A rare analyst to have foreseen Hillary Clinton’s defeats against Barack Obama and Donald Trump, Marie-Christine Bonzom has covered seven presidential elections and five presidencies. At the invitation of Dutyshe occasionally casts her expert eye on the presidential campaign of 2024.
The American media has long faced a crucial challenge: to once again fully assume its role as the fourth estate in a very sick democracy. This challenge has become urgent after the historic earthquakes that have just shaken the presidential campaign.
On June 27, Joe Biden’s disastrous performance in the debate with Donald Trump marked a major turning point. On July 13, a second earthquake: Trump was targeted by an assassination attempt that left one dead and two seriously injured among the Republican candidate’s supporters.
Through the debate, Americans received confirmation of the health problems that, for at least two years, had led most of them to worry about the president’s mental acuity. They also discovered, for some, and received confirmation, for others, that the White House, the Democratic Party and their allies in some media had deceived them about Biden’s ability to lead the country.
“I’m not as good at debating as I used to be, but I can tell the truth and I can do the job,” Biden said, as the debate shook one of the foundations of the anti-Trump crusade of the president and his party, who present themselves as the champions and guarantors of the Truth against the Lies embodied by Trump and the Republican Party.
The attempted assassination of Trump confirmed to Americans, after the invasion of the Capitol in January 2021, that the parties controlling the political-electoral system and their candidates have stoked anger so much that they have led the country to the brink of the abyss. Too many media outlets have contributed to this deleterious rhetoric of the duopoly by sensationalizing the Biden-Trump “duel” and its stakes for the future of the country and its democracy.
Lack of coverage and access problem
The fourth estate’s first role is to scrutinize the sitting president. However, Biden, who in 2020 was already the candidate least subject to scrutiny in the history of presidential elections, is the White House tenant who, until his disastrous debate, was the least scrutinized.
Until the debate, CNN and other media outlets had dismissed Americans’ concerns, uncomfortable videos or alarm bells, including those sounded as early as September by Democratic figures such as David Axelrod, Barack Obama’s former strategist, as partisan attacks, “fake news” or “conspiratorial” excesses. The debate, seen live, forced them to publish information about Biden and his team’s efforts to frame him and limit the damage.
Today, journalists like Nayeema Raza, former head of the Opinion pages of New York Timesexplained the lack of coverage before the debate by citing “a problem of access” to the president.
This “access problem” is precisely what the Biden team’s strategy is about. The White House Correspondents Association complained about it in 2021. A year later, 68 journalists covering the president for outlets as diverse as the New York TimesCNN, Newsmax or Fox News sent a letter to the executive to deplore that Biden is less accessible than all the other presidents, including Trump, and to denounce the restrictions of the White House as “contrary to freedom of the press”.
But the problem wasn’t just access to the president. NBC’s Chuck Todd and Jonathan Martin of Politico, admit that for two years, members of the government had been talking to them privately about Biden’s cognitive deterioration and that many journalists were also talking about it among themselves.
The problem was also a reluctance to report the situation to the public. To the point that just before the debate, CNN or MSNBC were still denying any deterioration in Biden’s health and castigating a well-documented investigation by Wall Street Journal on the subject.
Max Tani, former correspondent of Politico at the White House, speaks of a broader “failure” of the media. “There has been little reporting about the impact of Biden’s age and mental state on his presidency and his ability to perform his duties and campaign,” he laments. For Ben Smith, former media critic of the New York Times“journalists were not supported by their superiors because their bosses were focused on the existential threat posed by Trump.”
The same in 2020. Shortly before the election that year, the New York Post reveals the Hunter Biden case. In any other presidential campaign, a case involving allegations of foreign influence peddling, bribery and tax fraud against the son of a White House contender would have sparked a flood of investigative journalism to dig into the potential ramifications for Joe Biden.
On the contrary, the New York Post was banned from Twitter, treated with contempt, and few media outlets, except those with Republican leanings, picked up on his investigation. National Public Radio even went so far as to announce that it “didn’t want to waste time on non-issues.” A blatant lack of curiosity for a news outlet. Especially since after the 2020 election, the FBI confirmed that the computer that revealed the affair was indeed Hunter Biden’s, and that in 2024, the prosecutor prosecuting the president’s son in another case produced the computer and emails it contained as evidence.
Many American media outlets have therefore, in the name of “anything but Trump”, placed the interests of a party before the public’s interest in being informed.
Back to the basics of the profession
The judgment of Jill Abramson, former editor-in-chief of New York Timesis scathing: “Washington’s best journalists have failed in the first duty of journalism: to hold power to account. It is our duty to pierce the White House smokescreens and uncover and report the truth. I fear that too many journalists did not try to get the information because they did not want to be accused of helping elect Trump. I understand that. But that is no excuse to abandon our first duty.”
This is not the first time that media outlets, sometimes among the most influential in the United States and beyond, have become the mouthpieces of a president, Democrat or Republican, at the expense of their role as the fourth estate.
In the months leading up to Republican George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003, the New York TimesTHE Washington PostCNN, Fox News and many others contributed to the false propaganda in favor of the war. In particular, through the almost generalized use of anonymous sources located within the Bush administration and the virtual absence of opposing opinions on the allegations of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and of a link between Iraq and al-Qaeda.
In a study, Mark Harmon and Robert Muenchen of the University of Tennessee conclude that “the media has not been active enough as a fourth estate to prevent the headlong rush in Iraq.” John Walcott, a professor at Georgetown University and former Washington bureau chief for the Knight Ridder news agency, believes that “there is no evidence that today’s journalists have learned the lessons of Iraq.”
Walcott stresses the need for media and journalists to operate with rigor and critical thinking and to return to the fundamentals of the profession: multiple sources, sources close to the ground, basic reporting, fact-checking, demarcation between fact and commentary and, perhaps most importantly, “distance from power and politics” – that is, a distancing from elites.
To foster a renewal of American democracy, the fourth estate must therefore take up these challenges. Return to basics. Stop recruiting political operators from the duopoly and passing them off as journalists. Get out of the Democrat/Republican reading grid. Cover alternative political actors.
There is an urgent need to address these challenges, not only in relation to the toxic hyperpolarization that Biden, Trump and their parties are stoking ahead of the election, but also in relation to Americans’ loss of trust in their media.
Already badly damaged since Iraq, Americans’ trust in their media is at an all-time low. According to Gallup, 68% have “not much” or “no confidence at all” in newspapers, television and radio to report the news “completely, accurately and fairly.”
The reinvigoration of American democracy requires a revival of the Fourth Estate. The public is eager for it: despite their loss of trust in the news media, 84% of Americans believe that the Fourth Estate is “very important” or even “essential” to democracy.