Photo: Carolyn Kaster/AP
Over the last few years, as it grew increasingly likely that Donald Trump would mount a third campaign for the White House, leading press critics and others in the media vowed that this time had to be different. The press couldn’t fail in its coverage of Trump once again.
This time, it must aggressively investigate Trump while focusing coverage on the threat that he poses to democracy. The stakes for the nation in the election, not just the odds of who was likely to win the campaign, should be front and center in the press coverage, New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen argued.
But the change in coverage hasn’t happened. Instead, the press has doubled down on horse-race coverage, proving unable to alter its traditional formula for campaign coverage. Distracted by the campaign’s dramatic moments, highlighted by the attempted assassination of Trump and President Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw from the race, day-to-day, process-driven coverage of the campaign remains paramount. Horse-race coverage is back in full force, and the threat Trump poses to democracy is now an afterthought.
The calls for reforms in covering Trump emerged because of the litany of failures in past coverage. When Trump first ran for president in 2016, the press was caught flat-footed, flummoxed by how to report on a racist demagogue. Journalists tried to cover Trump like every other candidate they had covered in the past, seeking to fit his lunacy into their traditional coverage formulas. But that disastrous effort led to recriminations over the inadequate coverage that failed to capture his malevolence.
In 2020, the press was caught flat-footed once again, this time after the election, when Trump refused to accept defeat and tried to mount a coup to stay in power. During the campaign, the press had largely ignored the mounting evidence that Trump was planning to reject the results of the election and later failed to adequately track the warning signs of an insurrection, even as it was openly discussed among right-wing extremists.
Finally, after January 6, 2021, it seemed certain that the nation’s press was ready to cover Trump like a dangerous demagogue, rather than as a normal American politician. The fact that Trump was also convicted of a felony early in the 2024 campaign made changes in coverage seem inevitable.
But the press seems to have amnesia. It is as if journalists have forgotten that Trump was impeached twice, criminally indicted four times, and already convicted once. He should be facing three more criminal trials this year in the midst of the campaign, but he’s so far been saved from that fate by a series of shockingly partisan rulings by judges that he appointed.
Yet the insurrection, the indictments, the criminal conviction, the impeachments tend to receive little more than brief mentions in the Trump campaign coverage today. Poll-driven horse race stories now dominate, overwhelming the scattered attempts by the press to hold Trump accountable.
Just over the last few days, political coverage has been overwhelmed by endless stories about an endorsement of Trump by independent candidate and conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and about Trump’s waffling on debating Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris on ABC News.
Those kinds of stories and more horse-race trivia are featured in the endless loops of bite-sized stories featured 24-7 on the homepages of the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other news organizations.
Warnings of the danger Trump poses to American democracy are not in evidence on the daily campaign news feeds. (It will be intriguing to watch in the coming days how the political press deals with Tuesday’s decision by Special Counsel Jack Smith to issue a new criminal indictment of Trump in connection with January 6, on charges revised so that the case can survive under the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on presidential immunity.)
For Trump to escape much scrutiny from the press for the third time can be attributed in part to the deep historical, technological, and financial trends that have swept through the news industry.
Modern American political coverage has its origins in the 1960 presidential campaign between Democratic Sen. John F. Kennedy and Republican Vice President Richard Nixon. The 1960 race fundamentally altered the way journalists thought about and practiced campaign coverage.
“The Making of the President 1960,” a ground-breaking book about the Kennedy–Nixon race by Theodore White, has had a long-lasting impact on how journalists cover presidential campaigns. White’s book was a bestseller and won a Pulitzer Prize because it offered something new: White wrote about the presidential campaign as a yearlong narrative, an adventurous arc that took the reader from the snows of New Hampshire to the November day when the Kennedy compound on Cape Cod was suddenly transformed into the home of the president-elect. White created the modern campaign book, and with it, a narrative framing that became the model for generations of political reporters. Thanks to White’s book, the presidential campaign, a quadrennial event, became the story; examining policies and issues and investigating potential scandals all became secondary.
Television also came of age as a political force in 1960, and the nationally televised Kennedy–Nixon debates changed the relationship between candidates and the press. The television networks became more powerful at the expense of newspapers and weekly news magazines. Presidential campaigns were now dominated by televised visuals, and reporters in turn focused their coverage on the imagery and symbolism of campaigns, rather than the substance. Which candidate was best on television became the story.
