The Washington, D.C. political press is failing the public in the most important election of our lives.
In a healthy democracy, the media is essential for informing the public. Media consumers trust reporters to give details about the decisions their elected officials make, policies embedded into legislation that may eventually translate into laws that impact their lives, and the core values of candidates running for elected office that may shed light on how they would govern if elected. A robust political press should be trusted to both accurately report the facts and hold politicians from both sides to the same standard.
Instead, today’s beltway journalists and commentators have eschewed calling balls and strikes in favor of putting their finger on the scale for former President Donald Trump and the Republican Party. The fact that the beltway media wants Trump to win the November election is less because they have a far-right political bias, but more simply due to the financial benefit of a second Trump term in the drastic increase in clicks, subscriptions, and TV ratings he would provide for them.
In their pursuit of a more lucrative bottom line, the journalists tasked with holding power accountable and reporting facts to the American public have instead been directed by their editors and publishers to hold Democrats to an impossibly high standard, and to hold Republicans to a much lower standard. With democracy teetering on the brink and fascism banging on the doors of power, this has left the American public — which desperately needs information sources it can trust — in an especially precarious position heading into November.
Beltway media’s pro-Trump slant undermines its own journalism
As a journalist, I feel it’s important for the sake of accuracy to first give credit to the beltway media outlets being criticized in this article — chiefly the New York Times and the Washington Post — for their quality reporting on both the first Trump administration and the threat of a potential second one. This is what makes their coverage of the 2024 race that much more baffling.
- In late 2023, for example, the New York Times’ Maggie Haberman, Charlie Savage and Jonathan Swan wrote an in-depth piece exploring Trump’s plans to round up and detain millions of undocumented immigrants in sweeping camps to be deported en masse.
- The Washington Post’s Beth Reinhard authored a detailed profile earlier this year on far-right activist Russ Vought, who is the head of Project 2025 partner organization Center for Renewing America, and a top contender to be Trump’s next White House chief of staff if he wins a second term.
- Politico’s Natalie Allison, Adam Cancryn, Meredith McGraw, and Adam Wren co-wrote a June 2024 article exploring how Trump has flip-flopped on some of his biggest policy positions in order to court large donors.
- In January, NPR’s Tom Dreisbach and Noah Caldwell assembled an impressive amount of research finding that Trump is openly planning to pardon scores of January 6 insurrectionists and has even raised thousands of dollars for a nonprofit that advocates for them.
- CNN’s Steve Contorno reported in July that roughly 140 of Trump’s former White House staffers and advisors are all involved in some way with Project 2025 — the 920-page authoritarian playbook for the next Republican administration.
The fact that the same beltway media outlets that have published exhaustive reports on the threat of a second Trump administration are now openly providing cover for the increasingly unhinged Republican presidential nominee defies logic. If Harris wins, it will be in spite of them. And if Trump wins, it will be because of them.
When 81-year-old President Joe Biden was still the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, the beltway press made his age a defining issue despite Trump being just three years younger, and regularly uttering nonsensical gaffes that went largely overlooked.
This was seen in the tsunami of coverage from former Department of Justice special counsel Robert Hur’s report in which he declined to indict Biden on any criminal charges of mishandling classified documents. Rather than focusing its coverage on Biden being exonerated, outlets like the New York Times chose to make one sentence in Hur’s 300-plus page report about Biden being a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” the centerpiece of a lengthy news cycle.
This laser-focus on the octogenarian president’s age may be because, as Occupy.com previously reported, Biden has an objectively impressive record as the 46th president of the United States. Economist David Doney, who is the chief auditor for the Illinois Municipal Retirement Fund, found that real (inflation-adjusted) wages under the Biden administration are higher than under the last 10 previous administrations, and that unemployment rates are likewise lower than the lowest ones seen under his most recent predecessors.
As Axios reported, the U.S. has had the best post-pandemic economic recovery of any G7 nation. Union membership has risen under the Biden administration, and he oversaw the erasure of more than $168 billion in federal student loan debt in spite of a Supreme Court decision striking down his previous debt cancellation proposal.
