"Horse-race coverage is substance-free journalism that simply recounts which candidate is up and which one is down. That means that in addition to a lack of investigative and accountability journalism, there is also a dearth of in-depth stories on policies and issues. "
https://theintercept.com/2024/08/28/trump-campaign-election-media-coverage-journalists/
This is all the election coverage dished up by the mainstream for-profit news.
CelloDad has a whole different view of the world than I do. This is not about who we are as people: we broadly agree on a large number of things. (Good thing. I mean, we're married).
I've come to the conclusion it's about where we get the news: he reads mostly "mainstream" news, I read a lot outside that box.
And I have found that if you only get the mainstream, for-profit news, you miss out on a lot. A lot of pretty important things.
Sometimes when we talk about current events he will say things that make me go, "Where have you BEEN?"
One glaring example is the way Biden has been portrayed in the for-profit news, the incessant aggressive scrutiny, while Trump gets a free pass on similar things.
And #Project2025. The for-profit news only started covering it after Taraji P. Henson talked about #Project2025 at the BET awards, in July 2024, and it went viral.
The 900-page manifesto was published in April 2023.
Greg Sargent calls it:
If you're going to harp on Biden's mental fitness for office, a true both-sides approach would treat Trump in a similar way. It's just not happening.
Sargent sketches out the ways the press coverage is lacking.
https://newrepublic.com/article/185622/finally-top-journo-erupts-media-ignoring-trumps-mental-state
Rebecca Solnit makes a clear case for urgent improvement:
People don't need horse-race coverage, we need to hear what a second Trump term would look like.
"They pursue the appearance of fairness and balance by treating the true and the false, the normal and the outrageous, as equally valid and by normalizing Republicans, especially Donald Trump, whose gibberish gets translated into English and whose past crimes and present-day lies and threats get glossed over."
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/sep/06/trump-clinton-harris-election
With only two months before the US elections, you can't wait for the for-profit news to re-invent itself.
So the question is: WHO will give us the news the way we need and deserve to get it?
Veracity alone is not enough here. While the Media Bias & Fact Check chart has been a useful guide to ferret out things like outright climate or covid denial, the problems with election coverage right now are less about the facts covered, more about WHAT is covered: the framing.
mediabiasfactcheck.com/
The big question: WHO to trust?
Who will give us the facts and the framing right?
There are lots of writers with worthwhile things to say on Substack, Medium or Daily Kos, but what is their provenance? Whom can you trust?
If you read enough, you learn whom to trust. I've started to pay attention to individual writers. But it's an exhausting path, how many of us have got time and energy for that?
Next best thing: See who is recommended by someone you trust, then read with a critical eye.
Solnit highlights a few larger publications, saying
"the non-profit investigative outfit ProPublica and progressive magazines such as the New Republic and Mother Jones, are doing a lot of the best reporting and commentary."
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/sep/06/trump-clinton-harris-election
There must be equivalent pubs on the conservative side of the spectrum too. But even the high quality Bloomberg and Financial Times never mention Trump's increasing incoherence.
Nobody prints his word salads verbatim.
If you had a food allergy you become an avid reader of ingredients lists. In this election season you need to be allergic to lies, distortions, and unhelpful framing.
Caveat lector.
That said, here is a short list of where I read:
Pubs:
Pro Publica
The New Republic
The Guardian
The Conversation (scientists writing in plain English)
Heatmap.news (climate focused, has election coverage)
Commenters:
Heather Cox Richardson
Will Bunch, Philadelphia Inquirer (non-profit)
Rebecca Solnit
Here is a good example of journalism that focuses on what's AT STAKE in this election.
McKibben quotes Trump at length on climate (not sure if it's verbatim but it's certainly gibberish).
"But it’s gibberish in the service of something very important and very dangerous: doing all that he can to block the energy transition, in America and around the world."
We need to see the stakes spelled out like this, a lot more often.
Here is Heather Digby Parton in Salon (not the mainstream media), using, besides "gibberish", also:
"verbal incontinence"
"blather"
"incomprehensible babble"
- and -
"sounded like a 4th grader giving a book report of a book he didn't read."
But you wouldn't know it if you only read the for-profit mainstream news.
