Can Good Journalism Even Matter?
Time Magazine gets time with Trump and uses the time well. That deserves kudos, even if it changes nothing.
Time Magazine, which oddly enough still exists and employs good journalists such as Eric Cortellessa, ran a very good and important interview with Donald Trump Tuesday. The pub packaged it online as a feature article but also ran the complete transcript and a “full fact-check” [sic] along with it.
“Cortellessa” did not exactly spend the day trending on social media. If media critics have nothing bad to say, they say nothing at all I suppose.
Everybody loves to criticize the news media—trust me, I’ve done plenty of it myself. Most of the press wasn’t up to the job of covering George W. Bush, Barack Obama, or Mitt Romney, let alone Trump, and that’s just the apex of a journalistic pyramid that slopes away rapidly as you get beyond the Oval Office.
Yet I also contend that much media criticism from the left misses the mark, is far overblown in relation to its importance, and fails to grasp the difficulty of the task at hand.
And, I would argue, the left is—to a degree—falling into a similar cycle that plagues the American right in this regard.
That cycle of incessant criticism of the ‘mainstream’ news media—with endless rounds of circulated horror-takes of (often cherry-picked or overblown) New York Times columns, Associated Press headline word choices, and Sunday morning interview snippets—can give partisan news consumers the impression that such outlets are utterly untrustworthy propaganda sheets. Those consumers become less likely to actually consume those products, and thus more likely to get their impressions from highly partisan sources who cherry-pick and take out of context… and thus less likely to consume the mainstream media products, and thus, and thus, and thus.
This cycle has for many years proven both wildly popular and enormously profitable in the right-wing marketplace (a term you’ll have to get used to in my contributions to this newsletter, fair warning). It remains mostly nascent on the left (as the high Times subscriber numbers attest), but it’s there, and it figures to accelerate during this election year. And it ain’t good, in my opinion.
Getting back to the Time piece, we can see how useful and positive good journalism can be, but also how unlikely it is that such journalism will matter.
Take this small takeaway: for the first time I’ve seen, Trump acknowledged his awareness that the available (though incomplete) data shows that violent crime declined in 2023 and early 2024—contra Trump’s claims of a migrant-driven crime surge.
Under Cortellessa’s questioning, Trump’s inane response to this was to claim that something he saw “last night” showed that the FBI and other unspecified entities have deliberately falsified that data. (I have not yet discovered what report he might have been referencing.)
Great job Cortellessa! But… does it matter?
Though obviously (to me) an important revelation, it was surely not in the top half-dozen outrageous claims from the interview, which focused on Trump’s potential second-term agenda. (This meant not asking about court cases and past behaviors; you gotta make choices as an interviewer.) Cortellesa gave the exchange on crime data a solid paragraph high in the fourth section of his lengthy feature. Commentators circulating reactions, including the Biden campaign, focussed on Trump’s quotes on abortion, and political violence, and other issues.
So, even those who pay some attention to the Time story will probably not notice that Trump conceded that his heavy-handed plans to fight violent migrant crime fly in the face of data. Those who do see that piece could understandably infer, from its relative placement and repetition elsewhere, that it’s not a particularly important bit of information.
Similarly, Time’s hot-link fact-check does not address Trump’s claim about the data being “fudged.” Was there really a report questioning the data; what did that report actually say; how credible was the claim? You can’t really blame the magazine: given the extraordinary, rapid-fire, and ever-changing untruths pouring out of Trump’s mouth, there’s only so much you can do without holding up publication for weeks. But again, a reader is left uncertain, or might even assume that anything not rebutted in the “full fact-check” must be undisputed. (Hence my [sic] joke at the beginning of this column.)
Truth is, speaking as this newsletter’s resident journalist (and an ‘activist journalism’ practitioner for most of my career), journalism rarely accomplishes much of anything—and shouldn’t be expected to. The job—and in my opinion it’s a hugely important one—is to find out something a little closer to the truth than what was previously known, and relate that to your readers. It’s one role among many in a very broad societal, and in this case political, ecosytem. We report, you decide what if anything to do about it.
Give Cortellessa his props for doing his part well, in a rare opportunity for a non-sycophantic interrogation of the candidate. Maybe even take a moment to give him a shoutout on social media, before returning to the important work of criticizing headline writers.