Why I Am Taking A Cable News Hiatus

      If Kamala Harris loses this election, traditional news media will bear a substantial burden of the blame.

      News outlets obsess on Donald Trump, assuring him the lion’s share of coverage. On Wednesday, Oct. 15, for example, the top four political stories on my iPhone for The New York Times contained the name Trump or Donald Trump. On politicalwire.com, a much-read political web hub, eight of the first 12 headlines at 7:15 a.m. contained Trump’s name. One named Harris’. 

      When not obsessively covering Trump, news outlets report and dissect polls, though data specialists themselves concede at this point that covering this horserace is largely meaningless.  

      And, worst of all, the news media regularly normalize Trump with “balanced” and largely specious policy pieces, though in truth Trump is a candidate so extreme, so unmoored to fact and increasingly so unhinged that the former chair of the military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, a man whom Trump appointed to this top position, told author and Watergate icon Bob Woodward that Trump is “now the most dangerous person in the country.” 

      I’ve had enough. So, for the home stretch of this election, I’m turning off cable news —right (Fox), left (MSNBC) and center (CNN). I’ll selectively scan those print and online news sites I sometimes respect. 

      Why, as a journalist, would I do so? 

       On his hub website, politicalwire.com, Taegan Goddard recently wrote:

“The news media tends to avoid using the term ‘fascist’ to describe political leaders, particularly due to the sensitive historical comparisons it invokes with figures like Adolph Hitler.” 

      He’s absolutely right. Except Donald Trump is a fascist, as former Joint Chiefs Chair Mark Milley also told Woodward. In fact, he called Trump “fascist to the core.” 

      Yet Milley’s remarks received vastly less attention than, for example, Trump’s ever-changing “policy” on tariffs—20 percent, 100 percent, more, depending on his whims . Sure, the Milley charge made headlines. But it came and went in a day or two. 

      That’s bad journalism. When the former head of the U.S. Armed Forces says a candidate for president is a threat to democracy, doesn’t that deserve repeated and deep coverage? Has it ever been said of another candidate? Do other top military officials share his view? Why does Milley say this?  

      The media apparently are too busy to investigate. 

      Instead, they’ve devoted vastly more time to Trump’s views on immigration and the economy, validating a candidate who makes up stories, threatens perceived enemies and lies repeatedly. The constant polling pieces and comparisons of the candidates’ policy differences overshadow Trump’s tangible threat to Americans’ freedom. That’s inexcusable. 

      Then there is the limited coverage of Trump’s fundamental mental unfitness. 

      Joe Biden was driven from the race by a debate in which he could not land a coherent argument. At 82, he looked old and tired. Yet Donald Trump, at 78, would be the oldest president to ever start a term. He may be more vibrant physically than Biden. But he is mentally enfeebled, refuses to release medical information and at times seems to border on being unhinged.  

      Take Monday night, Oct. 14, 22 days before the election. 

      Trump held a carefully orchestrated Town Hall in Oaks, Pa. He answered questions from pre-selected attendees. But when two in the crowd fainted, Trump first asked, “would anybody else like to faint?” and then abruptly stopped taking questions. Instead, he stood on stage for nearly 40 minutes vaguely dancing to a wide range of music. 

      What?  

      The Washington Post covered the event under the headline, “Trump Sways and Bobs to Music for 39 Minutes in an Unusual Town Hall.” Unusual? How about bizarre? 

      NPR’s headline was more tepid: “Trump town hall ends with ‘musical fest’ while he stands on stage.” The New York Times didn’t even post a story immediately. When it did, it reported that, “Trump Bobs His Head to Music for 30 Minutes in Odd Town Hall Detour.” Can you imagine the headlines if Biden had done this? 

      By Wednesday, 24 hours later, the story was gone, one more blip in the endless stream of campaign minutiae. Only it wasn’t that by a long shot. 

      In fairness to The Times, their reporters, Peter Baker and Dylan Freedman, did a major Page 1 story Oct. 6 on Trump’s lack of mental fitness. It was headlined, “Trump’s Speeches, increasingly Angry and Rambling, Reignite the Question of Age.” 

      Here is an excerpt:  

      “He rambles, he repeats himself, he roams from thought to thought—some of them hard to understand, some of them unfinished, some of them factually fantastical. He voices outlandish claims that seem to be made up out of whole cloth. He digresses into bizarre tangents about golf, about sharks, about his own “beautiful” body. He relishes “a great day in Louisiana” after spending the day in Georgia. He expresses fear that North Korea is “trying to kill me” when he presumably means Iran. As late as last month, Mr. Trump was still speaking as if he were running against President Biden, five weeks after his withdrawal from the race.” 

      Good stuff. But where are other news outlets? And why did The Times write one front-page article on this topic and move on to articles that normalize Trump under such scintillating policy headlines as “Where Trump and Harris Stand on Immigration.” 

      Even worse is cable news. It doesn’t merely normalize Trump; it salivates over everything he says and does, whether he is the outlet’s hero or villain. As Trump knows, in the end, all publicity is good publicity. And he is getting an inordinate amount of coverage. 

      After this election, researchers undoubtedly will find Trump commanded coverage, even though he says virtually nothing that’s true and offers even less that’s substantive. 

      So, I’m turning off my television. I’ll follow the race’s closing days through such intelligent outlets as Electoral-vote.com, the daily blog/essay of Harvard historian and essayist Heather Cox Richardson, the media columns of Margaret Sullivan, who writes for The Guardian (the British newspaper’s U.S. edition does not have a paywall) and others. And I’ll hope mightily that despite the uneven level of aggressive, honest and serious coverage, Harris and Walz will find a way to win. 

      It could be a lot easier with a better performance of the news.