Message to the Media
Stop preaching to the choir, shut up and start listening to the people who propelled Donald Trump back into the Oval Office.
There already has been a numbing barrage of news media finger-pointing, handwringing, apologizing, navel-gazing and excuse-making for the coverage of this year’s national, state and local elections.
All of it and more is useful and richly deserved, from the quivering examples set by Patrick Soon-Shiong of The Los Angeles Times and Jeff Bezos of The Washington Post to the editors and reporters who remained fixated on and, it turns out, misled by opinion polls and mesmerized by Trump’s clever clickbait. Media critics such as Dan Froomkin, Melanie Sill, Dan Gilmore, Margaret Sullivan and Media Matters, to name a few, warned of that repeatedly, to little or no avail.
What matters now, however, isn’t just hindsight. It’s foresight. How will the nation’s surviving news outlets cover the second Trump administration?
Standing up to Trump’s bullying, threats and intimidation is a no brainer. So is abandoning the access addiction that prompts some journalists to avert their eyes or sandpaper their reporting to harvest planted leaks, remain in the good graces of high-ranking officials and get invited to the right parties. Reporters — and even columnists — aren’t members of the First Estate and shouldn’t aspire to join it.
Therein lies the most important lesson: News and information do not trickle down; they bubble up. So one lesson from this year’s elections and beyond is pretty straightforward: Get the hell out of Washington, tune out the experts and venture across the Hudson and beyond the Beltway into that red expanse where Donald Trump and his allies and acolytes won the election. Stop pontificating and preaching to the choir, shut up and start listening. Better yet, if you want to know what’s playing in Peoria, go stay there for a while. Consider it a semester abroad.
If President Trump carries out his promise to halt immigration and deport legal immigrants, go to local grocery stores, builders and restaurants and ask what’s happening to the supplies and the prices of lettuce and other produce and the availability of carpenters and other skilled workers.
If he makes good on his promises to impose sky-high tariffs on imported goods, don’t just talk to economists; go to car lots, hardware stores and lumber yards and ask the folks selling and shopping there.
If he hands Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. a license to practice medicine, go to the clinics and the schools and keep asking the doctors and nurses how his medicine is working. Keep asking the women’s health questions in Florida and Texas, and everywhere if Trump and company overreach that far.
If he does away with the Affordable Care Act, as he’s said he will, go to the immediate care clinics and hospitals in Springfield and Saginaw and ask people waiting there how they’re paying for the treatments they’re receiving, especially if they have preexisting conditions.
If he undoes the Biden administration’s efforts to combat climate change, head to the next Asheville and ask people what they think now.
If, as he’s promised, the new president clears the way to boost domestic production of coal and oil and natural gas, go to gas stations and knock on doors to see what effect his moves have had. Ask homeowners in North Dakota about their January energy bills. Sure, keep running the erudite cost-benefit analyzes, but put them on the opinion pages.
Ask local teachers, parents and students whether partisan, ideological or religious pressure is helping or hurting the next generation’s ability to cope with and compete in a world that is changing and challenging, whether you like it or not. Ask them if they think civics and syntax are obsolete. If the superintendent posts the Ten Commandments or the Beatitudes on every classroom wall, ask them if they think everyone, even the President, should obey them.
Some important questions aren’t as easy. Do parents, preachers and others care if Trump’s normalization of obscenity, crudity, racism, misogyny, narcissism and the rest of his trademarks — and some of the social and legacy media’s passive acceptance of it — are affecting the nation’s young people.
If he continues to call the inhabitants of Arlington and other cemeteries “suckers and losers”, forget the four-stars and go to the recruiting stations and ask the NCOs if that’s having any effect on their success. Then go to Parris Island and Great Lakes and Fort Jackson and ask gunny sergeants and new recruits.
In other words, for the next four years, ask the people who propelled Donald Trump back into the Oval Office if he’s delivered on what he promised them — and listen respectfully and report accurately what they say.
With the demolition of their economic base and the resulting extinction of local and regional news outlets, that responsibility now falls heavily on the surviving and solvent legacy institutions, and on the many new organizations that have arisen in a laudable attempt to fill the vacuum created by social media and predatory hedge funds.
Master’s degrees, Pulitzer Prizes and Nieman Fellowships are badges of honor, but news is still more credible when it comes from someone you see at Dunkin’ Donuts in the morning or Kroger on Saturdays. The New York Times, the Post, Politico and others have great reporters, but their work sometimes is more credible when it — or better, shorter versions of it — are not from Manhattan or Washington, but on page three of the local news or cited by a local podcaster, broadcaster or blogger.
True, some of the people who voted for Trump have joined his cult and probably won’t even listen to a person they have a beer or a glass of red blend with, of course. Others probably would never vote for a woman, even a white one.
Some others, however, are just angry that no one has been listening to them, watching executive salaries soar while their wages remain static and mourning the impossibility of having their first child or buying their first house. Those folks were the Democrats’ base since the New Deal, and Springsteen, Bon Jovi and Billy Joel were singing about their plight 40 years ago (https://open.substack.com/pub/johnwalcott/p/listen-to-the-music?r=zhhc&utm_medium=ios), but too many Democrats weren’t listening.
Even further back, Simon and Garfunkel had it right.
“And the people bowed and prayed
“To the neon god they made
“And the sign flashed out its warning
“In the words it was forming
“And the sign said the words of the prophets are
“written on the subway walls
“In tenement halls
“And whispered in the sound of silence”
The neon god Trump’s reality show genius is convincing people that he hears them. He isn’t even listening, of course, but it’s time that someone did.