The Very Weird Media Coverage of the 2024 Presidential Race

The media's coverage of the 2024 race has been a little odd. Whether that matters is another question.

Photo by Matt Popovich on Unsplash

It’s after Labor Day, which means it’s time for normies to start paying serious attention to the presidential election. Given that Donald Trump officially declared nearly two years ago, this has felt like the longest campaign in modern history. The events of the past ten weeks have juiced up the excitement for the last act, however. Kamala Harris’ entry has generated a lot of interest, and JD Vance and Tim Walz are compelling supporting characters.

The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World would like to talk about a character that really does not like to call attention to themselves: the mainstream media. The staff has certainly mentioned the media on a recurring basis, but just over Labor Day weekend there have been a some very strange framings of the campaign and the candidates.

Take, for example, Sunday’s ABC News/Ipsos poll of the national race. It showed Harris leading 52%-46% among likely voters, a six-point lead that was outside the margin of error. Given the closeness of the race, a national poll showing Harris ahead seems newsworthy.

That, however, is not how ABC’s Jonathan Karl chose to frame it:

Karl says that Harris’ lead is “just barely outside the margin of error,” which is just a weird way to describe one of the few polls where someone has a statistically significant lead. Karl could have simply pivoted from the poll result to talk about how it’s still very close in the Electoral College — but he didn’t. Instead, he described a poll in which Harris had a significant lead as a toss-up.

Then there was the Washington Post editorial comparing Trump and Harris’ policy positions. The editorial calls on Harris to provide more policy specifics — even though, as Marcy Wheeler points out, the WaPo editorial lists only five policies from Trump to seven from Harris. For Wheeler, this is further evidence of the mainstream media grading Trump on a very generous curve:

WaPo ignores some obvious policies from Trump, such as his tax cuts for billionaires (though that is alluded to in its observation that Trump would add $5.8 trillion to the nation debt, as compared to $1.2 trillion for Kamala), or his determination to eliminate protections for civil service workers and use DOJ for what he calls revenge but which is in reality forced loyalty. Plus, they count “deport millions” as a stated policy goal of Trump, without noting that he has never provided, never even been asked to provide, details about how he would pay for it, how he’d make up for shortfalls in things like Social Security, how he’d ensure food gets picked and houses get built.

This editorial, on its face, shows that Harris has provided more detail on policy than Trump has.

Even though WaPo can identify more policy proposals from Kamala than Trump, it nevertheless holds her accountable for providing more….

At some point, the traditional media needs to explain why it is so much more rabid about getting policy from Kamala than Trump.

Journalists need to come to grips, publicly, with why they apply this soft bigotry of no expectations to Donald Trump.

Then there is the New York Times, which had a whole host of stories with some rather bizarre errors and frames over the past weekend. One story on Trump speaking at the Moms for Liberty conference had to include the following correction: “An earlier version of this article incorrectly said that a local chapter of Moms for Liberty had accidentally quoted Adolf Hitler in a newsletter. The group, which later issued an apology, was aware that the quote was from Hitler when the newsletter was published.”

A good rule of thumb for a news organization: if you can’t get a Hitler attribution right the first time, maybe engage in a little introspection.¹

That is not the most egregious framing the NYT has provided in recent days. Former Times ombudsman Margaret Sullivan wrote about that particular framing, responding to a missive from former NYT reporter James Risen:

“Harris and Trump Have Housing Ideas. Economists Have Doubts,” is the headline of the story he was angered by. If you pay attention to epidemic of “false equivalence” in the media — equalizing the unequal for the sake of looking fair — you might have had a sense of what was coming.

The story takes seriously Trump’s plan for the mass deportation of immigrants as part of his supposed “affordable housing” agenda.

Here’s some both-sidesing for you, as the paper of record describes Harris’s tax cuts to spur construction and grants to first-time home buyers, and Trump’s deportation scheme.

