Press This Mess

Is the media in the early stages of repeating the same mistakes it made when it piled on to manufactured GOP scandals like Benghazi and EMAILS? Biden’s vice presidential documents, Balloonghazi, the debt ceiling “debate”—all of these have been like bat signals to journalists who thrive on false equivalences. But conveying reality isn’t as simple as making sure that the facts you report are true and passing them along. At some point you have to use subjective judgment about language and story placement and sheer volume of reporting. And yet, journalists keep pumping out a rash of stories that normalize aberrant Republican behavior and abnormalize Democratic behavior in order to appear neutral. Does the media take enough responsibility for its role in this democracy? Has the national media learned any lessons from their fateful mistakes in the run-up to the 2016 election? If that doesn’t make American political journalism rethink its practices, what will? Margaret Sullivan, the New York Times’s former public editor and one of our best media critics, joins host Brian Beutler to talk about how we can fix the media, or at least improve it.