A thread for anyone who cannot bear to watch the President humiliate the country on national television once again. It's about this very good @JamesFallows column on what news media are doing right and (mostly) wrong when covering Trump. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/09/media-mistakes/616222/

Fallows is an experienced observer of politics and government; I'll just urge readers to look his column over themselves rather than attempt to recapitulate his points. Almost all of these, I agree with. However, there is something important Fallows leaves out.

Journalists do, as Fallows says, like to appear objective, or at least to present "both sides." They do not want to appear partisan -- or, put another way, they see the role of the journalist as different from the role of the political opposition.

There are problems with this approach, which Fallows summarizes well. However, it is also true that the journalist's role IS different from that of the political opposition. What the political opposition says and does about someone like Trump will influence how he is covered.

Journalists have, in fact, uncovered & described in plain language shocking things about Trump and his administration: @Fahrenthold on Trump's personal corruption, @jacobsoboroff on the brutalization of migrants, @EricLiptonNYT and @eilperin on the gutting of....

....environmental protections, and many, many more. This has been going on for years. One can complain about how such reporting is described on the @nytimes front page; that's fair. But we have to ask ourselves what the actual political opposition has done with it, also.

"Both sides" journalism will not communicate to the public that a given scandal or policy blunder is a big deal if the political opposition does not act as if it is. It ought, for example, to shock Americans that Trump Republicans in Congress, having watched Trump allow....

....the #COVID19 to spread throughout the country killing tens of thousands, sat (and are sitting) with arms folded as state and local governments slide toward fiscal catastrophe and millions thrown out of work by economic shutdowns saw federal unemployment benefits end.

Have Democrats in Congress treated this as something shocking? Are they infuriated, enraged? Are there brawls on the Senate floor about bringing the House-passed #Covid_19 relief bill to a vote? There hasn't been any of that; only press releases and passive acquiescence.

We saw somewhat the same phenomenon after Democrats gained a House majority after the 2018 elections. Trump could by then have been impeached for everything from being compromised by the Russian government to using the Presidency to enrich himself to open contempt of Congress.

If it weren't for an Executive Branch whistleblower and the dogged insistence of @RepAdamSchiff, Trump would not have been impeached at all. In the face of a political opposition that chooses to complain about corruption and abuses of power rather than fight them....

....what are journalists supposed to do? Is it their responsibility to say what the political opposition will not? And if they do say it and nothing changes, what then?

It just seems to me that people in the political media community can focus excessively on the defects of their own profession. Some of these defects are indeed serious and consequential, but I wonder how much would really change if all of them were fixed tomorrow. [end]