Media Matters?

I’ve never had much use for Jim Acosta, the now-former CNN anchor who left the network this week after management proposed moving his morning show to midnight. 

He’s smug. He’s sanctimonious. He radiates scorn for the American right, particularly in its Trumpy incarnation. He … sounds like this newsletter! You would think I’d be a fan.

But no, Acosta’s politics are considerably more liberal than mine from what I can tell. And while I’m always down for anti-Trump polemics, I find them easier to take on the page than as performed on TV. Especially when they’re presented in the context of news.

Acosta was a chronic irritant for the president during his first term, even earning a temporary ban from the White House. (Trump received the news of his departure on Tuesday with as much grace as you’d expect.) And so watching the network ring in a second MAGA presidency by promptly exiling his nemesis to garbage time couldn’t help but seem like a capitulation.

The overt antagonism that colored much of our coverage of Trump 1.0 cannot and will not be repeated, CNN seemed to be saying. We need a new approach.

Which isn’t the first time we’ve heard that sentiment from cable news following the election.

But who can blame them? CNN and its more left-wing rival, MSNBC, were pulverized in the ratings after Election Day as demoralized Trump-hating viewers checked out of politics. That’s begun to change since the inauguration, but there’s no escaping the sense that Rachel Maddow’s exquisitely furrowed brow has failed as a business strategy and as a political strategy. If the goal of liberal media is to overcome Fox News and beat back right-wing authoritarianism, well, just check the scoreboard.

The definition of insanity, it’s said, is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. The country’s political media seems poised to take that to heart in Trump’s second term. They want a different result so they’re going to stop doing the same thing over and over. Acosta-ism is out and soon to be replaced with, uh, what, exactly?

“It doesn’t matter,” says the pessimist, veering into nihilism.

Just the facts.

What is the point of political news coverage?

“To make money,” we might say, cynically and correctly. But if money’s all you’re after, you’d do better to become a forthright propagandist than a reporter. It takes less skill, requires much less overhead, and can even open up political opportunities for those who excel at it. Only a chump would work in journalism if he’s looking to get rich quick (or at all) but entrepreneurs resolved to take that path will get closer by emulating Gateway Pundit or Breitbart than the New York Times.

And never has that been truer than now. Our president is turning the federal government into a patronage system in which media moguls will or won’t find their business holdings harassed by the state depending on how “friendly” their newspapers are to him. Employing a reporter who insists on doing his or her job ethically, without favor, is now a genuine financial risk.

So forget money. The only reason to cover news in the Trump era is if you feel called to it, because you recognize there’s a civic benefit to doing so. Even postliberals would concede, albeit insincerely, that government should be accountable to the people. For that accountability to happen, the public needs to be informed about what the government is up to.

And so the easy, even obvious, advice to the press on how to approach Trump’s second term is to do just that. Drop the impassioned critiques of the president and take a “just the facts” approach to his administration. Inform the public. Give us fewer Jim Acostas decorating the news with smarmy asides and more Maggie Habermans breaking scoops. The more opinionated the media is about Trump, after all, the easier it becomes for Americans to dismiss negative coverage as liberal activism designed to turn them against him. They won’t hold him accountable under circumstances like that.

Just the facts. That’s what the people want. Tell them about the president’s power grabs and corruption and they’ll turn against him without needing to be led.

It’s a nice theory. It’s also nonsense. Where is the evidence, exactly, that modern Americans give a wet fig about power grabs and corruption?

The most brazenly corrupt thing Trump has done in his first 10 days in office is to free the January 6 insurrectionists—all of them, including the scores convicted of violent offenses. Political reporters have covered that story lavishly. It’s tailor-made to sour the public on Trump, as most Americans know what happened at the Capitol and opposed clemency for the perpetrators. It’s not a financial scandal in which only forensic accountants are capable of understanding the nuts and bolts. It’s gut-level, easy-to-grasp right-and-wrong stuff.

