Would honest elite media coverage of Trump make a difference?

This is not a rhetorical question: I have no idea what the correct answer might be.

Former Chicago Tribune editor Mark Jacob argues that all the mainstream/elite media sanewashing of Trump, and in particular the failure to write comprehensive stories that hammer away at the obvious fact that Trump is a demented unhinged narcissist who is utterly unfit for the presidency, is the kind of journalistic failure that has major real world consequences:

The news media could go much farther than they’ve gone so far in stating how unhinged he is. 

To a large extent, coverage of Trump consists of a series of one-off stories. Every time he says something wacky — like that Gavin Newsom is president of the United States, or when he makes some strange claim that he predicted 9/11 — outlets just cover them briefly and move on. They don’t explain why what he says is either untrue or just bizarre.

There’s never what I would call an umbrella story — one that covers the whole thing and draws broad conclusions, like “the president of the United States is psychologically unhinged.” You get these little stories, and then they just kind of roll down the river never to be seen again. People could write sweeping stories that explain how the president of the United States is clearly mentally unfit for office.

If they don’t want to use “unfit,” there are a lot of other words they can use, but clearly they’re not doing a good enough job. You get situations where, like the Rob Reiner thing — that was a one day story. A famous director gets murdered by, allegedly, his son in a horrible tragedy, and Trump decides that it’s the victim’s fault that he was murdered. The reason it goes away is because the news media let it go away.

The best example of the news media deciding that somebody is unfit for office, because of their mental fitness or unfitness, is how they treated Joe Biden in 2024. Joe Biden was old and rational. Right now, Trump is old and irrational, but he’s not getting the same kind of treatment.

[Interviewer]: It’s almost as if everything Trump says or does happens in a vacuum, and it’s not even just the media who handles him that way. Republicans and Supreme Court justices do it too.

“If the president does it, well, then it must be okay.” There’s a lot of that Nixon-style thinking going on.

By making everything just a small daily story instead of telling the broader one about this guy being out of his mind and a danger to all of us, journalists show they’re still worried about coming across as partisan. They don’t want to make themselves part of the story by calling him out. They’re afraid he will direct his deranged behavior toward them. They’d rather write down what he says and assume the American people can figure it out on their own. But obviously some can’t.

Maybe? I mean you can read Jamelle Bouie on the country’s most prominent op-ed page this morning, pointing out that Trump is an unhinged narcissist who doesn’t really believe that other people have any agency, which explains the Iran fiasco and so much else. Yes the sanewashing in the Times and elsewhere is continual and possibly very damaging, but my sense is that a third of the country realizes Trump is fundamentally insane/unfit, a third is either just as nuts as he is or fellow travelers of the MAGA cult for complex ethnographic reasons, and a third is paying no attention whatsoever because they never ever pay attention to anything political. These are very rough estimates obviously, but I do think these “if only the media would tell the truth in an unvarnished way” stories have a green lantern/magic bullet flavor to them. On the other hand I can well believe that the unquestionable failures of the profession of journalism that all the sanewashing and bothsiding represent do make a difference on the margin, and that’s where elections are won and lost.

More generally, I don’t think anybody in the media or anybody else for that matter is ready for what’s going to happen over the next couple of years, as Trump continues to deteriorate and ends up announcing that he’s running again or whatever other unimaginable insanity happens between now and then, as this country continues to fall apart.