It's what we don't know that could sink us
And the media isn't helping
Issue #457 OpEd Monday, January 15, 2024
Those of you who are at least remotely aware of all the things President Biden has accomplished during his first term in office may be wondering why nobody else seems to know about or appreciate those accomplishments. So maybe ask yourself, “Hey, why is it that I’m only remotely aware of Biden’s accomplishments?” Then ask yourself why it is that you know every single detail about every screwed-up thing Donald Trump has done in his entire life.
Yeah. Why is that?
Donald Trump is doing his level best to destroy the country. He is a rapist, a liar, a bully, a coward, a white nationalist, a cult leader - and he used to be President of the United States. For many reporters, Trump has been the gift that keeps on giving, because nothing sells like bad news. When Trump lost the presidential race in 2020, those sighs of relief from reporters were mostly fake, because, in their hearts of hearts, they were kinda pissed that all those great stories were now gone and they were stuck with covering this Biden guy who just wanted to put the country back together. Oh sure, they pretended to be interested in Biden’s plans - and actions - to repair America for as long as they could. Which is to say until Trump made it clear that he wasn’t done giving them great stories yet.
And just like that we had January 6, 2021, and the media was back to doing the backstroke in their comfort zone where the juicy stories of sex with hookers, rampant crime, mob violence, and strangled hopes just fall from the trees like plump grapes into an open mouth.
The one thing nearly every single Trump story has in common is that they are all negative; all the twisted sex, violence, and political intrigue you could ever ask for. It’s a reporter’s wet dream because that’s how most of us were trained to dream. Find out how badly the powerful are screwing the public, and then report on it. Somewhere, somehow, a politician or a community leader is fucking us over is pretty much what I was taught. Don’t trust any of them because they’re all lying to you.
One of my first editors when I was an intern at The Los Angeles Times told me that almost verbatim. As for stories about pretty much anything positive (except, of course, sports news whenever the home team wins a game) that kind of news is boring, nobody wants to read it and it won’t get you on the front page. And if there’s one place a young reporter wants to be it’s on the front page - with all the other “Holy Shit!” stories designed to make readers spill their morning coffee and choke on their toast.
And right here, as a journalist of more than 30 years, I need to pump the brakes a bit, confess, be honest, and say that I do understand that instinct. I honestly do. It’s the instinct that broke the Watergate scandal in the Washington Post, and that broke the Pentagon Papers bombshell in the New York Times. Those were both incredibly important stories, and they needed to be told. I would never argue that reporters should not doggedly go after the corruption of the powerful or leave no stone unturned to expose wrongdoing. Not just because those sorts of stories give us a rush but because exposing those stories is the right thing to do on behalf of the public. Nobody is better equipped to expose public and private corruption than journalists - and no one has more of a responsibility to do so.
But sometimes we can get so carried away with our infatuation with bad news that we find ourselves yawning when something good is happening that demands equal time. We shrug our shoulders as if to ask who cares when President Biden appoints the largest number of women of color to the federal bench. Hardly anyone even knows that in Biden’s first two years in office, 75% of his judicial nominees were women and 47% were women of color. That percentage is now at 65% of his nominees who are women as of December 2023. Only 5 % of Biden’s nominees were white men two years in. Even President Obama, at two years in, had nominated 19% white men to the federal bench.
We grudgingly give Biden credit for the lowest unemployment in 50 years at 3.5%, for creating 750,000 manufacturing jobs, or for building the strongest economy literally in the entire world and the strongest economy this country has ever had. Or that this country now has the lowest rate of health care uninsured in history at 8%, and that 4 out of 5 Americans have signed up for health care under the Affordable Care Act, the historic legislation passed by President Barack Obama, with whom Biden served as Vice President (and to whom he said “this is a big f———-g deal” when the legislation was signed).
And those are just a few of the highlights.
But God how the media loves to obsess about Biden’s age. Or about how Black people just aren’t feeling him anymore. Or young people. Or Latino people. And we can thank the media for telling us about this supposed landslide of disgruntled Democrats who want Biden to step aside and make way for…who, exactly?
Where are these questions and concerns really coming from? Is the media dutifully reporting on the concerns of John Q. Public, or is John Q. Public taking his queue from what he is hearing ad nauseam in his media feed?
There is a great Substack post my wife shared with me earlier this week from Alexander Vindman entitled All About the Clicks. In a nutshell, Vindman discusses his disappointment over the noticeable decline in good reporting from the New York Times in recent years, especially since the Times and The Washington Post are among the few traditional news outlets that are not desperately trying to keep the lights on, can pay more than three staff reporters at a time, and still possess the resources to do actual in-depth reporting. Both newspapers, but especially the Times, have established themselves over the years as newspapers of record. These are supposed to be newspapers we can count on.
But as Vindman points out in his post, even the Times now seems to be more concerned with clickbait and sexy headlines than it is with giving its readers the news they need to make informed decisions - at a time when they need that information more than ever. He references one recent article where the once-upon-a-time newspaper of record now speculates on whether or not Taylor Swift is gay. That sounds a lot more like the kind of trash The National Enquirer delights in, not the NYT. Or at least that used to be the case.
I’ve been a journalist for over 30 years, and although I didn’t grow up in New York like Vindman, I revered the Times as a young reporter. Although the writing could be a bit stiff (I preferred the writing of the Los Angeles Times where writers could really flex their chops), there was no doubt that the “Old Gray Lady” as the Times was sometimes called, was the gold standard to which nearly all of us aspired to. Even though I never really wanted to work for the Times, I still considered their level of reporting to be my North Star that led me in the direction of how it was done.
Same with the Post; like so many reporters, the way the Watergate scandal was cracked wide open by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein was one of the coolest and most exciting things I had ever seen. Then came All the King’s Men, their outstanding book detailing how the whole thing went down, followed by an equally good movie starring Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford. Woodward and Bernstein pursued the truth, they had an editor, Ben Bradlee who stood behind them against pretty intense pressure to abandon ship, and eventually, they were rewarded for staying the course - and so was the entire country.
Even though Nixon wasn’t put in prison where he belonged, hardly anybody was saying he wasn’t a crook except for Nixon himself. And although there was noticeable reluctance among other news outlets, even the Times, to follow Woodward and Bernstein’s lead in the early stages, preferring to see if the two young reporters hung themselves so they could do all the cleanup reporting about the false alarm, they eventually did come on board late to the party once the facts were clear that Nixon and his crew really were crooked as hell.
Once the facts were clear.
Maybe I’m wrong, but it feels like the facts used to be enough to make a compelling story, especially if it was well-told. Not anymore. Now we have to be entertained as well. You could even say that the actual story is secondary to its entertainment value. If a story doesn’t sing and dance, then it doesn’t make the front page - if it gets published at all. And if the story doesn’t get published, then did it even happen?
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