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Yesterday morning TPM Reader MS asked, “Is it my imagination or has the press turned against Trump?” It may seem that way and perhaps it is effectively the case. But not precisely. What’s happened over the last week — and especially in response to the Kanye/Fuentes/Trump hoedown — illustrates a key feature of the political journalism and news ecosystems.
No, it’s not that the press has turned against Trump. It’s that Republican political elites are not defending him. That changes the tenor of press coverage in clear and immediate ways. If one party is defending something or supporting it, it trips off the framework of “bias” or rather what we might call “press bias avoidance.” So such and such happened or so and so did this. Many say it’s bad. But what do their defenders say? Their defenders say X. It’s a story with two sides. Events like the January 6th insurrection and the Big Lie have put this model under strain. But it’s persistent and robust.
The “bias” framework defines bias as not giving equal account to both partisan sides of the story. If one party doesn’t have a side, if they’re collectively sitting this one out, suddenly there’s nothing to balance because there are not two sides. This may sound reductive and cookie-cutterish. Perhaps the two parties shouldn’t shape coverage like this. But this is actually how this works. If one partisan side takes a pass, it’s a permissioning moment where the press collectively can simply focus on what happened.
What’s changed is that a handful of factors have come together to make very few Republican elites defend Trump. You might say it’s that the hoedown was just so egregious that it’s indefensible. But that’s clearly not the case. Indefensible has seldom been a problem for Trump. What’s changed is that midterm results suddenly showed Trump to be less dangerous (to Republicans) and less valuable. So there’s both less need to come to his defense and some hope that this might finally be the scandal that rids them of their Trump problem.
You might be saying, Don’t give them too much credit! Basically no prominent Republican has denounced Trump, called on him to apologize or really anything. That’s true. But almost none are defending him and in this context that can actually make the bigger difference. Without one of the two major parties, which serve as custodians of our national political polarization, organizing a defense, suddenly it’s like pushing against an open door. The whole story falls out of the construct of polarization, two sides and that framework of “press bias avoidance.” It’s just Holy Crap this person did something inexcusable and awful, let’s find out more about it and keep talking about how awful it is.
Let me stipulate that I don’t think Trump is going anywhere. I think he’s highly likely to be the GOP nominee in 2024 if he runs. It’s hardly like the press is baying for his blood. But there’s a difference that MS rightly detects. It’s not a matter of the press turning on him. They weren’t really for him or against him before. It’s this lack of organized partisan support, the existence of which journalists collectively believe they must respect and which profoundly shapes coverage.
