The incredible disappearing press secretary — and two telling headlines

First, as you probably know, I’ve been tracking how well Big Journalism has served its public-interest role in the run-up to the extremely important midterm elections. After all, in American democracy is on the line, as I’ve argued here and here.

So, in recent weeks, I’ve been evaluating the coverage through the lens of “not the odds, but the stakes,” as NYU’s Jay Rosen memorably urged. (In other words, don’t cover the horserace. Focus on the consequences.)

The endless stories based on public-opinion polls or prediction markets are “odds” stories. A particularly extreme example, recently, was this story in The Hill, which was not only focused on the horserace but on the deeper meaning of horserace coverage.

“Fox News predicts Democrats will win House in midterms for the first time this cycle.” Very meta, if you like that kind of thing. And also it’s about as “odds”-oriented as it gets. Not what I’ve been looking for.

By contrast, a good examples of “stakes” coverage was in Dan Merica’s “Early Brief” newsletter Monday in the Washington Post. It focused on how home heating oil prices have become a campaign issue in Maine and other cold-weather states. He notes that voters not only blame President Trump for rising oil prices due to the war with Iran, but that the administration “has repeatedly pushed to end the Home Energy Assistance Program, which helps low-income American pay for heating oil.” (I also appreciated that Merica credited and linked to a local paper, The Midcoast Villager, for its strong coverage of this issue.)

In general, “odds” stories continue to proliferate. Stakes stories are far fewer. In fact, they’re hard to find, even downright rare. I liked former Labor Secretary Robert Reich’s recent piece in the Guardian that emphasized Trumpian corruption and affordability as midterms issues.

And I loved historian and author Garrett Graff’s Doomsday Scenario post about ICE’s “Reign of Terror.” He writes:

As we head into the final weeks before the midterm elections — when a lot of decisions about our country’s arc and fate as a democracy will be made individually and collectively across thousands of election races in every corner of the country — it’s important for us to take stock of the reign of Donald Trump and damage to our country.

We’ve already gotten used to a level of fascism, authoritarianism, and corruption that would be unthinkable and shocking to us just a decade ago.

And Graff, whom I admire, and have interviewed several times over the years, writes about the failures of journalism at this moment.

He nails the problem here: “…the media — which is under immense un-ordinary pressures of its own — continues to fail to convey just how un-ordinary these developments and shifts in our daily life. Too often, these stories are covered individually, but not as a pattern.”

Yes, exactly.

The media’s inability (refusal?) to convey the big picture — the pattern — is more than disappointing. It’s outrageous. A failure.

On to the White House mini-drama of last week and the media story accompanying it. It can be entertaining to joke about the amazingly short tenure of Katie Zacharia as Trump’s press secretary. At only five days, it was even shorter than that of Anthony Scaramucci in the last Trump administration. Breaking that record took some doing.

But I’m more interested in how it came about, illustrated by two headlines that seem pretty similar but have a key — and telling — difference.

The first one is from Judd Legum’s excellent Substack, Popular Information, where his research broke the story.

It was straightforward. It went like this: “Trump’s new press secretary, Katie Zacharia, claims she’s a lawyer. Is she?”

Legum was being careful. He had the goods, but was still framing it at this early point as a question. Who knew if she had somehow passed the bar in an obscure location? Caution was appropriate.

Not long after, his reporting was confirmed. Zacharia tried to weasel her way though the question by saying she somehow got her legal credentials in China. But that made no sense, and eventually, it became clear that she had been lying all along. This, in the Trump administration, is not usually a problem — but this was rather extreme, given how often she had touted herself as a lawyer or attorney.

The other one is from the Washington Post. The headline on that early story now reads: “Katie Zacharia calls herself a lawyer. Legal experts aren’t sure.” An earlier version used the term “critics” instead of “legal experts.”

If you start paying attention to headlines with “critics say,” you’ll see it everywhere. And the ever-observant Mark Jacob wrote a post about this on his Stop the Presses newsletter, humorously titled, “News outlets over-rely on the phrase ‘critics say’, this critic says.”

