Margaret Sullivan on how the media normalizes Trump
"When you have such a disparity between candidates, it's not fulfilling our duty to treat them as equals."
PN is a reader-supported publication made possible by paid subscribers. Appreciate our independent journalism? Then please sign up to support us.
When we spoke with Margaret Sullivan about a month ago to get her view on coverage of the 2024 election, she made a case that the elite media’s focus on Biden’s age was doing a disservice to voters, especially considering the threat to democracy posed by Trump.
Then the debate happened, and the punditocracy went feral. So on Monday, I circled back with Sullivan to ask if her view had changed.
“My view is nuanced,” she said. “Biden’s age really is a huge story, one deserving of a lot of coverage. This is especially true, of course, since the president stumbled so shockingly in the recent debate. That, and the political fallout, is clearly major news. But the media feeding frenzy is over the top, almost gleeful in its relentlessness, and it takes up time, space, resources and attention that should be given — much more than is the case — to Trump’s appalling unfitness for office.”
“So much of Trump’s past wrongdoing and what another term would bring is treated as old news or as already ‘priced in,’” Sullivan continued. “Some perspective, some moderation and some self-scrutiny on the part of media leaders and practitioners is badly needed at this critical moment. But don’t hold your breath waiting for it.”
As a former public editor of the New York Times and media columnist for the Washington Post, Sullivan — who now writes for The Guardian, on her American Crisis Substack, and also serves as executive director of the Craig Newmark Center for Journalism Ethics and Security at Columbia University — is one of the country’s most esteemed media critics. When Public Notice contributor Thor Benson connected with her last month, she argued that while journalists trying to present themselves as nonpartisan is a “healthy impulse,” it doesn’t play out well when one of the two major parties has degenerated into an authoritarian nightmare.
“It produces a false equivalency that tries to equalize Donald Trump with all of the dangers he brings to American democracy and Joe Biden as a traditional pro-democracy candidate,” she said. “But these things really aren’t equal.”
“It’s something news leaders should really do some soul searching about. Are we doing our job of informing the American public so that they can do their job of voting in an informed way? If many people don’t know the facts, the media needs to take some responsibility for that.”
A full transcript of our conversation with Sullivan, lightly edited for length and clarity, follows.
Thor Benson