The media learned all the wrong lessons from 2024

There are annual conferences where medical professionals and other experts discuss the deaths and illnesses of historic figures through the lens of modern medicine. During the 2024 election, the American mainstream news media continued to practice its obsolete norms of “fairness,” “balance,” “objectivity,” and “neutrality.” Coverage remained steadfastly focused on “bothsidesism,” an obsession with the polls and the “horserace,” and inside the Beltway gossip rather than critical coverage of Trump’s campaign and his MAGA authoritarian populist movement. As an institution, the news media did not treat Donald Trump’s chances of victory over the Democrats in the 2024 election with the seriousness and alarm it merited. In this future political autopsy, media scholar Jay Rosen’s advice and warning to the American news media to emphasize “Not the odds, but the stakes” in its coverage of the Age of Trump will be written in bold or repeatedly underlined. In his January essay “Why is Trump coverage so feeble?” journalist and media watchdog Dan Froomkin summarizes the news media’s choice to fail: In some cases they have been explicitly muzzled — told by their bosses to “be forward-thinking and to avoid pre-judging Trump,” as CNN chief Mark Thompson told his staff, according to Oliver Darcy.