The Volokh Conspiracy
Mostly law professors | Sometimes contrarian | Often libertarian | Always independent
"Dear Journalists: Stop Trying to Save Democracy"
A very good Substack post by Yascha Mounk; two short excerpts:
The aspiration of many journalists to save democracy has not just proven counterproductive because it drove a big part of their readership away from mainstream outlets. It has also deprived Democrats of key facts they would have needed to make good strategic decisions—which, ironically, has helped to strengthen the very political forces that the journalists who were self-consciously striving to preserve democracy were trying to contain.
Over the last months, I have heard from multiple European diplomats that the extent of Joe Biden's struggles has long been well-known. In meetings with a number of senior statesmen, Biden repeated the same anecdotes, or seemed unsure about his own whereabouts, as early as 2021. Is it really plausible that American journalists were unable to learn something that has been known in capitals across Europe for so long—something that, as it happens, tens of millions of American voters have long cited as a serious concern in opinion polls?
No. The obvious truth of it is that, for the most part, journalists simply did not want to go there. Part of that reluctance may have been rooted in an understandable (if misplaced) sense of propriety. But another part of it was rooted in the unspoken suspicion that open consideration of this topic would somehow wind up helping Donald Trump.
As it happens, the reluctance to level with readers ultimately accomplished the opposite of what was intended. It allowed Biden to stay in the race long enough to make the entire Democratic establishment complicit in covering up the true state of his mental health. And it made it virtually impossible to stage an open primary to choose his successor….
But the truth of it is that the American mainstream itself now suffers from a serious epistemological crisis. If you were a faithful reader of The New York Times or a frequent listener of NPR, you were less likely than the average American citizen to believe that Biden was suffering from serious mental decline or that Harris was an unpopular politician with a steeply uphill path towards winning the presidential election. You were also less likely to recognize that school closures would exact a big toll on students' educational outcomes and mental health or to realize that a lot of Latinos were embracing the Republican Party. And you would, even now, be less likely than most voters to recognize how utterly simplistic it is to believe that America can meaningfully be divided into two opposing blocks of "whites" and "people of color."
Americans have lost trust in many of their institutions in good part because, despite their assurances to be the arbiters of truth and science, legacy news outlets and establishment institutions fundamentally misconstrue and misunderstand basic aspects of American life. The reasons for this sorry state of affairs go well beyond the decision by many journalists to flatter themselves into thinking that their task was to save democracy. But the first step towards fixing the problem is for journalists to re-embrace the humdrum conception of their own work that served them comparatively well in the past: to cultivate a healthy distrust of everyone, including those you may secretly believe to be on the right side of history, and report the news without fear or favor.
The whole post is much worth reading.
