10 ways for political media to fix their failures
Here’s a special expanded edition of Media Misses after a campaign full of missteps
In a special pre-Election Day edition of Media Misses, Mark Jacob and I discuss 10 ways for journalists to repair their failures in political coverage. (We also briefly explore the failure of the billionaire owners of the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times to publish an endorsement.) Here’s hoping this can be a part of the journalistic reckoning post-election, assuming our free press survives.
1. Stop platforming proven liars.
2. Don’t be a stenographer.
3. Stop obsessing about polls.
4. Describe the stakes of things.
5. Stop being distracted by trivia.
6. Speak truth to power.
7. Do instant fact-checks using video.
8. Don’t assume impartiality is the highest value.
9. Write clear, direct headlines—stop vague-posting
10. In a democracy, the press has a responsibility to sustain it.
Mark Jacob, a former editor at the Chicago Tribune, is the author of the excellent “Stop the Presses” newsletter. Check it out if you haven’t already.
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In my opinion, the biggest problem with the media is the "both sides do it" BS. Comparing any sane person to Trump is false equivalence, falsely "balancing" the two. The media went on and on about Kamala's supposed lack of a platform, when Trump can't even put together a full sentence without a teleprompter. This kind of false equivalence just normalizes his totally outlandish claims and unsupported allegations. Quite clearly, most of the media is trying to generate clicks and views, and to inflame matters so that people keep reading. That would be fine if the media was truly fair and balanced and HONEST.
This is an amazing list and this discussion comes at just the right time. I cannot take one more MSNBC anchor for crying out loud; spend their hour talking over and over about President Biden’s “comments that Trump’s followers are garbage”. it’s NOT what he said. It’s NOT a the person on the ballot. And all they care about is the horse race. The polls. The glee the seem to feel when it gets closer and closer or they FRAME it that way.
Now is well past the time to talk about the stakes. The stakes for American people on the day after the election.
I absolutely adore this list and I sure hope that this will be a template for elections and news issues to come.
Thank you both so much.