Jacob writes: “It’s a common issue in political journalism — whether to state something as objectively true or put an assertion ‘in someone else’s mouth.’ The problem is when journalists attribute a known fact to ‘critics,’ it diminishes that fact, turning it into mere opinion.”

The Zacharia example isn’t all that bad, since the truth wasn’t entirely nailed down yet. Still, I prefer how Legum handled it.

And there are many worse examples of “critics say” headlines, as Jacob notes, like this doozy from ABC News:

Trump has taken steps to make his campaign promise to seek ‘retribution’ reality, critics say.

Or this one from the AP: “Trump administration lowers fuel economy standards, critics say at a significant environmental cost.”

(Side note: Watch Mark’s talk here with Patrick Healy, a ranking New York Times editor in charge of standards and trust, and do tell me what you think.)

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The Post didn’t do anything awful with its headline, and the story was sound. It’s just an example of something we see far too often — a kind of journalistic safety net that is overused and too convenient. Start noticing it, and it’ll drive you crazy.

I do want to shout out the Post’s recent scoop about all the Republican bigwigs who have contributed millions to Trump’s corrupt ballroom project. The Post — diminished as it is by draconian staff cuts — keeps coming up with these big stories. Like the New York Times, the reporting is often impressive.

But the soft-focus framing we see so often undermines essential reporting work at major news organizations. “Critics say” is only the start. There’s “baseless claims” instead of lies. There’s “bypassing norms” instead of attacking democracy. There’s describing Trump as “freewheeling” instead of unhinged.

Anyway, much praise to Judd Legum, and so long, Katie Zacharia. We hardly knew ye. We’ll remember you by your lies, and by your first press conference which was so fittingly described by Marat Oyvetsky in a Substack note. It “had the atmosphere of a restaurant opening where the chef has just discovered fire is actually hot. She approached the prepared remarks as thought they’d been written by ChatGPT and read through for the very first time. Each sentence seemed like a small preventable tragedy.”

And finally, a sad farewell to Ann Hornaday, the Washington Post’s wonderful and longtime movie critic. She was a dear (and a most delightful) friend. Ann died Sunday night at age 66 after suffering glioblastoma, a form of brain cancer. A gift link to her Post obituary is here. She had just completed work on a book about the film, “All the President’s Men.” The book is tentatively scheduled to be published in 2028. I shared a meal with her last year in New York City, before her diagnosis, when she was at Columbia University doing research for the book. I loved hearing her talk so brilliantly about how it was taking shape, and I look forward to it as one part of her legacy.

Readers, please tell me your mood as we head into the midterm elections, now just two weeks away. Will Americans, in empowering the opposition party, begin to send Trump packing? Critics say they will.

And thank you for being here, with special gratitude to new subscribers and those who have signed up or upgraded as paid subscribers.

 

My background: I am a Lackawanna, NY native who started my career as a summer intern at the Buffalo News, my hometown daily. After years as a reporter and editor, I was named the paper’s first woman editor in chief in 1999, and ran the 200-person newsroom for almost 13 years. Starting in 2012, I served as the first woman “public editor” of the New York Times — an internal media critic and reader representative — and later was the media columnist for the Washington Post. These days, I write here on Substack, as well as for the Guardian US. I’ve also written two books, taught journalism ethics, and won a few awards, including three for defending First Amendment principles.

The purpose of ‘American Crisis’: My aim is to use this newsletter (it started as a podcast in 2023) to push for the kind of journalism we need for our democracy to function — journalism that is accurate, fair, mission-driven and public-spirited. That means that I point out the media’s flaws and failures when necessary.

What I ask of you: Shortly after Trump’s election in November of 2024, I removed the paywall so that everyone could read and comment. I thought it was important in this dire moment and might be helpful. If you are able to subscribe at $50 a year or $8 a month, or upgrade your unpaid subscription, that will help to support this venture — and keep it going for all. Thank you!