The Fifth Estate
Beware the media distortion field ahead
Way back in mid-July, pundits and polls suggested that Donald Trump might be on his way to a landslide victory against Joe Biden. The former president had survived an assassination attempt, rolled out Sen. JD Vance as his running mate and headlined a triumphant RNC convention that felt more like a coronation.
Then came a plot twist many hoped for but few anticipated: Biden dropped out and endorsed his vice president, Kamala Harris, who promptly unified the Democratic Party and turned the race on its head.
As a candidate, Harris has turned out to be everything Biden was not: energetic, joyful and rhetorically inspiring in a way not seen since in American politics since Barack Obama.
Rather than making her primary message that Trump is a threat to democracy, she and her vice presidential nominee, Tim Walz, have settled on a far more effective critique: The Trump/Vance ticket is weird. Rather than spinning lofty rhetoric about saving “the soul of the nation,” Harris and Walz have spoken about concrete measures that most Americans favor: reproductive rights, gun safety measures, support for working families.
Harris and Walz barnstormed through five swing states last week, playing to huge and ecstatic crowds while Trump — clearly rattled at losing his “main character” status — made a series of blunders, including a race-baiting turn at the National Association of Black Journalists, and an unhinged, incoherent press conference in which he came off as a dour demagogue more concerned about the size of the crowds at his rallies than the fate of the American people. According to NPR factcheckers, during that press conference Trump made “at least 162 misstatements, exaggerations and outright lies in 64 minutes.”
As Ezra Klein noted, Harris and Walz have succeeded in making Trump look smaller, not larger. The polls have followed suit, with Harris now leading nationally and in virtually every swing state, at least according to the latest New York Times/Siena poll. Trump’s strategists, meanwhile, have been flailing to find a line of attack that might stick against Harris. (In the meantime, Trump's campaign seems pretty clear on the map: If they win Georgia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania, they win.)
In this mission, alas, they are likely to find a willing accomplice: the corporate media.
I say this because media companies are increasingly driven not by a mission to inform, but a financial incentive to inflame. In short: it’s better for their bottom line to amplify attacks — no matter how ludicrous — than to articulate and explain policy.
This agenda inevitably favors candidates such as Trump, who—rather than setting out coherent positions or positive vision for the country—simply attack. Over and over, media outlets have provided him a platform for his brazen lies and accusations.
Even in its story about Harris’s remarkable surge in the polls, the New York Times managed to lay the groundwork for Republican attacks, noting that “42% of voters said Ms. Harris was too liberal” and quoting a floor installer named Jonathan Ball who said he believed Trump would help “working Americans” more than Harris. “I think she’s more liberal,” Ball explained. “I just don’t think she’s all for the middle class. I just see her one-sided. You know, for the rich.”
Advertisement
In short: it’s better for [the media's] bottom line to amplify attacks — no matter how ludicrous — than to articulate and explain policy.
This is lazy and disingenuous reporting by the Times. Rather citing any of the legislation the Biden administration signed into law, such as the child tax credit, which was passed to benefit middle-class families, or pointing out that Trump’s tax cuts were designed by and for billionaires, the Times quotes a misinformed voter. The result is a kind of distortion field wildly at odds with reality.
Harris is making no secret of her economic agenda. She’s been explicit in speaking about her support for working families and unions. Meanwhile, Trump has made no secret of his intention to cut more taxes for his billionaire donors. Even when he’s afforded two hours to pontificate, as he was last night by his new fanboy Elon Musk, Trump does little more than rehash his stale grievances.
Harris has been quite clear about her support for the bi-partisan immigration reform bill, which Trump torpedoed months ago, to the consternation of the congressional Republicans who largely wrote it.
But none of that really matters. The Trump campaign, and the right-wing noise machine, will eventually settle on a line of attack, and the mainstream media will dutifully amplify the controversy, as they did in 2016, when a phony scandal about Hillary Clinton’s e-mails became a bigger story than Trump’s documented history of swindling, or his crowing, on tape, about sexually assaulting women. Or any of their policy positions.
By all indications, the “mainstream media” will again bend over backwards to normalize, or outright ignore, Trump’s criminality, fraudulence, bigotry, violent incitements and cognitive incoherence.
Reporters and producers and anchors and editors will do this, in part, because they have been cowed by howling claims of bias from right-wing propagandists, and in part because the presidential campaign, as a media product, sells better when the race is close, and full of twists and turns.
I honestly hope I’m wrong about this. I hope the Fourth Estate will learn from the dark lessons of the past few elections — will stop pumping oxygen into lies and smears, and will instead choose to present its audience with an honest accounting of the candidates’ histories and their plans for the country.
A great example is the work the New York Times has done to expose Project 2025, the 900-page plan compiled by the Heritage Foundation, which sets out a roadmap for Trump’s second term. The document “lays out plans for criminalizing pornography, disbanding the Commerce and Education departments, rejecting the idea of abortion as health care and shredding climate protections.” Trump has attempted to distance himself from these wildly unpopular ideas, but, as the Times notes, Project 2025 was largely conceived of, and written by, former Trump staffers.
I think that’s a lot of what’s energized the unexpected groundswell for Harris and Walz — the simple fact that Americans want common-sense solutions to their problems, not endless fighting. They want a contest of ideas, not a war of words. Wouldn’t it be amazing if the Fourth Estate gave them one?