Or so you would think. Of the last six national polls taken following the release of the J6ers, Trump’s job approval is net-positive in four and barely negative in the other two. The most recent one, from Emerson, has him 8 points above water. A separate poll from Quinnipiac conducted after the rioters were let go found Trump’s Republican Party at 43-45 in favorability, meaningfully better than the 31-57 rating for Democrats. Never before in American history has a president rewarded those who committed violent crimes in his name with pardons; even so, 54 percent of registered voters pronounced themselves “generally optimistic” about what’s to come from this presidency.

Mind you, some J6ers have already been re-arrested on unrelated criminal charges since being freed. One was killed by police during a traffic stop when he allegedly resisted and had an “altercation” with an officer. The political press has been covering all of that too, just-the-facts style. “Trump puts public at risk by releasing dangerous offenders” seems lab-designed to detonate our law-and-order president’s public support on the launchpad, one would think. It hasn’t.

To explain why it hasn’t, you’re stuck arguing either that a popular backlash to the J6 clemency is in the process of forming but not quite “ripe” yet—or that it’s not coming, period.

All of which is to say that the dilemma for the political press in covering Trump’s second term isn’t actually a question about how opinionated or not reporters should be. The dilemma is that it’s unclear what purpose the political press now serves in a decadent country that no longer cares about holding government accountable and employs powerful tools to aggressively screen out information that might rouse it to do so.

Bad faith.

Thom Tillis, the most pitiful mollusk in a Republican Senate aquarium chock full of invertebrates, declared his support on Thursday for Trump uber-toady Kash Patel to lead the FBI. That was no surprise: Last week he supplied what amounted to the deciding vote to confirm talking head Pete Hegseth to lead the world’s most powerful military—after urging a witness against Hegseth to come forward with her testimony by implying that he’d vote no on the nomination if she did.

That’s weird, don’t you think?

After all, our political press has reported extensively on the foibles of Patel and Hegseth over the last few months. I’ve referenced that reporting many times in this newsletter. We’ve gotten “just the facts” about both men and the facts establish that each is grossly unfit for office, enough so that I’d be surprised if more than a handful of Senate Republicans were willing to say otherwise in private. Yet a senator from a swing state who’s up for reelection next year is supporting the two anyway, seemingly untroubled by the possibility that centrist voters who have access to the facts about their unfitness might punish him at the polls for voting yes.

Seems weird! But it isn’t, of course. Tillis is making a rational, if cowardly, calculation that Americans no longer care about corruption in their leaders even if the evidence substantiating it is right in front of them. They’ll always find a way to dismiss adverse facts—or to avoid them altogether.

Some will dismiss them because they’ve adopted the Trumpian view that corruption is evidence of strength and resolve. Some will dismiss them for reasons of partisanship, because being a member of the “team” means sticking with the team when things get rough. (Tillis is obviously more worried about being seen as not loyal enough by Republican primary voters than as too loyal by North Carolina’s general election voters.) And some will dismiss them because they’re boiled frogs—numb to all of this already after four years of Trump 1.0, overwhelmed by how much there is to keep track of, resigned to the notion that rampant corruption is somehow the price of making America great again, and whatabout-ed into believing that all presidents are as crooked as their leader is, if not more so.

But many won’t so much “dismiss” Patel’s and Hegseth’s corruption as remain blissfully ignorant about it, having never heard about it in the first place.

That’s the fatal flaw in the “just the facts” approach to how the media should cover Trump’s second term. Digging up unflattering facts about him and his cronies is easy; what’s hard is figuring out how to get those facts to a population that increasingly consumes bespoke news that’s designed to filter out information that might challenge their prejudices. Thom Tillis presumably assumes, correctly, that his Republican constituents and a decent chunk of independents have no idea why anyone would find Patel or Hegseth unqualified for the Cabinet because they’ve literally never seen an argument to that effect. If they lean right, their daily news menu has ruthlessly gatekept that information from them or clubbed it into submission with spin.

