Advise for Media/Press in covering real news

Sterling article about what the media/press has done to help Trump --unwittingly, what the public has 'asked for,' and what must change in the reporting, focus, approach to reporting about Trump and the candidates running in 2020 - to benefit our nation.

Here are some excerpts:

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Will the Media Be Trump's Accomplice Again in 2020?
We have a second chance. Let’s not blow it.
By Frank Bruni
Opinion Columnist
Jan. 11, 2019


“The shadow of what we did last time looms over this next time,” the former CBS newsman Dan Rather, who has covered more than half a century of presidential elections, told me. And what we did last time was emphasize the sound and the fury, because Trump provided both in lavish measure.“When you cover this as spectacle,” [Dan] Rather said, “what’s lost is context, perspective and depth. And when you cover this as spectacle, he is the star.” Spectacle is his métier. He’s indisputably spectacular. And even if it’s a ghastly spectacle and presented that way, it still lets him control the narrative. As the writer Steve Almond observed in a recently published essay, “He appears powerful to his followers, which is central to his strongman mystique.”

But we fell prey to a habit thatcan’t be repeated when we compare the new crop of Democratic challengers to Trump and to one another. We interpreted fairness as a similarly apportioned mix of complimentary and derogatory stories about each contender, no matter how different one contender’s qualifications, accomplishments and liabilities were
from another’s.

We need to do something else, too, which is to recognize that Trump now has an actual record in office and to discuss that with as much energy as we do his damned Twitter feed.

And when journalists gawp at each of Trump’s tirades, taunts and self-congratulatory hallucinations, these heresies blur together and he evades accountability for the ones that should stick. I asked Rather what he was most struck by in the 2016 campaign, and he instantly mentioned Trump’s horrific implication, in public remarks that August, that gun enthusiasts could rid themselves of a Clinton presidency by assassinating her.I’d almost forgotten it. So many lesser shocks so quickly overwrote it. Rather wasn’t surprised. “It got to the point where it was one outrage after another, and we just moved on each time,” he said. Instead, we should hold on to the most outrageous, unconscionable moments. We should pause there awhile. We can’t privilege the incremental over what should be the enduring. It lets Trump off the hook.

So does anything, really, that tugs us from issues of policy and governance into the realms of theater and sport. That puts a greater premium than ever on avoiding what Joel Benenson called “the horse-race obsession” with who’s ahead, who’s behind, who seems to be breaking into a gallop, who’s showing signs of a limp.

readers and viewers, no matter how much they complain about the media’s shallowness, reward it. What they lap up most readily and reliably is Trump the Baby at the top of the newscast, Trump the Buffoon in the highlights reel, Trump the Bully in the headline. And that’s on them.But it’s on us to try to interest them in more and to leaven that concentration of attention with full, vivid introductions to Trump’s alternatives.

Full article here