Let's not return to normal
We can use what we learned over the last four years to move forward.
American pageantry was in full effect yesterday, and it’s interesting watching the pendulum attempt to swing back to a kind of normalcy.
But perhaps we’d be better off if we didn’t return to ‘normalcy,’ instead create a better path forward.
Watching the Inaugural and all the pomp around it highlights how much of it is created for TV. Yes, the actual event—from the swearing in to the speeches to the backdrop of The Capitol— itself is made-for-tv, but the rest of the day is, too.
On the parade route following the Inauguration, sideline reporters trip over themselves to yell barely coherent questions to the new president.
A CNN reporter: “Can you unite the country?” Well, that’s one way to take your shot.
Or you can go the Al Roker route and ask how it feels to finally have the job you’ve wanted for the last five decades. It feels pretty great, Al. Thanks for asking.
Moving to the evening’s festivities, typically filled with balls and dancing, but because of the pandemic, last night, the spectacle of Bruce and Tom and Jon and John and Katie singing and attempting to lift America in front of the Lincoln Memorial was for the cameras. While Bernie’s meme ricocheted around the digital world, the American story was beamed into living rooms. Normalcy wrapped up in a security blanket of iconography.
(Screen-grab from Katy Perry’s YouTube channel of her singing “Firework” during last night’s festivities)
Of course, normalcy in itself is both a relic of the before times and also what led us down a dark and troubling path.
For example: it was normal for political reporters to cover a White House in superficial ways while attempting to break THE story that would define an era. A briefing room filled with reporters who entered the job because of the hagiography of Woodward and Bernstein; or the Hollywood veneer of The West Wing. Access means everything.
However, the Trump administration took the norms and taboos of everything—including coverage—and the press was batted around like a cat toying with a mouse.
I tuned in to the first press briefing in what seemed like an eternity, as new White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki took the podium and fielded questions from reporters. For a press corp that went four years either battling or being ignored by lying press secretaries, it’s easy to see the excitement engendered by journalists. We asked questions! We got answers! And maybe even truthful ones, too!
For the roughly seven minutes I watched, I heard several questions about former president Trump and unity, including one reporter who followed up his question about whether President Biden will ask Sen. Schumer and Rep. Pelosi to drop the second impeachment as a call for said unity with a question on whether Biden has filed to run in 2024.
The White House press learns nothing.
It’s tempting to hail a return to normalcy for the political press, but we’d be better off taking the lessons (we should have) learned over the last four years and move forward.
The Washington Post’s Margaret Sullivan’s piece today echoes this.
By the end of the Trump administration, the national press was doing things differently, and better. More than in the past, some journalists (certainly not all) were standing up for democracy without embarrassment, without fearing they’d be called partisan. Some had figured out how to present an election not as a mere horserace, but as a question about substance, character and the nation’s future.
But now that the comfortable norms have returned, and the new administration is so much easier for most national journalists to like, the old journalistic norms may return, too.
That would be a shame. The lessons were hard-won. They shouldn’t be forgotten.
Further, it was normal for media companies and corporations to either ignore or perpetuate systemic racism. This norm shouldn’t return.
After the Black Lives Matter movement last summer sparked companies to look inward, we have to continually put pressure on and ask how is corporate America making sure it doesn’t revert back to normal?
In a USA Today column today, Jason Sattler writes:
The business community has tacitly admitted the role it plays in enabling Republican extremism with the various pledges companies have made to stop, at least temporarily, funding candidates who voted against confirming Joe Biden’s victory. But these face-saving gestures are not nearly enough.
The Chamber of Commerce spent over $100 million over the past decade electing Republicans. Even before Trump’s attempted coup, the organization was already trying to figure out how to separate from the GOP.
His solution: instead of returning to normal, where companies hedge their bets by giving to members of both parties, regardless of where members fall on the political spectrum, don’t continue to prop up a party devoted to Trumpism.
But in this moment where conglomerates are actually showing some shame, corporate America has a responsibility to reverse the short-term opportunism that helped lead to Confederate flags in our Capitol, and blood being spilled.
If the interests that help make the GOP possible don’t start correcting the damage they’ve done, they’re just another part of the cancer America needs to remove from our dying democracy.
And as corporate America wrestles with how it’s funded, both tacitly and obviously, Trumpism, media, too, needs to push forward. No more ‘view from nowhere’, no more both sides-ism, no more false equivalencies (e.g. MSNBC is NOT the left equivalent of Fox News).
But also: elevate voices that represent the communities that read, watch your coverage. Create a pipeline of talent that speaks to where the nation is heading, not where it’s been. Create policies that allow reporters and editors to find the closest thing to truth instead of framing political stories as a left vs right construction or a horse-race.
We face many challenges, as an industry and as a society. And while it’s nice to see the engines of our giant ship turn on after four years of gears getting stuck, we’re better off not returning to normal and instead actually make things better.
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Billy Joel, “We Didn’t Start the Fire”
Some interesting links:
For photojournalism:
More Access, More Anxiety: The Job of Photographing Trump (NYT)
For local newspapers:
The fight for the future of America’s local newspapers (FT)
For name-brand media companies’ unions taking a stand:
New Yorker staff to do a 24-hour work stoppage (The New Yorker union)
For aspiring speech writers:
Biden’s Inaugural speech annotated (WSJ)
For how to build a brand when your product is illegal:
Can the Pizza Pusha survive pot legislation? (Curbed)
For media criticism:
The media had a role to play in the rise of Trump. It’s time to hold ourselves accountable. (WaPo)
Tucker Carlson warns viewers they could be targets of “war on white supremacists” (Media Matters)
How Trump beat the press for four years (Press Run)
For Bernie memes:
Bernie Sanders Is Once Again the Star of a Meme (NYT)
For exit interviews:
Trump’s outgoing antitrust enforcer Delrahim explains the government’s push against Big Tech (CNBC)
For Facebook’s biggest test. Or not!
Referring Former President Trump’s Suspension From Facebook to the Oversight Board (Facebook)
I'd like to immediately see attention on things that were problems before Trump but that have been identified with him. Like conditions in holding people trying to emigrate here from Central and South America. They were horrific under Trump but, while better, still terrible under Obama. And yet, there was almost no attention to it. Will we get better coverage of the uglier side of the country's international actions?