In 2024, The Media Somehow Got WORSE

Turns out airing every Trump rally live wasn't the only problem!

‘Fly-tipping’ is British for ‘illegal dumping.’ No idea how a sticker explaining it’s illegal is supposed to help solve the problem. Photo by the blowup on Unsplash

Following the 2016 election, there was a certain amount of soul searching done by some in the news media, wondering whether giving Donald Trump nonstop free coverage — all those breathless cable news shots of an empty podium, waiting for the Great Man to speak! — might have been a mistake. A few outlets, like MSNBC, noped out during that campaign, choosing instead to air video only after it had been fact checked and put in context. In 2024, there was a lot less of that stuff, except on Fox News, and not even the designated Trump network bothered carrying his entire long rambling rants in their entirety.

Lesson learned: No more live Trump rallies. But then a funny thing happened: Even without covering Trump without a filter, the national media ended up providing the crazy fascist all sorts of free assistance, simply by “doing dumb shit” in reporting on the campaign. (This is a well-known term of rhetorical critique, and we are professionals here.)

The chief sin of media reports on Trump’s campaign was perfectly captured by the term sanewashing — reporting on his deranged, disconnected ramblings as if he had made a coherent point, by plucking out a few nuggets of something that sounded like it might be policy, and filling in the gaps with details that might or might not actually tie together the disjointed, rambling nonsense coming out of Trump’s mouth-hole.

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New York Times Pretty Sure Trump Just Loves Science! Something Shifty About Kamala, Though.

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It was almost beyond parody; in October, Trump said more of his usual racist shit about how immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” and that some of them are driven to crime because, well, that’s their genetic destiny, as any eugenics expert from 1924 could tell you. Trump offered this guy-at-the-end-of-the-bar Race Science in a Hugh Hewitt interview, just pure racist crap:

“Many of them murdered far more than one person, and they’re now happily living in the United States. […] You know, now, a murderer, I believe this, it’s in their genes. And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.”

And what did The New York Times do with that madness? It presented Trump as a sciencey-minded man who thinks a lot about genetics, and did you know his uncle was a scientist at MIT?

That wasn’t a “discussion,” it was a tossed-off bit of racist stereotyping dressed up in a pretense of science, and nothing more. The Times story did, eventually, get around to noting that Trump’s “decades-long belief” boiled down to old fashioned eugenics pseudoscience, which it primly noted was “discredited.” Funny how providing the Nazis an excuse for the Holocaust will do that.

Then, after noting that Trump’s scientific speculation was the basis for atrocities like forced sterilizations in the US, the article blithely moved on to Trump’s campaign strategy of focusing on the border, la-ti-dah.

Kamala Harris, on the other hand, was described as “bobbing and weaving” in interviews, at least when she bothered to give any, and golly, when would she ever offer any real policies, other than the voluminous policy documents and very real proposals for making Medicare better? Compared to Trump’s stream-of-madness rants about things that weren’t real, Harris hardly offered any substance, yeah, that was the problem.

Harris proposed large chunks of down payment assistance for first time homebuyers as well as “detailed, serious and impactful” proposals to increase the housing supply. Donald Trump proposed mass deportations. One of these was treated as serious. It was not the one you would think.

Again and again, serious journalists took Trump’s bait, and that shows no sign of slowing now that he’s about to return to office. The Washington Post has been very busy at that game, with a December 26 story purporting to explain that Donald Trump has Very Serious Strategic Reasons for wanting to buy Greenland — according to experts on Greenland’s potential strategic and economic importance. Never mind that Trump has never articulated any of the reasons those experts mention; the Post was able to find people to Explain Greenland, so maybe Trump isn’t altogether nuts.

That was followed by a second story on December 28 — by an entirely different reporting team! — asserting that Trump’s weird fantasies about taking Greenland, the Panama Canal, and even making Canada “America’s 51st state” aren’t just delusional power fantasies. No, no, say Trump insiders, they’re part of a real strategy, so we get the headline, “Trump team says Canada, Greenland, Panama comments are part of a broader plan.” Mmm-hmm, they certainly say that!

According to the Post, Trump might sound like he’s just blurting out any old crazy thought that comes to mind, but in fact, he’s

crafting an “America First” foreign policy defined by antagonism toward U.S. allies and adversaries alike, centered around dreams of territorial expansionism, and channeled through the president-elect’s braggadocio.

CNN was even worse; it explained that invading Canada, Panama, and Greenland would be on par with the greatness of Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase.

Donald Trump can’t articulate anything like a coherent foreign policy, but he doesn’t have to. His lickspittles will do it for him, and very serious thinkers at media outlets will write it down and publish it, albeit with the caution — literally the WaPo story’s subheading — that “Not everyone is convinced.”

And that’s why you send your Washington Post donation money to Wonkette.

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