In between the lines of Frank Bruni’s column Friday in the New York Times, he admits what any normal person should have accepted long ago: President Trump won the 2016 election in spite of the news media, not because of it.
I literally mean between the lines. The piece is largely a plea for the national news media to “redeem” itself (the actual word he used), but here and there, he confesses that his complaint may not only be hopeless but also pointless.
“That’s a specific question but also an overarching one — about the degree to which we’ll let [Trump] set the terms of the 2020 presidential campaign, about our appetite for antics versus substance, and about whether we’ll repeat the mistakes that we made in 2016 and continued to make during the first stages of his presidency,” wrote Bruni.
The “mistakes” he’s referring to were attempts to cover Trump’s surprise campaign that amounted to anything less than repeatedly insisting he should under no circumstances be elected.
Bruni continued: “Trump was and is a perverse gift to the mainstream, establishment media, a magnet for eyeballs at a juncture when we were struggling economically and desperately needed one. Just present him as the high-wire act and car crash that he is; the audience gorges on it. But readers’ news appetite isn’t infinite, so they’re starved of information about the fraudulence of his supposed populism and the toll of his incompetence.”
Of all people, he turns to Dan Rather to illuminate how the media should operate during a presidential campaign.
“The shadow of what we did last time looms over this next time,” Rather told Bruni, without a flicker of irony. (Rather has still yet to apologize for the massive journalistic malpractice he oversaw at CBS during the 2004 election.)
Bruni complains that the news media only covered Trump superficially while at the same time admitting, “I’m not certain that more firepower would have made a difference. For one thing, there were many exposés of Trump’s shady history.” His own colleague, Maggie Haberman, a fantastic reporter, said last week that “Voters had a great deal of information about Trump and voted for him anyway.”
“But it’s on us,” Bruni writes, “to try to interest them [voters] in more and to leaven that concentration of attention with full, vivid introductions to Trump’s alternatives.”
Is anyone under the impression that the public wasn’t fully informed of who Hillary Clinton is? She’s been in the national conscience since 1991.
The next election will be different in that most of the leading Democratic candidates are unknown on a national level, but to blame the media (to the extent that Bruni does, before alternately throwing his hands up) for Trump’s success is to suggest that the coverage of his campaign was wildly positive rather than what it was: hostile to an extent that has no precedent. It remains that way.
If you want a real case study in negligent media coverage of a presidential campaign, look squarely at 2008.
The longtime broadcaster Tom Brokaw of NBC and Charlie Rose, then of PBS, said just days before that election that they and the rest of the public had virtually no clue who then-candidate Barack Obama was, thanks to the news media’s lack of in-depth coverage of his campaign and his history.
Brokaw: “I don’t know what books he’s read.”
Rose: “I mean, it is more likely we’ll know more about John McCain, because he has been speaking about foreign policy, just over a longer time. But I really don’t know — and do we know anything about the people who are advising [Obama]?”
Brokaw: “We don’t know a lot about Barack Obama and the universe of his thinking about foreign policy.”
Rose: “I don’t know what Barack Obama’s worldview is.”
Brokaw: “No, I don’t either.”
Rose: “He is principally known through his autobiography and through very aspirational speeches.”
Will the media take the opportunity to “redeem” itself for the 2008 election? Of course not, and that’s not what Bruni wants. What he wants is for Trump to have never been elected and for the media to do everything it can to ensure he doesn’t win a second term.
Trump was elected, and unlike Obama, it was no thanks to the media.
