Just 5% Of U.S. Adults Say They Prefer To Get Their News From Print Media

Ah... So That's How QAnon Took Hold

Last week, Greg Sargent penned an insightful column for the New Republic… but probably read by fewer people than should have because of the off-putting title, Top New York Times Editor Offers Stunning Defense of Coverage of Trump. At this point, does anyone really give a damn about the excuses a NY Times editor makes about how they cover Trump or Gaza or politics or anything? But… that wasn’t really what Sargent’s column was about; quite the contrary. He savaged their (Joe Kahn’s) bullshit, which he pointed out is stunningly simplistic “Trump’s hostility to democracy.” 

And that’s the problem with The Times, their routine insistence on glossing over that hostility. Sargent’s concern is that the casual reader regularly doesn’t come away from most Times coverage grasping that core difference between Trump and Biden, that one fundamentally threatens the [democratic] system and the other doesn’t. What makes this column worth reading— and what isn’t intuited in the title, is the way Sargent sliced and diced the Times gestalt up.

The systemic-threat problem. A lot of media coverage obscures the purely systemic threat Trump poses. To take just one example, Trump is trying to delay his trials so he can cancel ongoing prosecutions of himself if he wins. Times pieces sometimes describe this fact in oddly neutral tones, without asking whether it poses a unique threat to the system’s validity by attempting to place Trump above the law entirely.

The casual reader could easily infer that Trump’s gambit is tantamount to just another conventional legal strategy, and not see anything amiss with it. The Times could include more quotes explaining how abnormal this is, isolate Trump’s real aim in headlines far more often, and do more stand-alone pieces explaining why this would dramatically undermine the rule of law itself.

The proportionality pitfall. When critics argued that coverage of Biden’s age, as referenced in special counsel Robert Hur’s report, was over the top, Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger dismissed this as a demand that the media engage in “downplaying” the age issue to help Biden, in refrains similar to Kahn’s. This is absurdly evasive. The question is not whether Biden’s age should be covered— of course it should— but whether attention to it is disproportional. And it plainly is disproportional, all across the media.

But here’s the thing: Even if Sulzberger and Kahn disagree with me on that, it’s time for figures like them to stop employing rhetorical dodges that reductively treat such criticism as nothing more than special pleading. Surely there is some point at which they’d concede coverage crosses into disproportionality. The dispute is over where that line lies. Editors make decisions about how much importance to ascribe to things all the time. These are editorial choices. Defend them frontally, and own them.

It’s no accident that many in the profession have never seriously accepted that “But Her Emails” coverage was over the top, which it plainly was, given what we know now. This reflects a broader evasion about the proportionality issue. Enough games around this. Volume and placement matter.

The fodder-for-attacks news hook. The Hur report unleashed a deluge of media analysis pieces declaring that it would provide Trump and Republicans fodder to attack Biden, and looked at whether that will be effective. There is obviously a place for probing the efficacy of political strategies. But this easily veers into overkill.

The danger is that one side’s use of something to wage an attack— the seizing on it as “fodder”— itself becomes the hook for covering those attacks and the broader is sue around them, often in the form of stand-alone pieces about the attacks themselves. If the attacks carry more weight in determining the scope of coverage than editors’ judgment of the genuine newsworthiness of the underlying fact itself— like what Hur said about Biden’s age— that seems self-evidently problematic.

This and the proportionality pitfall raise a broader point: News organizations like The Times have great power to send a message that people should be generally alarmed by something, simply by covering it relentlessly. Do casual readers come away thinking that Biden’s age is as alarming a problem as Trump’s authoritarian intentions are? I don’t know the precise answer to that question. But would Kahn really deny that it’s a reasonable one for journalists to ask themselves? 

The euphemism temptation. There are too many of these to count: The description of right-wing propagandists and ratfuckers as “provocateurs”; the claim that “Congress” did something, when the culprit is Republicans; the echoing of GOP “election integrity” talking points in headlines, and so forth.

Recently, Pew released a report that shows that when asked which “platforms they prefer to get news on, nearly six-in-ten Americans say they prefer a digital device (58%), more than say they prefer TV (27%). Even fewer Americans prefer radio (6%) or print (5%)… The portion [of U.S. adults] that gets news from digital devices continues to outpace those who get news from television. The portion of Americans who often get news from television has stayed fairly consistent, at 31% in 2022 and 32% in 2023. Americans turn to radio and print publications for news far less frequently than to digital devices and television… News consumption across platforms varies by age, gender, race, ethnicity, educational attainment and political leaning. Americans ages 50 and older are more likely than younger adults to turn to and prefer television and print publications.

Let’s look at this from another perspective and we’ll leave off at that point. Where precisely do most Americans get their news from? The NY Times? Fox News?  How about YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, TikTok… Is it any wonder that QAnon took off or that Americans are routinely electing congressional candidates like Lauren Boebert, Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Traitor Greene, Mike Collins, Gym Jordan, Tommy Tuberville, Paul Gosar, Alex Mooney, Mary Miller, Bob Good, Chip Roy, Matt Rosendale, Andy Biggs, Anna Paulina Luna, Dave Schweikert, Andy Ogles, Derrick Van Orden, Troy Nehls, Eli Crane…

Inherent in social media news consumption are systemic challenges such as the spread of misinformation, echo chambers and algorithmic biases. I’m sure you already know this but let me just reiterate that false or misleading information spreads rapidly on social media, reaching large audiences before it can be fact-checked or debunked. Misinformation tends to undermine trust in reliable sources of information, distort public discourse, and even have real-world consequences, such as influencing elections or inciting violence. At the same time,social media algorithms prioritize content that aligns with users' existing beliefs and preferences, creating echo chambers where we’re only exposed to viewpoints that reinforce their own opinions, leading to ever-deepening polarization, as we become isolated within our own ideological bubbles and are less exposed to diverse perspectives. These social media algorithms are designed to maximize user engagement and retention by prioritizing content that elicits strong emotional reactions and controversy, while— inadvertently or not— reinforcing biases and amplifying harmful content, such as hate speech, misinformation, or discriminatory stereotypes. 

The problem here is that these dangers can have wide-ranging implications for democracy and social cohesion, undermining trust in democratic institutions, eroding social trust and exacerbating social tensions and conflicts.