We (Liberal Media Critics) Are Winning

Mainstream outlets have tried very hard to ignore their most rigorous detractors. That may be changing.

(Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)

While I was traveling earlier this month, American political elites wrestled with the political press corp’s tendency to “sanewash” the rantings of Donald Trump.

It’s a great catchall term, coined by

Aaron Rupar

, to describe a phenomenon media critics have lamented for many years.

“Watching a full presidential Trump press conference while visiting the US this week,” the Australian journalist Lenore Taylor observed in 2019, “I realised how much the reporting of Trump necessarily edits and parses his words, to force it into sequential paragraphs or impose meaning where it is difficult to detect.”

That’s sanewashing, and it remains the default mode for the bulk of reportage on Trump’s public events, from his meandering rallies, to his angry Fox News phone-ins. If anything, the tendency has had to intensify to keep up with Trump as he’s grown more unhinged and less comprehensible. After so many years it would be reasonable to suspect that a habit this old has become unbreakable.

But this time something different happened.

On Monday, the New York Times ran an article with the auspicious headline, “As Debate Looms, Trump Is Now the One Facing Questions About Age and Capacity.” In the piece, the Times’ chief White House correspondent Peter Baker stipulated, “Often [Trump’s] mangled statements are summarized in news accounts in ways that do not give the full picture of how baffling they can be.”

Notwithstanding the passive construction—the reluctance to take direct ownership as a newsman of this defect in Trump coverage—it was a rare and important acknowledgement: Our critics are right. We’ve been doing something wrong. But an acknowledgment, particularly an implicit one, is less important than whether it marks a turning point. After Trump raved his way to defeat in his debate against Kamala Harris this week, we’ll have to see if it sticks.

ABC, IT’S EASY AS 123

The early picture is promising but mixed.

On the optimistic side of things, ABC’s debate moderators, David Muir and Lindsey Davis, did an admirable job. They corrected just enough of Trump’s lies to convey an evident imbalance: Trump is far more dishonest than Harris. (Honestywashing, after all, is no more justifiable than sanewashing.)

For their professionalism, they have predictably become MAGA’s latest scapegoats, replete with online threats of physical violence and official threats of state retaliation should Trump win the election.

ABC News has thus far not waffled. Many peer journalists have applauded Muir and Davis. In their defense, CNN’s Abby Phillip expressed a standard that, if embraced widely by news outlets, would address another major liberal criticism of the mainstream media.

Phillips separately made a point of emphasizing how much more disjointed Trump’s appeals have become over the years.

Perhaps for these reasons as much as for the drubbing Harris delivered, Trump has chickened out of a rematch.

But all of these developments leave open a key question: Will the fact that Trump is mentally disordered, habitually dishonest, increasingly erratic remain thematically central to election coverage, or will this all prove to be a passing concession?

We can’t be more than cautiously optimistic.

The preponderance of media criticism in the Trump era has served to underscore how resistant legacy journalists are to introspection, how impervious to change or accountability.

In a recent guest essay for the rival Washington Post, Times CEO A.G. Sulzberger exemplified this stubborn tendency. After acknowledging the danger Trump poses to the nation and the media itself, Sulzberger straw-manned his critics with the following caricature. “As someone who strongly believes in the foundational importance of journalistic independence, I have no interest in wading into politics,” he wrote. “I disagree with those who have suggested that the risk Trump poses to the free press is so high that news organizations such as mine should cast aside neutrality and directly oppose his reelection.”

Emphasis added.

That is a strange way to describe a plea not to impose meaning or reason or method on maniacal diatribes. If faithful depictions of Trump damage his campaign, whose fault is that?

After conducting candidate Harris’s first sit-down interview, CNN’s Dana Bash repeated an old trope reporters often invoke to brush off their critics. “The fact that nobody in their entrenched camps was happy makes me think that I probably was in just about the right place,” Bash told The Daily Beast.