However, Biden’s obvious weakness as a general election candidate was on full display during his June debate with Trump, where he appeared tired, confused, and frequently stumbled over his own words. Biden chalked up his poor performance to recovering from a cold, and being fatigued from extensive international travel. And even though Biden tanked the debate, Trump notably failed to increase his own favorability ratings. Nevertheless the defining narrative instead centered on Biden being too old to serve a second term as president, kicked off by a New York Times editorial calling on Biden to exit the race published hours after the debate (the Philadelphia Inquirer answered with an editorial of their own calling for Trump to drop out).
The only conclusion that can be reasonably drawn when looking at the beltway media’s more recent coverage of the election since Vice President Kamala Harris became the Democratic presidential nominee is that they want to keep the race as close as possible. A race in which Harris is uniting the Democratic Party and running circles around a 34-time convicted felon and a GOP vice presidential nominee who is even more reviled than Sarah Palin isn’t exciting. But an election kept artificially close by a press more concerned with clicks than facts keeps the bottom line strong.
The beltway media wants Trump to win the election
“The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” -George Orwell, 1984
Most ordinary journalists accept their role of accurately reporting facts and do it well each day with little fanfare. But the largely invisible editors of prominent beltway outlets — particularly at national newspapers of record like the Times and the Post — also keenly understand their ability to shape public opinion. And it’s in this role where the beltway media’s desire to put Trump back in office becomes more apparent.
Republicans’ most egregious lies are repeated without comment, like how both the Associated Press and NPR’s Morning Edition took Trump at his word that he wouldn’t ban abortion nationwide despite him publicly bragging “I was able to kill Roe v. Wade.” Even good news for Democrats is framed in a negative way, like when Politico spun inflation rates dipping below 3% for the first time since 2021 as somehow bad for Harris.
One clear example of this was how the Times covered recent speeches by both Trump and Harris. On the social media platform Bluesky, Cornell University historian Larry Glickman posted snippets of two articles by the Times to illustrate how the paper was “grading on a curve.” In one article quoting several unnamed Trump advisors, the paper noted that “parts of his speeches were focused on policy,” even though a speech supposedly focusing on the economy rapidly devolved into personal attacks on Harris and vice presidential nominee Tim Walz.
That same day, the Times criticized a Harris speech as “provid[ing] few details on her proposals.” This is despite Harris using that speech to propose a $6,000 tax credit for parents of newborns, increasing the child tax credit from $2,000 to $3,600 per child, and calling for $25,000 in down payment assistance for prospective homeowners.
During the most recent Democratic National Convention (DNC), the Times also demonstrated its ability to, as Orwell wrote in 1984, make readers not believe their eyes and ears. When Tim Walz shared the story of how he and his wife, Gwen, tried and failed to have children over a period of years and finally had their daughter Hope with the help of IVF (in-vitro fertilization) treatments, the Times split hairs over Walz’s use of the term “IVF.”
Technically, the Walzes used a process called intrauterine insemination (IUI) to conceive Hope, though the Times admitted six paragraphs into their article that IVF is widely accepted as “a catchall phrase for a wide range of fertility treatments.” And in the penultimate paragraph of that story, the Times admitted that “some advocates for people dealing with infertility said they were unconcerned about precisely which treatments the Walzes had undergone.” These two crucial tidbits suggest that the Times really had no reason to run this story other than to try and fuel a narrative that Walz was a liar.
After Biden’s speech on the first night of the convention, New York Times fact-checker Linda Qiu called his claim that Trump had presided over the largest four-year increase in the national debt in history as “misleading.” This wasn’t because what Biden said was untrue, but because the debt increased more under former President Barack Obama’s eight-year tenure. Of course, as Fordham University law professor John Pfaff wrote on Bluesky, eight years is twice as long as four.
Qiu said it was “exaggerated” for Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker (D) to say that Trump wanted Americans to “inject bleach” in order to stave off Covid-19, even though Qiu quoted Trump in her fact-check saying it would be “interesting to check” if an “injection” of “disinfectant” would be a viable solution. She also called it “exaggerated” for New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham (D) to state that Trump wants to “dismantle our healthcare system, repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA), and eliminate protections for patients with pre-existing conditions.” This is despite Trump literally running on repealing the ACA if elected to a second term.
The Post also bent over backwards to call Democrats liars for accurately describing Trump and the GOP’s policies during the Democratic convention. Fact-checker Glenn Kessler was ripped for his suggestion that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was lying about Trump “sending love letters to dictators,” with journalists pointing out that Trump and North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un exchanged complimentary letters during Trump’s time in the White House. Minnesota Reformer reporter Chris Ingraham even posted a screenshot of multiple Post headlines using the term “love letters.” The Internet Archive shows that Kessler changed his wording from “there is no evidence that Trump sent such letters” to “this is in the eye of the beholder.” The Post did not include any correction or editor’s note on Kessler’s fact-check notifying readers of this change.
