As the 2024 election cycle was ramping up last fall, I worried that the news media was making some of the same mistakes as 2016 and risked normalizing Donald Trump, a twice-impeached president facing four criminal indictments. My concern was that normalcy bias would cause the mainstream media to treat the aspiring autocrat as a conventional candidate and give a guy known for lying about pretty much everything—from crowd sizes to sexual encounters to winning elections—a platform to lie even more.
Though the media has surely learned some lessons from the 2016 cycle—a period in which Trump enjoyed billions of dollars in free exposure—reporters, pundits, and TV producers continue to fall into old patterns, like letting Trump play assignment editor. On Thursday, in a desperate attempt to wrestle back the news cycle from Kamala Harris, Trump gave a long, rambling press conference chock-full of lies, distortions, and grievances that was carried live on cable news. “It was 2016 all over again,” bemoaned Lawrence O’Donnell that night on MSNBC, where I also serve as a contributor.
At one point, Trump compared his January 6 crowd size to the gathering for Martin Luther King Jr.’s iconic “I Have a Dream” speech on the National Mall and said that his 2024 opponent—a former prosecutor, attorney general, senator, and sitting vice president—was “not smart enough to do a news conference.” As unhinged and offensive as this spectacle may have been, it was also effective in getting the media to talk about how Harris, who has taken questions from reporters on the campaign trail, hasn’t done a wide-ranging presser since ascending to the top of the Democratic ticket in recent weeks, or sat for a substantive interview.
The editorial board of Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post suggested Trump “had it right” when he said at his presser that Harris “won’t even do interviews with friendly people, because she can’t do better than Biden,” while The Washington Post’s editorial board credited Trump for taking questions at a news conference. Trump’s presser was cited in a slew of recent stories on Harris’s media strategy, including Axios, the Associated Press, and The New York Times, which featured the headline, “Kamala Harris Isn’t Giving Interviews. Any Questions?”
While it’s true Trump has taken questions, what’s the value in this exercise if many of his answers are baseless or just ridiculous? “A team of NPR reporters and editors reviewed the transcript of his news conference and found at least 162 misstatements, exaggerations, and outright lies in 64 minutes,” noted the news outlet. “That’s more than two a minute. It’s a stunning number for anyone—and even more problematic for a person running to lead the free world.”
Should Harris do interviews? Sure, but the media should be very wary of taking cues from a bad-faith actor who happens to be running against her. Or from Trump’s sidekick, JD Vance, who tried trolling Harris last week on the tarmac by telling reporters how she “refuses to answer questions from the media.” While the Trump team tries to frame Harris as dodging media scrutiny, it’s not as though Trump is sitting down for tough questions from, say, Rachel Maddow. Instead, he spent a couple hours Monday night in a friendly, albeit glitchy, conversation with billionaire supporter Elon Musk.
One of the major changes in American politics since 2016 is the plummeting public trust in the mainstream media. Part of this can be blamed on Trump, who demonized the press as the enemy of the people, leading his base to hate us. But part of this can also be blamed on the media itself, which has made readers and viewers writ large upset by some of our worst tendencies: There’s the problem of headlines often repeating Trump’s lies, or even those willing to give the aspiring autocrat the benefit of the doubt. Many articles seem unable to grasp the stakes of 2024 beyond framing it as a traditional horse race. And for every journalist doing hard-hitting investigative reporting on, say, Supreme Court corruption or Trump’s foreign money scandals, there’s reams of coverage of Trump’s insults and tirades.
What’s worse is that because the media business is in such a diminished state—with subscriptions dwindling, local news decimated, and cable news on the brink—it’s much more vulnerable to Republican ref-working. “The right wing is extremely skilled at charging mainstream journalists with bias, putting them in a defensive crouch,” Margaret Sullivan, media critic and the head of an ethics center at Columbia Journalism School, told me. “Call it working the refs.” (Think, for example, of the countless stories about Biden’s age and mental acuity.)
We’ve seen this particularly in the case of CNN: Since the 2020 race, when Trump accused the network of biased coverage, prompting chants like “CNN sucks,” CNN has since hired more on-air Republicans and ended its long-running media criticism show “Reliable Sources.” The network under Chris Licht parted ways with some hosts and analysts known for holding Trump to account and put on a town hall that appeared more like a campaign rally. More recently, CNN did not provide real-time fact-checking when Trump debated Joe Biden in June. (Trump made more than 30 false claims on air, as CNN noted later.)
With another hotly anticipated debate just weeks away, this time between Trump and Harris on ABC, it’ll be worth watching how the media covers what’ll surely be a stream of nonsensical lies from the GOP nominee. While many columnists and pundits were quick to call on Biden to drop out after his disastrous debate performance, it’s unlikely you’ll see the same in September, as questions of Trump’s mental fitness have never broken through in a similar way.
Just days ago at his Mar-a-Lago presser, Trump told a confusing and confabulated story about riding in a helicopter with Willie Brown, whom he seems to have confused with former city council member and California state senator Nate Holden. The screwup got some coverage, but as is the case with Trump since 2016, such moments get quickly overtaken by the latest outrage or string of bogus claims.