The Line

The day I began writing this newsletter, in October 2018, Donald Trump was the president of the United States, it was the sad Monday morning after a barely processable attack on a house of worship, and the press, I wrote, needed urgently to grapple with “how to report on an intensifying and obvious politics of hate.” Nearly seven years later, it can sometimes feel as if time has stood still—and yet it’s also true that the media landscape has changed enormously since then. I’ll be stepping down as the writer of this newsletter after tomorrow’s edition; I’ll have some more personal reflections to share then. For today’s newsletter, I wanted to look back on those seven years, where we were then, and where we are now.

The current news cycle contains all sorts of echoes from my early years in this space: a government shutdown appears imminent (see this from 2018), Pam Bondi is on Fox talking about James Comey (see this from 2019), Trump just gave breathtakingly irresponsible medical advice (see this from 2020; it really does a number on the lungs). In many ways, though, riffling back through editions from the first Trump presidency feels like reading dispatches from a different planet. Shortly after I started, I wrote about the debate over the media’s hesitation at calling Trump’s messaging “racist,” in a newsletter about a pre-midterms ad claiming an invasion of migrants at the southern border (which I had, to be honest, completely forgotten about); a few months later I wrote—in two consecutive newsletters, to be precise—about the debate as to whether the media should carry Trump live, given his propensity to lie. In the weeks leading up to the presidential election of 2020, I collaborated with Pete Vernon, the former writer of this newsletter, on a detailed accounting of all the pathologies that we’d observed in coverage of Trump. We wrote that his first presidency had seen some very smart work, namechecking influential essays by Adam Serwer and Ta-Nehisi Coates by way of example, but also plenty of “bothsidesism,” credulous hopes of a new presidential “tone,” breathless obsession over tweets, civility policing, judgment of optics over substance, and so on. “The act of bringing together our daily doses of media criticism,” we wrote, painted a clear picture of an industry whose basic rhythms “conspired, time and again, to downplay demagoguery, let Trump and his defenders off the hook, and drain resources and attention from crucial longer-term storylines.”