"He has the whole press corps acting as his ghostwriter, sanitizing his babble for the public. "
https://www.salon.com/2024/09/06/donald-incoherence-makes-the-medias-double-standard-hard-to-hide/
Okay this has now made the mainstream news --
in Britain, that is.
‘Desperate’ Trump is ‘hyper-aware’ that he is slipping mentally and making less sense, his biographer says
‘What we’re seeing now is a reflection of someone who’s very troubled and very desperate,’ says Timothy O’Brien, author of TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald
Who's next.
Heather Cox Richardson:
"Trump’s behavior today merits a marker because it feels like a dramatic escalation of the themes we’ve seen for years.
...
Whatever has caused it, Trump seems utterly off his pins, embracing wild conspiracy theories and, as his hopes of winning the election appear to be crumbling, threatening vengeance with a dogged fury that he used to be able to hide. "
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/september-7-2024
Domenico Montanaro at NPR writes of Trump's slips that few other journalists have picked up on:
That lie about immigrants eating dogs and cats:
"Trump got the conspiracy wrong, though, because it was about ducks, not dogs."
!!!!
https://www.npr.org/2024/09/11/g-s1-22023/debate-harris-trump-takeaways
He said "dogs"
Sounds like "ducks".
He's been doing that a lot: substituting words that sound like words he means to say.
Domenico adds:
"The spotlight should now be on Trump’s incoherence and general lack of any serious grasp on policy."
[Satire alert]
Patrick Gathara covers the debate the way the western press would cover politics in authoritarian states. He describes the United States as "a troubled, oil-rich former British colony with a history of political violence" and Trump as "the candidate of the far-white Republican Party, widely thought to be the political wing of white-Christianist militias."
It's like something out of Gary Larson's Far Side.
@CelloMomOnCars It also depends on where you are looking from. For example, the Media Bias and Fact Check chart positions the Financial Times and BBC as "skews left" but in the UK they would probably be seen as "skews right" (I assume the analysts were not from UK).
So it is often useful to get perspective from outside your own country. During the Brexit debate I often preferred non-UK sources.
Then there is the question of where you position the "center"!
Yes, the American center (even before MAGA) is to the right of the UK center, and certainly to the left of the European center.
Think of the way they label Bernie Sanders a "socialist".
@CelloMomOnCars Interesting that the bias chart positions the centre at the peak of the distribution curve. It is as if "centre" is defined by the distribution rather than the ideology and indirectly charts the Overton window.
If centre were to be defined by ideology then we might see that there is a general skew to the right in the media.
I don't know what goes into the left-right positioning.
NYT and WaPo are left of center and not far from the Guardian? Not my experience.
Like I said, the chart is useful as a rough guideline.
@CelloMomOnCars @peterbroks I like to use Ad Fontes Media, but it is skewed.
It shows USN&W and The Economist to the left. Both have always been considered conservative.
@CelloMomOnCars
Plus he hates dogs
@CelloMomOnCars "tribal conflict" in the "ethnostates of sub-Scandinavian Europe" - just perfect!
@CelloMomOnCars this is actually how we talk about the US in Britain. 
@CelloMomOnCars@mastodon I also like Democracy Docket, founded by Marc Elias, for the legal side of election news.
@CelloMomOnCars It is not unlike my own personal journey of finding out who I could trust with climate science. Long story but I had never learned how the academic process worked until years into that journey.
Of course, no one has that kind of time in an election year when decisions must be made based on what we learn from reporting.
This has so many parallels with science:
In science also, the framing is the most important thing, the questions you ask or the problem you set out to solve. Asking the right questions is huge. The rest of the work is the perspiration.
Then once you write the paper it goes through peer review. It's not perfect, but it's still the best we got.
The news + blogs + internet right now is like having to read scientific preprints *without* the peer review. Whew.
@CelloMomOnCars Seeing the Daily Mail (sometimes known as the Daily Racist in the UK) as a middle ground reliable news source makes me think US media is pretty extreme.
I agree, personally I would put the Daily Mail quite a bit more to the right as well as lower in the reliability scale. Their climate coverage is all bunk.
If it's hard to get a estimation on news outlets in your own country, it's a hundred times harder in another country.