Opinion | After Trump shooting, Biden debate, the media is the scapegoat

So the initial headlines were tiptoeing works of lawyerly circumspection. The Post’s early offering: “Trump escorted away after loud noises at Pa. rally.”

Not good enough, countered media critics on X who saw an alleged effort to minimize the event. “Someone tries to assassinate the presumptive GOP candidate for president. And behold, your media,” wrote one poster, citing a few headlines. Thus began yet another round of media-blaming in a summer bursting with this perennial activity. We’ve now reached the point in the United States where no breakdown, no screw-up, no tragedy can be the fault alone of leaders, principals, presidents, CEOs or a sick society. Somewhere, somehow, every single time, there’s an argument or two for media complicity.

And boy, have we ever gotten good at crafting them.

When I first saw the critique of the initial headlines from Butler, I felt sure it would fizzle. People understand that journalists have to confirm things, right? That in all the commotion, all the confusion, it was impossible to discern precisely what just happened? No, they don’t — this particular complaint snowballed into something real: “The immediate headlines from the media tried to ignore the actual story in a way you know they would not have if, God forbid, this were Joe Biden,” said the Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro in a Sunday video. He slammed the Associated Press for writing that Trump was escorted off the stage after “loud noises ring out in the crowd.” “Oh, someone must have sounded an air horn or something,” said Shapiro.

The garbage backlash grew strong enough to require explainers by The Post and Mediaite. “Breaking news events — particularly one as fraught as a live event involving the shooting of a former president — are difficult to cover. Information is fluid and rumors spread fast,” wrote Mediaite’s Aidan McLaughlin.

“Okay, we are watching live,” said CNN host Jessica Dean moments after Trump was swarmed by Secret Service agents at his lectern in Butler. “We do not know what is happening.” With cautious formulations of that sort, news organizations were all but declaring to their audiences: We’ve learned our lesson. Scroll back a decade or so, and you’ll find instances in which journalists were hammered for privileging speed over accuracy in covering tragic events. After the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013, for instance, CNN, the New York Post and others committed a journalism seminar’s worth of errors and misjudgments, for which they sustained a wave of public scorn.

It’s here that the irony seeps in. Burned by criticism of their sloppy ways, the country’s leading outlets embraced caution, for which they’re now getting grilled. Perhaps semi-cautious journalism will thread the needle?

Just last month, a similar scenario materialized. In the aftermath of President Biden’s anemic performance in the June 27 presidential debate, critics ripped the media for not having prepared the public for just this possibility. Yet news organizations such as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal had covered the topic aggressively enough to warrant concerted pushback efforts from the White House.

Whatever: Jill Abramson, former executive editor of the Times, said D.C.’s press corps had “failed in the first duty of journalism: to hold power accountable.”

The debate performance, in any case, touched off yet more coverage of Biden’s age and public miscues, which, in turn, touched off criticisms that the media was going light on Trump. MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, for example, laid out a searing critique on X: “The media giving Donald Trump a complete pass while dissecting Biden’s syntax patterns in radio interviews is something to behold.” Media maven Margaret Sullivan asked in a Guardian column, “The media has been breathlessly attacking Biden. What about Trump?”

The New York Times set out to answer that very question with a multipart editorial outlining Trump’s unfitness for office. The package debuted online on July 11, with the print version slated for the following Sunday. The assassination attempt took place between these two dates, and after the print version was finalized. None of those considerations — common in newspapering — stopped the backlash against the Times, which received a boost from X owner Elon Musk.

Kathleen Kingsbury, head of opinion at the Times, explained the logistics behind publication of the presentation, which included essays on Trump’s character, rhetoric and “disregard” for democracy. But she did say, “We would have changed our plans if we could have.”

On Monday morning, MSNBC did not air its flagship talkfest, “Morning Joe,” with one source telling CNN that the rationale was the possibility of “an inappropriate comment on live television that could be used to assail the program and network as a whole.” The network later denied that explanation, though there’s no denying the logic: Comments both appropriate and inappropriate can be used and are used to assail the network as a whole.

Which brings us to the final bit of ridiculous media griping — the idea that the media inspired Thomas Matthew Crooks to open fire on Trump last Saturday. “On a daily basis, MSNBC tells its audience that Trump is a threat to democracy, an authoritarian in waiting, and a would-be dictator if no one stops him. What did they think would happen?” wrote conservative pundit Erick Erickson in an X post that captures the sentiment of many other right-wing commentators. That sentiment relies on a fantastical supposition about the shooter’s motivations, even as authorities still haven’t determined what they were.

So, no: We won’t halt unflinching coverage of Trump or any other politician. It wasn’t the media, in any case, that attempted to overturn the 2020 presidential election, it isn’t the media that is gearing up to challenge the 2024 election results in case of a Trump loss, and it isn’t the media that is looking to commandeer the federal government. Strong coverage of such schemes can coexist alongside forceful denunciations of last Saturday’s assassination attempt.

Besides, the reflexive and facile supposition that media coverage drove this tragic event grinds against evidence that Americans have been increasingly tuning out the news, especially coverage of politics. Data, in other words, suggests that the American media is a collection of pipsqueaks, an industry struggling for influence, audience and paying customers. In the mind-set of the uber-critic, though, it’s a behemoth capable of rearranging with world with a few devilish keystrokes.