Yes, the bid reporting of the media was incorrect. But the reporting on Trump was far worse | Margaret Sullivan

With a new book about Joe Bidens, re -election campaign has been in full swing.

It is roughly the same: the mainstream journalism did not pass the voters. Reporters were complicit; They didn't tell us how much the older president had declined. They do not dug under the surface of what Biden helper did when they covered up the physical and cognitive decline of the leader of the free world.

And some of it is undoubtedly valid. Under fire in the past few days, Jake Tapper, co-author of original sin: the decline of President Biden, his cover-up and his catastrophic decision to run again, even to nod his own role in the downplay of bidens.

There is a lot of fault to find bidens final loss – and the horrors that the whole world has brought about in the election of Donald Trump to a second term. Bruce Springsteen put it out for a concert audience last week when he opened his European tour: “My home, America I Love, which has been a beacon of hope and freedom for 250 years, is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent and treacherous administration.”

As a media critic, I am always happy to see a good settlement for the mainstream press.

But this lets me wonder. When does the billing for the failures come to effectively cover Trump?

At what point will there be a general recognition and a serious self -condition about the way in which large media could not adequately convey what would happen if Trump was re -elected?

“It is difficult for me to watch journalists about books [the White House] Covering for bidges, ”wrote the political scientist and the scholar Norman Ornstein, one of the most comfortable commentators about politics in recent years.

It is “a distraction from her own deep fault in Trump's choice”.

What would the elements of this billing be?

Here again is Ornstein about what the mainstream print has done with its hybris and its failures.

“False equivalence, normalizing abnormal, the treatment of Trump as a real danger was the norm, not the exception.”

From 2015 – when Trump declared his candidacy for the President for the first time – until the 2024 elections, the press generally did not stand by reality.

When the New York Times in 2016 looked at the sound by considering the supposedly shocking scandal of using a personal e -mail server by Hillary Clinton, this was only the beginning. But it was a consistent beginning, since the times were still extremely influential in our fragmented and polarized media system then and now.

For a long time I believed that Times editors were used so much that they might have the candidate Clinton hard -that she would be the president and that Trump was not a real threat -that they went overboard.

Was the fault of fully choosing Trump, or even the guilt of the mainstream media in general, led by you? Of course not. But they played a destructive role that was never appropriately recognized.

Then the mainstream press normalized in the first term of trump and especially during the 2024 campaign.

The term “Sanewashing”, which was always so to date, was born to describe what was going on and the role of the media. Talk about a cover -up. Trump's rallies were exercises in Lunacy when he turned stories about Haie and Hannibal -Lecter and roamed for hours.

But the reporting rarely came close to conveying reality. Instead, we heard descriptions about his “freewheel” style or his “brazen” approach.

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As for autocracy when waiting, there was excellent stories about the blueprint for his second term as a project in 2025, but it was anything but obvious whether news leaders stopped to ask whether the voters really understood the missions. Now we see that the Trump administration literally does the same project in 2025, of which he claimed he hardly knew anything.

The nearby acid cover prevailed every day. And then, when Biden's decline became impossible, news organizations changed their melody last June last June.

Week was nothing more than “Hey, bidges is an old reporting”, and there was again the emphasis where it belonged: on the dangers of a Trump presidency.

Heads of news organizations and reporters themselves distance themselves from their real mission: to communicate the reality of the actual missions of an election. Instead, they speak to a high degree to treat the news only as if their daily decisions about the volume, the selection and tone of reporting are not important.

It was certainly important shortly before the 2016 elections when the entire top of a front page – and some evening messages – was transferred to the restoration of the examination of the Ministry of Justice's Ministry of Justice on the determination of Clinton's e -mails.

It was certainly important when influential sections of opinion last summer were constantly eaten by Biden's cognitive decline in order to force him out of the race.

Despite the wishful thinking, there are no “only the facts” or a complete neutrality always Object.

What do you examine? What is the exact wording of this news alarm? How clearly do you show this story? Who do you quote and who do you grant anonymity? Which photo do you choose? Use terms such as “decency limits” to describe what looks more like a bribery?

If the media would put their thumb on the scale – as they inevitably do – they should have done this to defend democracy, the rule of law and human decency.

The failure to play in our shattered world and at a terrifying pace.

This is a billing that we should have, but I doubt that we will ever do it.