On Monday, September 19, 2020, in “The Media Today” newsletter from the Columbia Journalism Review, Jon Alsop wrote
Yesterday, the New York Times and the Washington Post ran more or less the same story about the upcoming midterms. The Post asked the Democratic and Republican nominees in nineteen gubernatorial or US Senate races whether they will accept the result in November; all but one of the Democrats (the one did not respond) said yes, whereas only seven Republicans did likewise, with the other twelve either refusing to commit or not responding at all. Not to be one-upped, The Times asked both parties’ nominees in twenty gubernatorial or Senate races the same question; all the Democrats said yes, whereas six of the Republicans declined to commit and a further six either ignored or batted away the question. And several of the candidates who said they would accept the results have previously cast doubt on the outcome of the 2020 election—not least Adam Laxalt, the GOP Senate nominee in Nevada. “Of course he’ll accept Nevada’s certified election results,” a spokesperson for Laxalt told the Times, “even if your failing publication won’t.”
The Times’s story was paired on the paper’s homepage yesterday with a much bigger read: a six-thousand-word essay by David Leonhardt, who typically (and sometimes controversially) anchors the paper’s flagship morning newsletter, describing “twin threats” to US democracy. The first, which Leonhardt described as “acute,” essentially echoed his colleagues’ new reporting on GOP candidates: “a growing movement inside one of the country’s two major parties—the Republican Party—to refuse to accept defeat in an election.”
The New York Times and the Washington Post are clearly getting more one sided, and it’s about time.
Up until 2016, these two highly influential newspapers’ journalistic guidelines called for bothsidedness–both sides of major issues being reported on had to be included in all news stories, not necessarily with equal weight, but with some sense of balance. Of course, opinion pieces and editorials could be partisan and one sided. Imagine Maureen Dowd being balanced, for example.
For years critics, the Media Curmudgeon included, derided the he-said-she-said bothsideism, especially with issues such as climate change. What is the other side of trying to keep the planet from burning up? However, after Trump was elected in 2016, the responsible news media started inching away from bothsideism and getting less balanced in their news coverage. As the Republicans degenerated into a far-right, election-denying, Trump-dominated party, responsible news media realized that Trump’s strategy was lying, manipulating the media, and creating chaos, so Twitter and Facebook threw him off of their platforms and news outlets such as the NY Times and the Washington Post began to call out his lies and stopped giving him much coverage.
But Trump is harder to get rid of than cockroaches, so now responsible journalism is starting to realize that Trump is not going away and that the real problem is far-right, Republican threats to our democratic system.
In this current crisis, journalism must be one sided in favor of democracy (not necessarily in favor of Democrats).