That transformation was captured in “The Selling of the President 1968,” another seminal campaign book that documented the way in which Madison Avenue advertising and marketing executives were able to remake and polish Nixon’s image, propelling him to victory after he was beaten by the more telegenic Kennedy in 1960. The book, by Joe McGinniss, was the first cynical examination of how television and advertising were changing campaigns, and it convinced political reporters that they should focus much of their coverage on the marketing gurus behind the candidates. That led their reporting even deeper into the weeds of the campaign process — and the horse race.
No book has had a greater influence on the current generation of campaign reporters than “What It Takes: The Way to the White House,” Richard Ben Cramer’s iconic book about the 1988 presidential campaign. “What It Takes” has shaped presidential campaign coverage ever since its publication in 1992, almost certainly in ways that Cramer never intended. The book provides deeply researched profiles of the major candidates in 1988, concluding that George Herbert Walker Bush was the most willing of all of them to slash and burn his way to victory. That has given the book an unintended legacy by convincing reporters that they should focus on whether candidates are willing to do anything, including sacrificing their integrity, in order to win. That has led to a style of campaign coverage that downplays ethical and moral lapses unless they get in the way of electoral victory. Long after Cramer’s death in 2013, “What It Takes” has inadvertently provided the narrative formulation that reporters have used to cover Trump.
Technological change has also played a big role in making sure that horse-race coverage remains dominant.
In the 1980s, broadcast television was revolutionized with the shift from film to video, which made it possible for network reporters to file more often and more quickly from the field. At the same time, the founding of CNN in 1980 ushered in the era of cable news, taking full advantage of new commercial satellite technology and the shift from film to video to fill endless hours of daily campaign coverage. The gaping maw of the 24-hour news cycle led to a constant hunger for new content, which meant that minor campaign process stories were treated like big news on an endless loop.
Cable news was followed by the rise of the internet and social media, which led to even greater demands for quick hits from the campaign trail. After Twitter was founded in 2006, many of its earliest and most avid users were political journalists, who used it to track campaigns on a minute-by-minute basis. No tactical decision by a campaign was too trivial for reporters to catalog on their Twitter feeds.
These trends all converged with the 2007 founding of Politico; its business model was built around the idea that it would cover politics faster and in shorter bites than the New York Times and the rest of the mainstream media. Politico was unabashedly focused on horse-race coverage, and it soon was setting the tone in Washington for daily campaign reporting. Before long, Politico alumni were being hired by every major media outlet, and the Politico style of horse-race coverage came to dominate the entire political journalism landscape.
The brutal financial pressures facing news organizations today have also had a big impact on political coverage.
Demands for more web traffic have forced news organizations to put a priority on quickly written breaking news stories that help generate hourly attention. Few news organizations now can afford to have reporters take the time required to dig deeply. Horse-race coverage — quick and easy to write or broadcast — is perfect for today’s attention-deficit news landscape. And, at a time of intense political polarization, horse-race coverage has the added benefit of helping news organizations insulate themselves from criticism that they are too partisan.
There are costs for news organizations caused by their horse-race obsession — costs that many in the business still don’t comprehend.
But there are costs for news organizations caused by their horse-race obsession — costs that many in the business still don’t comprehend. Horse-race coverage is substance-free journalism that simply recounts which candidate is up and which one is down. That means that in addition to a lack of investigative and accountability journalism, there is also a dearth of in-depth stories on policies and issues.
Campaign officials take advantage of the media’s horse-race fixation when it benefits them. But increasingly, they are trying to break through the horse-race noise by going completely around the press to get their messages out to the public. It is a trend that threatens to make the political press irrelevant.
Trump was one of the first candidates to fully embrace the new ways available to campaigns to skirt the press. In 2016, political reporters were not prepared for Trump’s prolific use of social media, which enabled him to speak directly to his supporters and influence the campaign narrative on an hourly basis. Reporters found themselves writing daily stories about each Trump tweet, which had the effect of allowing Trump to hijack the horse-race coverage.
The trend among campaigns to ignore the press and its fixation on horse race coverage reached new levels at last week’s Democratic National Convention, where more than 200 online influencers were credentialed by the Democratic Party to post content for their followers on TikTok, Instagram, and other platforms. That move deeply angered some in the traditional political press, but the Democrats saw it as a way to communicate more directly with young people and others turned off by conventional campaign coverage.
Yet the political press still doesn’t understand that campaigns are going around them in part because of their obsession with the horse race. They don’t get the connection.
And so horse-race coverage is likely to keep its iron grip on political journalism — an arrangement that leaves candidates unchallenged, important questions unasked, and voters uninformed. It’s an arrangement that Trump is eager to exploit.