So why wouldn’t Tillis vote yes on both? Most of his voters literally have no reason to think he shouldn’t.

The story of Trump’s first 10 days is a story of him engaging in out-in-the-open corruption, the political press springing into action to report it out, and … seemingly no one caring. Take the new “memecoin” that the president launched a few days before being sworn in. Plenty of media outlets covered that, and not just political ones; obviously it was a big deal in the financial press too. Trump’s attempt to monetize the presidency was so brazen and scammy that even crypto enthusiasts took to complaining about it, fearing that it would give the industry a bad (well, worse) name.

Has it hurt Trump at all? The facts are out there, dispassionately reported. Who’s upset about it?

Or take the trend in media companies choosing to settle lawsuits filed against them by Trump despite the fact that American defamation law strongly favors the press in court. First ABC News did it, then Facebook did it, now Elon Musk’s Twitter (er, X) is poised to do it despite the fact that the president’s case against it is weak. That’s an unlikely winning streak for a guy prone to filing nonsense lawsuits against his political enemies seemingly just to harass them. A cynic might suspect that these “settlements” are really de facto bribes by corporate entities who understand that greasing Trump’s palm will make life under his administration more pleasant for them. We’ll see many more such “settlements” in the next four years, no doubt.

This too has been covered by numerous outlets. How many people have you encountered who are agitated about it? Has it been picked up by a single media property that’s remotely Trump-friendly?

To hold government accountable, political media need a public with an appetite for accountability and a pipeline to deliver pertinent information to that public. Lacking one is a crisis; lacking both means endgame for liberalism.

The kitchen table.

My advice to political news reporters on how to cover Trump 2.0, then, is this: Play Tetris instead. You’ll be just as productive.

If you feel you must expose his scandals as a matter of professional duty, though, I suppose there’s value in chronicling them for the historical record. Just don’t expect most Americans to care—and don’t expect too much of the historical record, frankly. History is written by the winners, and if postliberals prevail long-term, the mythmaking around Trump to come from future generations of Republicans will be so fulsome as to make even an elderly “Camelot”-worshipping Kennedy slobberer retch.

Your best bet for relevance in the here and now is to devote less coverage to Trump’s corruption and more to how he is or isn’t keeping the kitchen-table promises he made during the campaign. Most Americans are fine with authoritarianism, it seems, but they are not fine with out-of-the-blue federal spending freezes that suddenly threaten whatever particular gravy train they happen to be riding.

“Trump is a gangster shaking down companies for protection money and unleashing his imprisoned goons on the public” doesn’t inflame the noble American spirit. “Eggs are getting more expensive” is how you sell newspapers and get Capone.

Even then, there’s only so much you can do to sway Trump supporters by directly attacking their savior. Voters who have experienced ahem, a “MAGA revelation” will not lightly abandon the Good News because of some Maggie Haberman scoop. But the public might be more receptive to criticism of Trump’s deputies, the lesser beings around him to whom they owe no divine loyalty. Already, I see, Americans have begun to sour on his shadow president. “Trump is incompetent and failing to deliver” is not a headline that will meaningfully influence public opinion, true or not, but “Trump’s team is incompetent and failing to deliver”? That one might have legs.

Whatever happens, I hope the mainstream political press accepts the inevitable blistering criticism of its Trump coverage by right-wing media in the spirit in which it’s offered—as pure horse dookie, designed to discredit not the stuff they report that’s false but the stuff that’s true. Trump has been quite candid about that in the past. To the modern right, Jonathan Last recently noted, no amount of success by “elites” can compensate for elites’ mistakes and no amount of failure by populists can discredit populists’ successes. Their answer to the question “How should the media properly cover Trump?” will never be anything other in practice than “With the same degree of North Korean-style obsequiousness that we do.”

Still, Tetris is probably the way to go. If nothing else, it’ll be less aggravating than having to cover this dystopian circus for another 1,400-plus days.