How a really good British pub covers American politics

 This from a post by Jim Smith, of Talking Turkey; Below is an email I received today as a voluntary contributor to The Guardian from interim “membership editor” Georgia Warren. It’s a short interview with Margaret Sullivan, one of their columnists.

Georgia Warren: You wrote recently in your Guardian column about how this isn't the time for coverage as usual. What does good news coverage of this election look like, in your view?

Margaret Sullivan: It's really important to make American citizens – and citizens of the world – aware that this is not a normal election. We are in a situation in the United States right now in which a “normal” candidate, Joe Biden, is running for re-election against a former president whom we know to have authoritarian tendencies (at the very least) and who has allies making plans that would move us in the direction of, if not fascism, then certainly authoritarian-style government.

How do journalists and editors avoid falling into the trap of creating a both-sides narrative of false equivalence while also maintaining impartiality?

Instead of focusing on performative neutrality, I think what we need to keep in mind is fairness. Fairness doesn't necessarily mean taking everything down the middle. It doesn’t mean equating, for example, Biden's gaffes and memory lapses with the 91 federal charges that Donald Trump is facing in several different cases. These things aren't equal, and to cover them equally actually does readers a disservice.

So how should the media cover the “normal” candidate in this election?

Of course, journalists need to cover Joe Biden rigorously and yes, cover his faults and his gaffes and all the bad stuff, too. Of course we want to pay attention to whether Biden is mentally acute enough to run for president. But Donald Trump is also nearly 80, and I don't see much attention paid to that. We all know by now that Biden is old, so writing endless stories about his age doesn't really inform the public in any useful way. This is not about making Biden look good. It's about doing our public service job of informing the public in a responsible way.

What do you think the media has learned about covering Trump since 2016?

One thing the media has learned is not to simply train the camera on Trump and let him say all kinds of things that mostly aren't true. Everyone knows for sure now that he does lie all the time, so real-time fact-checking has gotten better, as have decisions about whether to air his rallies and speeches live.

And what do you worry the media has not learned?

The thing that I don't think is better is the reliance on horse race coverage instead of more substantial coverage. Jay Rosen, the journalism professor at New York University, has coined an expression in which he urges the media to focus on – and this is his phrase – “not the odds, but the stakes”. So don't concentrate on who's going to win, but rather: what are the potential consequences of this election? I think that's really smart and I think it’s part of fairness too: covering substance. What are the candidates’ positions on the issues? What is their record? It’s journalists’ job to scrutinize these men’s records and talk and write about what they actually represent. So I think more of that and less surface stuff, less about public opinion and polls.

The media industry is in a precarious state – more than it was in 2016, more even than in 2020. How does that play into it?

Two American newspapers are going out of business every week. One of the things that worries me the most, and I've written a book about it, is the collapse of local newspapers and local journalism. Those newspapers had a really important role helping to give people in cities and states a common ground, a shared reality. We could disagree with our neighbor, but we shared the basic facts about what was happening nationally as well as in our communities.

You’ve been public editor of the New York Times and a media columnist for the Washington Post. What do you see as different about the Guardian?

One of the reasons I'm so happy to be writing for the Guardian once a week is that it is accessible to people. It doesn't have a paywall; you don’t get stopped when you're trying to read an important story. That is something that I think is increasingly important, and it makes the support that the Guardian gets from its readers crucial. It is extremely important to the business model, and readers do need to be aware of that. It's not either-or, it's both. The Guardian is both accessible to everyone and it needs the support of its readers. It has a different business model and it's one that I feel really proud to be a part of.