Failing the news cycle

The New York Times barely covered Mike Pence declining to endorse Donald Trump

I started PoliticsNC eleven years ago this month. I began writing because I did not think the media was covering North Carolina politics very well at a time of great upheaval and believed that the progressive coalition did not understand how to respond to the GOP takeover of the state government. The piece below highlights why I will continue writing. If you haven’t become a paying subscriber yet, I ask for your support on the week of our anniversary. Thanks for reading.

On Friday, former Vice-President Mike Pence announced that he would not support Donald Trump, the man he used to serve. At the New York Times, the news made barely a bleep. They never put the story on the front of their homepage. They ran a short piece that offers little analysis and few insightful details.

The episode illustrates the imbalance in coverage in the presidential campaign. Before the State of the Union address, the Times wrote numerous articles about Biden’s age and fitness for office, most based on speculation. However, the man who served as vice president under Trump and defended him almost until the end dissed his former boss and the Times didn’t feel the snub warranted much notice. Maybe they think Pence is irrelevant to the campaign or that people won’t care.

Well, that in itself would be an angle on a story. How did a guy who served in Congress, a governor of Indiana, and then Vice President become so irrelevant that his endorsement doesn’t matter?

Here’s another angle. Pence is the latest senior member of the Trump administration to dis his old boss. Why do so many people who worked with Trump say he’s not fit to be president again and, collectively, do they have influence with voters?

Or how about this one? Just a week after Mitch McConnell offered a lackluster endorsement of Trump, acknowledging that his loyalty is stronger to his party than to the country, Pence took a different route and said Trump lacks the conservative values that are supposed to define Republicans.

Or finally, what about this one. Pence’s rejection of Trump defines a split in the GOP between old-line Reagan conservatives and the populist MAGA crowd that is tearing the party apart. How deep is the division in the Republican Party, how will it impact the general election, and can the fissure be healed?

The news media spent months and months talking about Biden’s age. We watched videos of him misspeaking and shuffling as he walks. We read stories about his possible cognitive decline. We saw comparisons of him from four years ago, noting his aging process.

Nobody who spent time with Biden indicated evidence of cognitive decline. Even Republicans who worked with him noted that he has all his mental faculties, yet the New York Times and others did countless stories on how the age issue affected the campaign, often arguing the subject was valid because of polling results—results that were almost certainly influenced by the deluge of coverage.

Why isn’t the news media spending similar ink or pixels on the parade of former Trump administration officials and advisors who say he’s unfit to serve? People like John Bolton once provided the ideological framework for GOP foreign policy positions. John Kelly was a senior military leader before he served as Trump’s Secretary of Homeland Security and Chief of Staff. Dick Cheney, probably the most influential and powerful vice president in history, says Trump is the greatest threat to our country. Former vice president Dan Quayle says he’s not supporting Trump, rounding out every living Republican vice president rejecting the former Republican president. Dozens of people who worked in the Trump White House and have been loyal Republicans all of their lives are not supporting him.

Either these defections from the GOP standard bearer are going to have a substantial impact on the presidential election or they are not. Both scenarios should be major stories that deserve significant attention. If the former is true, then Donald Trump’s candidacy has serious problems. If the latter is true, then the people who have been the most influential members of the GOP for the past 50 years have lost that influence, indicating the most significant political re-alignment within the party since Ronald Reagan and the conservative movement killed the Rockefeller Republicans.

The NYT’s failure to give adequate coverage and analysis to Pence’s rejection of Trump is indicative of a much larger problem with the traditional media and how it’s responded to decades of attacks from the right. After years of being accused of bias by right-wing media critics and propaganda channels, organizations like the New York Times are erring on the side caution in order to save credibility with an audience they’ve already lost. In short, they don’t want to offend Republicans at a time when news organizations are having a very difficult time retaining audiences.

Conservatives’ anger at the news media began in the 1960s and 1970s. They blamed journalists and newspapers for fueling the Civil Rights Movement by exposing the harsh treatment of African Americans in the South. They blamed people like Walter Cronkite for souring the American public on the Vietnam War. Most importantly, though, they have never forgiven the Washington press corps, and the Washington Post in particular, for bringing down Richard Nixon. By the time Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980, the derisive term “the liberal media” rolled off conservative commentators’ tongues with obvious disgust.

Conservative publications like the The American Spectator criticized the way events were covered and launched their own investigations into the Clintons during the 1990s. The rise of talk radio fueled more anger at the news media. Conservatives heard Rush Limbaugh and others denounce the mainstream media, giving their own critique of the news. The rise of Fox News completed a media ecosystem that allowed conservatives to hear news the way they wanted it.

