US Media Fails in Its Coverage of the Election*

Newspapers and broadcasters seem to have learned little and insist on giving oxygen to Trump’s lies “because he is the candidate.”

In March 2016, two months before Donald Trump secured the Republican presidential nomination in the primaries, mediaQuant, a company that specializes in monitoring what candidates spend on media, calculated a surprising number. They estimated that the New York businessman’s badly funded campaign had already obtained the equivalent of $2 billion in free exposure in the American media.

While his rivals paid huge amounts for television ads and other forms of digital publicity, we saw and heard Trump many times each day, telephoning directly into TV channels and radio stations, making bombastic declarations and tweeting outrageous statements, gaining immediate attention and piquing the public’s interest in political coverage. Les Moonves, head of the CBS network, cynically admitted at that time, “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”

What did the American press learn from its indisputable role in Trump’s victory eight years ago? Apparently little, judging by the moment Nancy Pelosi lost her patience on air Sept. 24.

The Democratic congresswoman appeared for an interview on CNN, a network which, in 2016, was led by Jeff Zucker, the executive who made Trump a reality show star and put his pre-candidate friend on air during live programs. The sanctimonious CNN anchor Jake Tapper, who poses as a defender of journalistic integrity, asked for Pelosi’s reaction to a video clip of a Trump rally in which he said that Vice President Kamala Harris has “bigger cognitive problems” than the octogenarian Joe Biden did.

“Why would you even cover that?” Pelosi shot back. “This is a person who’s not on the level. … Let’s not even talk about the silliness of it all.”

Humorlessly giving the game away, Tapper responded, “I run that clip because that’s the Republican nominee…”

Dishonest politicians are nothing new, but Trump knows that it will pay for him to be a troll without any connection to reality whatsoever. As I write, CNN is broadcasting yet another live and unedited speech filled with delusional claims. Traditional press organizations such as CNN and The New York Times think that their role is to reproduce and give oxygen to lies “because he is the candidate.”

In 1939, The New York Times Sunday Magazine ran an article, headlined “Herr Hitler at Home in the Clouds; High up on his favorite mountain he finds time for politics, solitude and frequent official parties.”

It requires historical context to revisit that period, but the article illustrates the moral failure of the English language press in covering the rise of Nazism in the 1930s, as documented in “Berlin, 1933,” published in France. The author, Daniel Schneidermann, presents a valuable chronicle of reporters covering a new political reality and the events that followed, without understanding the regime that would be responsible for the Holocaust.

After Trump’s debate performance with Vice President Kamala Harris, a New York City professor of clinical psychiatry wrote, “If a patient presented to me with the verbal incoherence, tangential thinking, and repetitive speech that Trump now regularly demonstrates, I would almost certainly refer them for a rigorous neuropsychiatric evaluation …”

The American political press, shocked by the Trump victory they facilitated and failed to anticipate in 2016, seems uninterested in self-diagnosis.

*Editor’s note: This article is available in its original language with a paid subscription.