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- Margaret Sullivan Nails It
Sullivan takes on the mea culpas from the press on failing to report on Biden’s age:
But this one makes me wonder. When is the reckoning coming for the failures to cover Trump effectively?
At what point will there be a general acknowledgment and some serious self-scrutiny about the way big media failed to adequately convey what would happen if Trump were elected again?
“I have a hard time watching journalists high-five each other over books on [the White House] covering up for Biden,” wrote the political scientist and scholar Norman Ornstein, one of the sanest commentators about politics in recent years.
It’s “a diversion from their own deep culpability in Trump’s election”.
She’s right and Norm Ornstein is right. The lesson that the press seems to be taking from their coverage of the 2024 election is that they were insufficiently hard on Democrats, and didn’t both-sides enough. She runs through the many press failures to cover Trump and concludes with this:
So if the media were going to put their thumb on the scale – as they inevitably do – they ought to have done so in defense of democracy, the rule of law and human decency.
The failure to do so is playing out in our shattered world, and at a frightening pace.
That’s a reckoning we ought to have, but I doubt we ever will.
The day that I knew that the Times was well and truly cooked, and wasn’t going to recover, was when they abolished the post of Public Editor, which Sullivan had turned into a master class on how to critique journalism.
Still traveling, so posting will be intermittent.
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