Washington Post media writer Erik Wemple, who uses a headshot that appears to be about twelve years old, received a timely question from a reader named Jon. As we head further into the 2024 campaign, he asked: “What is it going to take for coverage of [Donald Trump] to stop falling into the same mistakes?”
Wemple gave a superficial answer about cable news being too driven by a “ratings contest,” which completely missed the point of the question, so let me help this poor guy out by answering it myself.
First, Jon, we’d need to define “mistakes.” Because in your question, you actually credit Wemple for having “provided on-target descriptions and prescriptions” for the media’s Trump coverage, I’ll assume you generally mean something like “interviewing a former president, who is running for president again, on live national television.”
Wemple had previously written that such an event, like the town hall-style event that CNN hosted earlier this year, fails at “providing viewers with a comprehensive inventory of true and false claims.” In other words, a live interview with Trump doesn’t allow for the host to interrupt him every two seconds with a “FACT CHECK! YOU ARE WRONG, MR. PRESIDENT! HAVE YOU NO SHAME, SIR?!”
If it’s a “mistake” to interview a leading presidential candidate in front of a live audience, then the answer, Jon, is not that there are mistakes to be corrected. It’s that you are an anti-American fascist with no hope for saving. And because of people like you
