Journalists and umpires share a lot in common. The benefits of both jobs, at least on an armchair-psychology level, involve a mix of duty and narcissism—someone has to thanklessly call balls and strikes, someone needs to go to a city-hall meeting and write up what the mayor said. Why not us? The downsides are far more obvious: we are paid relatively poorly, catch blame for every bad result, and our integrity constantly gets called into question, sometimes for good reason.
This past week, Gallup released its annual report on “Americans’ Trust in Mass Media.” Readers of this column will know that I am skeptical of opinion polls, especially those that try to gauge something as subjective and conditional as trust in mass media, but Gallup has tracked this same question since 1972, and that, at the very least, should give a sense of how a portion of the population feels about the word “trust” in relation to the “mass media.” What Gallup found was that for the third straight year more American adults have “no trust at all” in the media than trust it a “great deal/fair amount.” In 1976, the percentage of Americans in the “great deal/fair amount” category topped seventy per cent. Today, that number sits at thirty-one per cent.
You don’t need a Gallup poll to tell that the public’s trust in the mass media—which for these purposes we can define as the major broadcast and cable networks, newspapers, and a handful of high-profile magazines—has fallen, and, although the reasons for this decline aren’t as immediately clear as they might seem, the fallout from decades of growing suspicion and contempt toward the press litters the political discourse. Much of the criticism aimed at the media is both fair and accurate, and, even if I don’t believe the scale of the harms to be as large as some say, I do think the attacks carry added significance in an election year. So I wanted to go through some of the more common accusations of bias from both ends of the political spectrum, not as a way to exonerate the media but more in the fashion of one of those new umpire reviews, where the league office looks through the controversial calls in a game and then tells the fans whether they were right or wrong.
Every news organization that feigns objectivity is actually heavily slanted toward the left. Not only that; the media is actively working with the Democrats to defeat Donald Trump.
The most obvious explanation for this impression is that the press corps is mostly made up of liberals. Conservative outlets are not shy about labelling themselves as such, even if only through a wink and a nod. At prestige outlets—many of which do don the armor of impartiality—the imbalance skews a lot further to the left than what many outsiders might imagine. This past April, a former editor at NPR named Uri Berliner published an article, in the Free Press, about how a decade of cultural shifts inside the company had ushered in the reign of an identity-based progressive politics that was anathema to the journalistic process. I assume that some of what Berliner described about his time at NPR was true enough, but I disagree with his reasoning. The proliferation of identity acronyms and employee resource groups for marginalized communities cannot explain the bias in coverage. Perhaps those groups have some influence in how stories get covered, but I imagine that their effect is for the most part negligible compared with the effect of the fact that nearly everyone who works there—even those who, like Berliner, are highly suspicious of the acronym and E.R.G. crowd—are college-educated Democratic voters from middle- to upper-middle-class families. I have mentioned this before, but it bears repeating: in the course of a fifteen-year career that has included stints at radio shows, print outlets, digital media and television, I have yet to meet a Trump supporter at work.
The basic ideological homogeneity of the press corps isn’t some secret that’s tightly guarded by journalists or even the people who run news organizations. In a 2023 interview in this magazine, A. G. Sulzberger, the publisher of the New York Times, said, “Almost everyone who works at the New York Times lives in the big city and graduated from college. That alone makes our staff unrepresentative. It means that we’re going to under-index in gun ownership, under-index in church attendance.”
So let’s start there: the people who make up the prestige press are overwhelmingly liberals who would satisfy most definitions of the “coastal élite.” But does that actually translate into biased coverage? As Sulzberger intimated, it’s difficult to believe that a press corps mostly made up of one type of person who votes one type of way would not be influenced by both their prior beliefs and their gaps in knowledge. And, indeed, the Times—who bears the brunt of media criticism across all political spectrums—has not endorsed a Republican for President since Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1956, nor do they have a columnist or editorial writer who openly supports Trump. The situation is largely the same at the big network-news shows and most newspapers. So, yes, there is a liberal bias to the news.
The question, then, is whether or not this bias constitutes something bordering on a conspiracy where people within newsrooms and production rooms are actively trying to get Kamala Harris elected. The answer is still no. The American press is not some finely tuned machine but, rather, a chaotic institution in decline made up of individuals from similar backgrounds who hold similar political beliefs. If one must speak broadly about them, they tend to be much more hostile to what they see as the far left than they are to the moderate right, whatever that might mean these days. This happens for a variety of reasons, and much can and has been made of the mainstream press’s particular animosity toward the left. Some assume that it’s because the press serves Wall Street and Big Tech, both of which would reject anything smelling of socialism. Others believe, as I do, in a more sociological explanation: many reporters, especially at prestige outlets, do not come across all that many Republicans, whether in their everyday lives or on social media. Who they do encounter is a lot of highly-educated people to their left with views they find extreme, and to whom they attribute outsized influence on politics, public opinion, and the electorate.
I would consider the case about media bias closed at this point, mostly because I don’t think any of the other explanations, however well argued they may be, measure up to the majority-liberal makeup of the workforce. This is not to say that I believe the press can’t be impartial or tell the truth, only that if any slant exists it’s probably going to line up with the beliefs of the people actually writing the stories. But, for the sake of argument, I want to entertain a few of the more common cases that media bias actually runs the other way.