Post reporter Linda Gardner was roundly criticized for a “fact-check” of Biden’s claim that Trump “wouldn’t accept the election if he loses again,” which she argued was “not true,” because “Trump just hasn’t said that he would accept.” It’s important to note that the Post has a history of using its “pinocchios” system typically used to gauge the truthfulness of a politician’s claims in dubious ways, like when it gave Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) three pinocchios for accurately citing a study finding that roughly 500,000 people declare bankruptcy every year due to medical bills.
In her Substack newsletter, media critic Parker Molloy cited Gardner’s post as an example of the beltway media’s pedantic fact checks “missing the forest for the trees.”
“This type of fact-checking does a disservice to readers by obscuring the more significant truth behind a veneer of technical accuracy,” she wrote. “It prioritizes linguistic hairsplitting over meaningful analysis of a genuine threat to democracy.”
The “linguistic hairsplitting” Molloy refers to was also evident in Politifact’s coverage of the DNC. Politifact, which is run by the Poynter Institute, is regarded as the gold standard of discerning truth from fiction, and won a Pulitzer Prize in 2009. This is what makes its latest “fact-checks” so egregious. On night two of the DNC, the outlet gave Pennsylvania state representative Malcolm Kenyatta (D) a “half true” rating for claiming that Project 2025 calls to “cut overtime pay.” In order to justify this rating, Politifact decided to say that the “overtime protections” Project 2025 would eliminate are somehow different from “overtime pay.”
Politifact’s most glaring fact-check was when the outlet gave Harris a “mostly false” rating for claiming that Project 2025 “plans to create a national anti-abortion coordinator and force states to report on women’s miscarriages and abortions.” The outlet’s reasoning for suggesting Harris was a liar amounted to nit-picking, calling foul on her accurately describing the document’s plans using simple terms.
“Project 2025 doesn’t mention a ‘national anti-abortion coordinator,’” Politifact staff wrote. “The document calls for a ‘pro-life politically appointed Senior Coordinator of the Office of Women, Children, and Families.’”
Freelance writer Darryl Mott ascribed this phenomenon to beltway media “attempting to be ‘impartial’ without understanding what that word actually means.”
“Because Trump lies every time he opens his mouth, it is in their minds biased to not also call Harris a liar constantly even when she’s objectively and proveably[sic] telling the truth,” he wrote.
In a late August essay, New York Times opinion contributor Thomas B. Edsall quoted one expert who warned that the media was letting down the American public at a time when the public has never been more in need of reliable media outlets that can accurately and fairly report the facts. Edsall referred to an article by Princeton University historian Sean Wilentz, who wrote that the beltway media’s insistence on covering Trump like any other typical presidential candidate rather than the threat to democracy he’s proven himself to be could do lasting damage.
“[M]any of even the most influential news sources hold to the fiction Trump and his party are waging a presidential campaign instead of a continuing coup, a staggering failure to recognize Trump’s stated agenda,” Wilentz wrote.
But rather than “a staggering failure to recognize” a threat, it could more simply be that the D.C. political press has a longing to return to the lucrative days of the first Trump administration. In February, George Pearkes, who is a macro strategist at Bespoke Investment Group, posted three revealing graphs showing the monthly returns on the New York Times Company’s stock compared to the S&P 500.
Pearkes’ first graph showed that the performance of the Times’ stock price (depicted by a white line) remained far below the growth rate of the S&P 500 (delineated by a blue line) between 2009 and 2016. But in 2017, after Trump officially took office, the Times’ performance in financial markets rocketed past the S&P 500’s growth rate between 2017 and December of 2020, just before Trump left office. The third graph showed the Times once again trailing the S&P 500’s rate of growth between January of 2021 and February of 2024. This data could be used to suggest that, at least for the Times, there is a clear material incentive to having Trump back in office.
The decision-makers at major beltway media outlets are less concerned about the practical threats of a second Trump administration, as they’ll be largely insulated from the worst of it by virtue of their wealth and proximity to power. The rest of us won’t be as lucky.
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