Alan Zendell, August 31, 2024

During this election season, traditional news organizations like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post have generally provided Americans with responsible journalism. Fifty years ago, that would have been enough, but in today’s world, most Americans get their news and opinions, often indistinguishable from each other, from commercial news outlets, social media, and online entities like Talking Points, The Drudge Report, and The Huffington Post that represent a broad spectrum of political views.

There was a time when Americans trusted their local newspapers. As elections approached, the endorsement of a major newspaper was an intensely sought-after commodity. Today, not so much due to the influence of our video and internet-oriented culture. That’s a problem, because it represents a new paradigm in journalistic integrity. There isn’t much of the latter anymore, and the culprit, as usual, is money.

Social media companies are unregulated in the United States. They are infested with bots and fake actors that are allowed to say whatever they wish until public outrage forces them to take a step back. Foreign adversaries and criminal organizations use Facebook, X, Telegram, Tik Tok, and others to sew discord among Americans and influence our elections. These platforms are safe homes for racists, terrorists, scammers, and revolutionaries, and much of the billions they earn is fed back into the political system by people with extreme views, like Elon Musk.

Cable news networks, with the exception of PBS and NPR, are commercial entities that depend on the largesse of sponsors for their survival. Aside from not offending the hands that feed them, there is nothing regulating the content they stream, and no way for consumers to know whether what they see and hear is true.

Fox News unabashedly brags that despite its name, it is not a news network, but a politically skewed entertainment network, although, since they were punished with a nearly billion dollar fine for supporting election fraud allegations, they’re likely to be more restrained this cycle. With less self-consciousness, networks like Newsmax and America One are even more outrageous in peddling conspiracy theories and promoting the reactionary fringe elements of our society. On the left, MSNBC makes no bones about its progressive bias, and CNN, more than anything, seems uncertain of its identity.

Accused of a liberal bias, and serving both a domestic and international audience, I believe the network attempts to take a centrist approach, but if their recent efforts are the best their industry can do, the public will not be well-served during the 2024 election cycle. The Trump-Biden debate that forced President Biden to drop out of the race was one example. I don’t doubt that CNN tried to present a meaningful debate, but all they did was demonstrate that traditional debate formats are useless when moderators are powerless to enforce the rules. There will never be a meaningful debate in which Donald Trump is a principal until and unless someone figures out a way to convincingly fact check in real time and force participants to debate issues rather than engage in gladiator matches.

We might have expected CNN to put its best foot forward for last Thursday’s interview with Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. Prospective voters hoped and expected to see what the candidates were made of under intensive questioning about their policies. We thought we were tuning in to an hour-long, live interview. What we got was an edited version of an interview that occurred earlier in the day, liberally seasoned with commercials. Dana Bash, who conducted the interview for CNN, sounded more like a colleague chatting with candidates than someone pressing them with tough questions.

It wasn’t Harris’ or Walz’ fault – they generally answered the questions put to them with more specificity than we ever hear from Trump. When Harris was asked about her change in position on banning fracking, she explained that her values hadn’t changed, but as she learned more about new technologies, she’d concluded that the nation’s climate mitigation goals could be met without the need for a ban. I thought that was an excellent answer that should have been followed up with probing questions that gave us more insight into what Harris meant, but that didn’t happen. CNN gave us a half-baked excuse for an interview.

Since 2015, the media have been culpable in allowing candidates to lie, distort, and mislead voters, and create an atmosphere of divisiveness, fear, and uncertainty. Factual reporting and truth have suffered one mortal blow after another, and if the media don’t clean up their acts, we’ll all suffer. We can’t prevent candidates from lying and spreading hate, but we don’t have to give them a free ride when they do so. And if the media don’t collectively fight against fraudulent allegations of rigged elections, next January could be more deadly and violent than January 2021 was.