The people who work in the media might be liberal, but the people who own the media companies are not, and they all want Trump to win—not only to save on taxes but because Trump is good for the media business.
This is the weakest of the arguments. If you believe that the ownership of a media platform can somehow secretly manipulate hundreds or even thousands of liberal journalists into putting a pro-Trump slant on all their news coverage, you are seriously underestimating both the amount of coördination that would be needed and the egos of most journalists.
The desperate need for journalists to seem objective has yielded both-sides coverage that pretends that the problems of the Harris campaign (and the Democratic Party) are somehow comparable to the problems of the Trump campaign (and the G.O.P.).
I want to give this claim the respect it deserves, because, aside from being the most widely expressed criticism of media bias—at least by those in the center and on the left—it also happens to be partially true. Any nonpartisan journalist or editor overseeing political coverage would balk at uncritical reporting on one side and full-on confrontation with the other. I don’t know of any outlets that have running counts of negative and positive stories for each side, but I imagine that most individual reporters and pundits are tracking how they’ve covered the candidates, and whether they might be inadvertently veering into propaganda. This does create some internal pressure to criticize both campaigns, and, because there’s no practical way to perfectly divvy up coverage in real time, it can lead to something like what happened in 2016, when the Hillary Clinton e-mail scandal took up unworthy weight in the public discourse when compared with the myriad scandals of the Trump campaign. In 2024, it might look something like an op-ed about Harris’s aversion to mainstream-media interviews getting the same column inches as an article about Trump’s latest racist rant. Perhaps counting words and taking stock of headlines and bylines aren’t the best metrics, but I do think it’s undeniable that the journalistic impulse to both-sides an election have led to an inflation of the problems of the Harris campaign, just as it had for Clinton.
It’s hard to square this, at least at first glance, with the largely liberal makeup of the press corps, but it makes sense that a press driven by its collective insecurity of its political homogeneity might default to such a state. The question, then, is whether this dynamic actually shows up in the day-to-day coverage of the 2024 election. It probably does, but not nearly as much as some of the liberal critics of the media might believe—I would hope that some of the liberal critics who argue that the press has actively been trying to get Trump elected will remember the relentless coverage of Russiagate, the investigations into Trump’s finances, and the endless warnings from opinion writers—and sometimes the papers’ editors themselves—that the Trump Presidency would be the end of democracy as we know it. It’s possible to believe that the press made grave errors in 2016 that most likely helped Trump win the election while also understanding that reporters, regardless of how they might feel personally, should still honestly cover the Harris campaign. Yes, this should require some rebalancing, but the truth of the matter is that partisans who hate the media—especially those on social media—are always going to find some grievance with the way their preferred candidate is covered, just as some sports fans will blame the refs whenever they can.
The real issue is that the press actually isn’t prepared to cover someone like Trump. They are prepared to cover quaint ideological differences between establishment Republicans and Democrats, but they don’t actually know how to sound the alarm.
I’ve spent quite a lot of time thinking about this question, because it does seem true that nothing we report about Trump has any real effect on his election chances or his popularity among his base. At times, I wonder if the country might be collectively desensitized to it all. Since the “grab ’em by the pussy” tapes were revealed, eight years ago, we’ve had an impeachment, January 6th and “very fine people on both sides,” a second impeachment, four indictments, a sexual-abuse case, and thirty-four felony convictions—and nothing has seemed to change. It might be true that, without these events, Trump would be sailing his way to his third term right now and would be the most popular President in modern history, but it’s far more likely that he is immune to bad news.
For the liberal-voting public who make up much of the audience for the prestige media, Trump’s impunity to negative stories might seem like a journalism problem. If we just tried harder—wrote more condemning headlines, fixated even more on his terrible politics and his spiral into incoherence and fascist rhetoric—a tossup race would turn into a landslide win for the Democrats. The truth—at least in part—is that the press also gets exhausted with running the same stories about Trump over and over, especially when they seem to have no effect. But that doesn’t mean that even more strenuous efforts to report on his faults would suddenly break the dam.
I am sympathetic to the despair of voters like these, even if I believe that mainstream coverage inevitably tilts toward favoring mainstream Democratic candidates such as Harris. One of the contradictions of the social-media age is that we can follow the campaigns incredibly closely—tracking every movement in the polls, listening to every concerning Trump remark—but somehow this flood of content makes us feel even more distant from the process, and less empowered. This flattening of the world into small bits of information makes people believe that the journalists who they assume are producing these screenshots and video clips have great influence on how voters think. But the truth, of course, is that the proliferation of content has actually weakened the mainstream media’s influence on voters, many of whom have moved on to alternative outlets of news and commentary. This, ultimately, is a healthy change, and I would welcome an information ecosystem that wasn’t so dominated by a handful of print outlets and cable-news stations—one where local papers and community-interest news could find robust audiences. As it stands, I imagine that, if Harris loses the election, much of the liberal public’s ire will be laser-focussed on the media. The sense of emergency that would come with a second Trump Presidency would invariably be good for the news business—albeit at less of a scale than the first one—which will likely just lead to more consolidation. If Harris wins, that same public will likely ease off some of their criticism of Harris, but the news companies will face an even tougher question: With Trump out of the picture, what will we write about? ♦