“Their two visions of how to solve America’s affordable housing shortage have little in common …But they do share one quality: Both have drawn skepticism from outside economists.” The story notes that experts are particularly skeptical about Trump’s idea, but the story’s framing and its headline certainly equate the two.

Stories like this run rampant in the Times, and far beyond. It matters more in the Times because — even in this supposed “post-media era” — the country’s biggest newspaper still sets the tone and wields tremendous influence. And, of course, the Times has tremendous resources, a huge newsroom and the ability to hire the best in the business. Undeniably, it does a lot of excellent work.

But its politics coverage often seems broken and clueless — or even blatantly pro-Trump. There’s so much of this false-balance nonsense in the Times that there’s a Twitter (X) account devoted to mocking it, called New York Times Pitchbot.

Sometimes, sadly, it’s hard to tell the difference between the satire and the reality….

Why does this keep happening, not just in the Times but far beyond?

Nearly 10 years after Trump declared his candidacy in 2015, the media has not figured out how to cover him.

The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World thinks the problem is that the media has figured out how to cover him — like any other political figure. Ever since 2015, the media has reported on Trump travesty after Trump travesty, and none of them caused his public support to collapse. The media has lost any expectation that the latest Trump scandal will matter. So they have settled on covering him like a normal politician.

Trump has been around long enough for his egregious behavior to no longer shock. So, for example, when Trump suggests on Truth Social that Kamala Harris slept her way to the top, the Times coverage leads with, “Former President Donald J. Trump used his social-media website on Wednesday to amplify a crude remark about Vice President Kamala Harris that suggested Ms. Harris traded sexual favors to help her political career.” It lasted a single news cycle.

The media covers Trump’s batshit insane policy initiatives like they would any other candidate. This is not all bad — they often highlight the problems — but the very act of discussing policies like mass deportation with, say, Times-neutral language does normalize some horrendous policy suggestions.

How much will any of this matter for the campaign? I think the answer is, “not much.” While folks on BlueSky might be poring over the Times coverage and other MSM reporting with a microscope, it is worth remembering that most voters are only barely intermittent attention to the race. The precise framing of Trump stories will not sway undecided voters, who do not read the Times.

Harris will benefit from the same thing that hurt Biden: inattentive voters looking only at mute video in a restaurant or bar or in their living room. Biden’s problem was that all those videos showed a shuffling old man. Trump’s problem that all those videos of Harris show a candidate who is better-looking and more energetic.

Finally, it’s worth noting that the Harris campaign seems savvier at handling the press than Biden. Two recent examples of this. First, campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon’s memo declaring Harris the “underdog” despite outperforming Trump in fundraising, campaign staff and volunteers, and polling. Second, Harris telling CNN’s Dana Bash that, “I believe the American people deserve… a new way forward, and turn the page on the last decade of what I believe has been contrary to where the spirit of our country really lies.” That is a clever way of framing the Trump-Biden years while simultaneously presenting herself as the candidate of change.

A lot of folks believe the media wants Trump to win. That is not true — remember, the spike in interest in this election came when Harris supplanted Biden. No, the press is just covering Trump like a normie candidate because they don’t know what else to do — and covering Trump like a normal person humanizes him way more than he merits.

This frustrates those who find Trump to be a unique threat to democracy. Hopefully, for the reasons provided above, it will also not matter.

1. I’ve seen several online commentators also skewer another Times story by Shawn McCreesh about Trump’s rhetorical “weave,” but the following paragraph makes it clear that McCreesh had arched his eyebrow the entire time he wrote his piece: “Certainly, in the history of narrative, there have been writers celebrated for their ability to be discursive only to cleverly tie together all their themes with a neat bow at the end — William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens and Larry David come to mind. But in the case of Mr. Trump, it is difficult to find the hermeneutic methods with which to parse the linguistic flights that take him from electrocuted sharks to Hannibal Lecter’s cannibalism, windmills and Rosie O’Donnell.”