I was going to write something a little lighter for Labor Day, but this is getting worse and worse: Major media outlets are now openly in the tank for Trump.

I had hoped that our august media outlets like The Paper of Record, The New York Times, would have learned to listen to critics and adjust their coverage, but then again they do have a long history of kid-gloving dictators. I am going to pile on the Times a little, building a bit on my past writing about their failures covering Trump.

Interestingly enough, one of the best criticism of this type of coverage has come in-house, via Times columnist Jamelle Bouie.

Once again @jbouie gives a fundamental lesson in journalism pic.twitter.com/bCA8xSII7F

— Jeff (Gutenberg Parenthesis) Jarvis (@jeffjarvis) September 2, 2024

Bouie really drives home the point here, and it’s MADDENING. First off, Trump is spouting off the most unhinged claims you can imagine, that schools are forcing kids to have transitional gender surgery. This is “Grandpa’s having a mental health episode at the diner” level stuff. Secondly, it’s like he’s lost the ability to talk sensibly about anything for more than a few seconds. And this isn’t a new thing—it’s gotten noticeably worse since 2020. It’s very easy to see.

Of course, just five weeks ago, the fact that a major party candidate’s obvious physical and mental decline might be linked to his age was the biggest issue in the 2024 race. That was when the target was Biden. Now? It’s like it never existed in the first place. The media elite has almost completely dropped it. Well, except for Bouie, who’s pointing out that they’ve dropped it. And by the way, would anyone be surprised if the Times drops Bouie, making some lame claim that they were disappointed in his writing or something like that?

How does this even make sense? It’s hard to shake the feeling that the usual rules of journalism just don’t apply to Trump, or that the people running these media outlets either want Trump to win or simply don’t care if he does, because his political drama is making them money. Or perhaps the tax bracket of the upper administration at these outlets.

Then there were two opinion pieces over the past week that can best be described as laughably detached from any sort of reality. First off, we have Bret Stephens, aka BretBug, who came out with a column that’s an example of what many of us expected: the loud demands from the media that Harris interviews with them would not stop them from criticizing her about doing interview. Behold:

That headline/image combo is a journalistic choice.

Then there was this Nicholas Kristof piece, which gave us Democrats stern lecture number 244,317 since 2015 that we need to stop being so darn mean to the poor little Trump supporters who are, wait for it, just upset about the economy. Listen, Nick, that ship sailed a very very long time ago, so long it’s arrived at its destination and has been in dry dock for years now. In keeping with tradition, Trump’s universe made any defense of them instantly look like the game of a sucker. You might have heard that one of them attacked Kristof’s colleagues at a Trump rally in Johnstown, PA, and thankfully, a CBS News SECURITY MEMBER stopped him. That’s right…the media needs their own security at Trump rallies.

Also, the Arlington National Cemetery employee who the Trump team literally pushed aside has declined to pursue that incident any further. The reason? Because she was worried about retaliation from Trumpers.

So, the New York Times can fuck right off with that nonsense and until they publish pieces about how the targets of Trump and his supporters feel, we do not need to listen to anything they have to say about civility.

Regarding the Arlington National Cemetery scandal, Trump got what he wanted when he planned this fake event. The media would fumble the coverage of it, with lots of “people said” and “it is not clear” statements, stressing that families of fallen soldiers invited Trump. So was assaulting a female Arlington employee and disrespecting fallen veterans by shooting video and photos in a restricted area a bad thing? Who knows, says our media. This is a must-read about how grotesque it is from a Columbia Journalism Review writer who is also a vet.

I’ll finish with another reading recommendation: Margaret Sullivan of The Guardian, a former New York Times public editor who has done fantastic work criticizing this media malpractice, has a great piece on her substack about another former New York Times writer, James Risen, who is also alarmed about the turn the Times has taken. It is becoming near-impossible to deny this turn the Times and other prestige media outlets have taken, and not see how they are in the tank for Trump.

The last word goes to Paramore.