Margaret Sullivan was the ombudsman for The New York Times. She now writes a blog called American Crisis.
With less than two weeks until the most consequential presidential election of the modern era, this is my evaluation of how the media has done — along with an 11th hour plea.
There are, after all, still a lot of undecided or at least uncommitted voters, hard as that may be to believe. And the media, while it won’t determine the outcome, can make a difference.
I’ll grant, up front, that the national news media — Big Journalism — has done some good work. The reporting on Project 2025, while not pervasive enough, has been excellent, and some of the best of that has been in the New York Times. Daniel Dale at CNN has done great, helpful fact-checking. ABC News did a good job with the single presidential debate. The Guardian has been publishing a fine series and a newsletter called The Stakes. (I contributed a piece about what would happen to press rights.) The New York Times just launched a link to its extensive coverage of what a Trump presidency would mean, tagged “What’s At Stake.”
Some columnists have made sense of the nightmare for us, like Will Bunch at the Philadelphia Inquirer, who consistently nails what’s happening, providing reporting and big-picture context; and Jill Lawrence at the Los Angeles Times, whose most recent column was terrifyingly headlined: “Get Ready for President Vance.” And I see improvement from the Washington Post, as Parker Molloy noted in a New Republic piece about Trump’s town-hall dance party titled “The Washington Post Covered that Bizarro Trump Rally the Right Way.”
But fundamentally, the media coverage writ large has fallen far short of what was needed to get the true stakes across to an entire nation of voters. And that’s been true not just recently, but for more than nine years, since Trump declared his candidacy in 2015. Too often, the coverage of Trump has been an embarrassing failure — sanewashing his lunacy, falsely equating him to his traditional rivals, or treating him as some sort of amusing sideshow.
The economist Dean Baker, posting on X the other day, expressed it perfectly: “It says everything you need to know about the U.S. media that Trump’s clown show at the McDonald’s gets more attention than his former defense secretary and chair of the Joint Chief of Staff warning that Trump is a dangerous fascist with no respect for democracy.”
Exactly. And that is true of the mainstream, supposedly independent media! Now add in Fox News, the beating heart of the right-wing propaganda monster.
Donald Trump talks to reporters after handing out food at a McDonald’s in a campaign stunt in Pennsylvania on Oct. 20 / Getty Images
New research from Media Matters notes that “Fox News gave nearly 500 times more coverage to McDonald’s stunt than Trump’s threats to Social Security.” (That’s two hours and four minutes for the stunt; 15 seconds for a report from a nonpartisan group showing that Trump’s policies would make the Social Security Trust Fund insolvent years before expected; Kamala Harris’s policy would not change the expected trajectory.) Bret Baier’s showily combative interview with Kamala Harris was one more example.
There are some — including prominent commentators — who are in dreamland, handing out helpings of false equivalency like Milky Way bars on Halloween. Here was the top piece in the New York Times opinion newsletter from Tuesday: “Keep calm and look at the polling averages.” The point of this piece from Republican pollster Kristen Soltis Andersen was that you can reduce your stress by realizing that polls shift and change all the time. “The ups and downs that can come from seeing your preferred candidate pingpong back and forth, from day to day, became less stressful when placed into context.”
Believe me, it’s not the shifting polls that are stressing me out; it’s the knowledge that if Trump is elected, American democracy may well be over. Her take reminded me of the infamous column from Kathleen Parker of the Washington Post on Nov. 4, 2016: “Calm down. We’ll be fine no matter who wins.”
Readers, we weren’t.
And we won’t be, if Trump wins. Those are the stakes.
So over the next two weeks — though it’s arguably too late — every media outlet should be trying to correct its long-term errors. It should be trying to get across to those mysterious individuals known as undecided voters that this really matters, and why. That Trump is a danger, declining by the day, and that the prospect of a radical, but much younger, President Vance is very real.
I’ll be keeping track here, and I deeply appreciate your joining me. Please let me know — in the comments or on social media — what you’re seeing in the media that strikes you as admirable or objectionable.
Getting it right in the last two weeks is probably too little, too late. But, in a very tight election, any improvement just might be enough to matter
Diane Ravitch's blog 