Tuesday, May 20, 2025

Mainstream media works overtime to cover its ass for normalizing and sanewashing Donald Trump over the past 10 years


Newsweek edition
 
Top headlineNewsweek, 5/19/2025
Bottom headlineThe Guardian, 5/17/2025

Margaret Sullivan opines in The Guardian:
As a media critic, I’m always happy to see a good reckoning for the mainstream press. 
But this one makes me wonder. When is the reckoning coming for the failures to cover Trump effectively? 
At what point will there be a general acknowledgment and some serious self-scrutiny about the way big media failed to adequately convey what would happen if Trump were elected again? 
“I have a hard time watching journalists high-five each other over books on [the White House] covering up for Biden,” wrote the political scientist and scholar Norman Ornstein, one of the sanest commentators about politics in recent years. 
It’s “a diversion from their own deep culpability in Trump’s election”. 
What would be the elements of this reckoning? 
Here’s Ornstein again on what the mainstream press wrought with their hubris and their failures. 
“False equivalence, normalizing the abnormal, treating Trump as no real danger were the norm, not the exception.”  [emphasis added]
From 2015 – when Trump first declared his candidacy for president – right through the 2024 election, the press in general didn’t get across the reality.

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