This is in and of itself an instance of the false balance liberal media critics decry.

Right-wing media critics—of Muir, Davis, Bash and others—seek to wreck journalism as a vocation. Liberal media critics want journalists to be more faithful to their professional ideals. And, more tellingly, they aren’t critics the way most people think of critics. Many of the sharpest and most prominent are former and current practitioners. There is no equivalence between Trump and his allies, who want to strip ABC of its broadcasting license, and

James Fallows

,

Margaret Sullivan

,

Greg Sargent

,

Mark Jacob

, Lenore Taylor, and so many others who have devoted their careers to the cause of faithful reporting.

The best-developed liberal media critiques aren’t really analogous to the aesthetic judgments of a Gene Siskel or Roger Ebert, who had no moviemaking experience.¹ Rather, they sound alarms from within. Their pleas are not bad reviews. They are more akin to whistleblowing. Everyone hates critics, in Washington no less than in Hollywood. But if generationally talented actors spoke up in unison to decry the business and creative practices of Hollywood, I think they’d get a hearing.

LET’S CALL IT A WASH

The early response to the “sanewashing” critique suggests we’re getting our own hearing, and not a moment too soon. If it sticks, it’ll mark a departure from past practices that already helped deliver Donald Trump the presidency once.

Mainstream press coverage in 2016 sought generally to normalize Trump and abnormalize Hillary Clinton, so that campaign coverage didn’t have to be dominated by his many aberrances. In 2024, sanewashing has been elemental to the creation of this same false balance—first between Trump and Biden, now between Trump and Harris. It has propagated without regard to whether it leaves consumers better informed, or endangers democracy.

At least until this week.

This is why vigilant criticism is so important, even if it can seem tedious.

“The number of high-status posters who think the New York Times is out to get Kamala Harris is a bit disturbing,” scoffed

Nate Silver

, a Times alum and one-time critic.

My old boss

Jon Favreau

has argued more than once that liberals who work media refs are usually spinning their wheels. “If you want to make a difference in this election, go have some difficult conversations with people who haven't decided who they're voting for or if they're voting at all,” he wrote recently. “Don't expect a left-leaning editorial board to do the work for us.”

Some media criticism is of course off base. And as a therapeutic prescription, Favreau’s advice is excellent—media criticism is typically thankless and vexing. Insofar as most critics don’t have enough of a public profile to influence their target audiences, they should channel their political efforts elsewhere. But empirically, I believe he is mistaken.

Imagine two futures, one in which the Times spends the next seven weeks continuing to sanewash or otherwise normalize Trump, and another in which it covers his incoherence (or his corruption or his dictatorial ambition) with as much crusading energy as it devoted to covering Joe Biden’s age. Ceteris paribus, Does anyone really think the election in those two scenarios would play out identically? How would that even be theoretically possible, insofar as both parties are competing for the same swing voters, who get their information somewhere? Does mainstream media really have such little cultural clout that its fixations have no bearing on how those people choose to vote? If so, when after the fateful errors of 2016 did its influence become negligible?

I don’t think it did.

If journalists had heeded critics eight years ago, Trump likely would never have been president. If news coverage today better reflected the stakes of the election, or faithfully juxtaposed candidate character, Harris would shine as the one who offers greater detail, communicative clarity, energy, honesty, and public ethics, outperforming Trump across every measure except one: media engagement. (Trump, always happy to lie and smear and hoover up attention, puts in more television appearances than she does.)

If that’s how political media operated, I think the election would be slightly less close than it is, representing the movement of hundreds of thousands or millions of voters, including young voters with no conscious memory of Trump’s presidency. In that regard, if their efforts stick, critics of sanewashing will have accomplished orders of magnitude more than they could have by talking to cross-pressured family members or knocking on doors in swing territory. Theirs—ours—is a cause worth championing.

1. I have mercifully expunged Beyond the Valley of the Dolls from Ebert’s record.