However, these outlets didn’t just offer a conservative spin on current events. They undertook a concerted effort to discredit traditional media. They turned relatively minor mistakes in reporting into broad evidence of news systems protecting a liberal status quo. They brought down a major news anchor when they forced the resignation of Dan Rather over a poorly sourced story on then-President George W. Bush’s service record.

The rise of the internet both threatened print publications and gave conservatives more venues to attack traditional news outlets. The “lame stream media,” as conservatives call it, was fighting for survival in a quickly changing environment. After decades of being criticized as biased and losing readers to upstart organizations like Huffington Post and Gawker, publications like the New York Times, and often their reporters, responded by trying to ward off attacks by attempting to appeal to their attackers. The effort gave rise to the bothsidism that has become so pervasive today.

Trying to appease conservative news critics has become part of the organizational culture of some of the largest news outlets in the nation. Stories downplay offenses of a populist right that is far more radical than any politics we’ve seen since the 1960s. At the same time, liberal scandals with little real credence take off with almost breathless coverage.

In 2016, the news media felt the need to balance coverage of Trump’s almost daily outrages with articles that criticized Hillary Clinton for her perceived wrongs. The result was an obsession with email servers that matched Trump’s bragging about sexual assault and his affair with a porn star. The traditional media played into normalizing the false equivalency that dominates the GOP narrative.

Every criticism of Trump needed to be balance with a criticism of Democrats or an unwillingness to press GOP disinformation. For instance, contrary to GOP claims, the Mueller Report never “exonerated” Trump. It found that the Russians interfered with the 2016 campaign and attempted to help Trump. It led to criminal charges against multiple Trump campaign operatives and consultants. It even acknowledges that the Russians reached out to the Trump campaign, but that it could not prove any acts of coordination with the campaign.

Instead of exonerating Trump, Mueller wrote, “If we had had confidence that the president clearly didn't commit a crime, we would have said so. We did not, however, make a determination as to whether the president did commit a crime.” The media, though, allowed the Republican narrative and Trump claims that he was “fully exonerated,” when, in fact, he was not.

That brings us to today where many of the most prominent people in the Republican Party are declining to endorse the Republican nominee and it’s not a front page story. Trump calling people who attacked the Capitol “hostages” and “patriots” barely warrants the attention of journalists. A campaign based on vendettas and revenge is not covered as thoroughly as Biden stumbling over words or getting confused about which door he’s supposed to exit.

What has happened to the Republican Party is truly astonishing. It’s in the midst of divisive civil war that’s largely been won by autocratic populists animated by an almost irrational hatred and fear of immigrants. The movement’s leader wants to upend the world order that’s been in place since World War II, empowering a Russian dictator and sacrificing Ukraine. He’s shown little respect for the truth or rule of law. The insurgency has led an uprising of candidates for powerful office who call for the execution or jailing of their political opponents and demean minorities in ways reminiscent of Nazis in the 1920s and 1930s, before the concentration camps.

And the New York Times and other news outlets are covering the election like it’s just another presidential contest. After years of trying to keep conservatives from crying about liberal bias, they’ve normalized the abnormal. They’ve lost perspective in an attempt to keep from losing an audience, conservative readers, that they no longer have. The people complaining about the liberal media don’t read liberal publications. They just watch Fox News and believe the propaganda.

While the traditional press outlets are too compliant to pressure from the right, the progressive infrastructure has never adapted to the new media environment. While conservative billionaires were building outlets like Fox and supporting talk radio that permeated entire communities and even regions, their counterparts on the left were still focused on individual campaigns and elections. Progressives never built the type of comprehensive communications apparatus that the right began more than 40 years ago.

There have been attempts to counter the right, most notably through MSNBC and Al Franken’s failed talk radio network, Air America. I think part of the problem is that liberals have never believed in propaganda. They believe that if Americans get enough of the facts, they will side with Democrats. So, they relied on the mainstream media to deliver those facts. Their talk radio was NPR. They believed critical thinking skills would win out.

They never imagined that the news, as they knew it, would not get through at all. Today, whole swaths of the country no longer believe or watch broadcast news. Conservatives, particularly in rural areas, have created their own reality where truth has become relative and alternative facts thrive.

In that world, they’ve barely heard about Trump’s trials, but they’re inundated with stories about the Biden Crime Family. They’ve been convinced that the war in Ukraine is a waste of American dollars and that the dispute with Putin is none of our business. Most likely, they don’t know that Mike Pence, Dick Cheney, or any other Republican is not endorsing Donald Trump. Certainly, the New York Times isn’t helping them get that information.