“The American press is failing to meet its responsibility to adequately emphasize the stakes of the coming election,” says long-time media columnist Margaret Sullivan in The Guardian.
Instead:
— "News organizations have turned Biden’s age (granted, a legitimate concern) into the equivalent of a scandal,” she says.
She quotes Ian Millhiser of Vox, who says: “I worry the ‘Biden is old’ coverage is starting to take on the same character as the 2016 But Her Emails coverage – find something that is genuinely suboptimal about the Democratic candidate and dwell on it endlessly to ‘balance’ coverage of the criminal in charge of the GOP.”
— "The evidence-free Biden impeachment efforts in the House of Representatives are presented to news consumers without sufficient context” (speaker McCarthy’s need to placate the far right).
— Trump continues to be covered mostly as an entertaining sideshow, not as a threat to democracy.
“We will look back on this and wish more people had understood that Biden is our bulwark of democratic freedoms and the alternative is worse than most Americans can imagine,” says Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of “Strongmen," and an expert in authoritarian regimes.
The big problem, Sullivan says, is that the mainstream media want to be seen as non-partisan – a reasonable goal – and bend over backwards to accomplish this. If this means equalizing an anti-democratic candidate with a pro-democracy candidate, so be it.
"Add to this the obsession with the 'horse race' aspect of the campaign, and the profit-driven desire to increase the potential news audience to include Trump voters, and you’ve got the kind of problematic coverage discussed above,” she says.
“When one of our two political parties has become so extremist and anti-democratic,” the old ways of reporting don’t cut it, Sullivan quotes journalist Dan Froomkin as saying.
Both-sides-equal reporting “actively misinforms the public about the stakes of the coming election,” Sullivan says.
"The big solution? Remember at all times what our core mission is: to communicate truthfully, keeping top of mind that we have a public service mission to inform the electorate and hold powerful people to account. If that’s our north star, as it should be, every editorial judgment will reflect that.”