On January 23, 2024, Business Insider reported how Republican candidate Nikki Haley “bluntly explained” her perspective on the 2024 presidential election to a crowd of supporters: “Most Americans do not want a rematch between Biden and Trump,” Haley stated. “The first party to retire its eighty-year-old candidate is going to be the one who wins.” It wasn’t just GOP hopefuls like Haley who criticized the leading candidates, including President Joe Biden, as “too old.” Numerous polls found that a majority of Americans felt the same.
By February and March, in primaries across the country, Biden was challenged by Democratic voters who voted “uncommitted” in noteworthy numbers (including 29 percent of voters in Hawaii, 19 percent in Minnesota, and around 13 percent in Michigan and North Carolina).
Although Biden’s campaign had been dogged by concerns about his age and mental acuity, the wave of primary voters choosing “uncommitted,” rather than their party’s incumbent leader, registered their disapproval of his administration’s obstinate support for Israel, despite charges of genocide stemming from its brutal military campaign in occupied Gaza. Even as the establishment press has failed to cover Israeli atrocities, Democratic voters continue to cast blank ballots to express disapproval of the Biden Administration’s aversion to interventions that could stop Israel’s war crimes.
Clearly, voter dissatisfaction with the two predominant parties’ candidates stems from more than just their age. But you would not necessarily know this if you only paid attention to establishment press coverage of the presidential campaign’s early days. Across the board, corporate media have done a disservice to the nation and its voters by providing narrow, stereotypical horse race news coverage of the presumptive front-runners, regardless of tepid public support for either of them.
Such coverage exemplifies what Project Censored, where we work, analyzes as “news abuse,” a concept introduced by Peter Phillips in 2002 to describe reporting that obscures or distorts the most important points of otherwise newsworthy stories. Critical analysis of such coverage matters because news abuse often serves to deflect criticism from powerful people and organizations (including governments and corporations), ultimately reinforcing the status quo and existing inequalities and injustices.
Just as citizens vote “none of the above” to indicate their disapproval of the candidates in a voting system, so too an increasing number of Americans have been rejecting the news and opinions provided by the nation’s establishment news outlets. Examining news abuse in election coverage sheds light on the sources of that dissatisfaction and points to some remedies that might repair the damaged relationship between news outlets and the public they allegedly serve. At stake is nothing less than the imperiled status of journalism as one of the institutions that uphold democracy.
As framed by the establishment press, presidential elections have become as formulaic as a Hallmark holiday movie. The countdown to the holidays (or the election) begins earlier every year; the lead characters are presented as predictable stereotypes; and, defying all logic, the plot twists are at once melodramatic and banal.
One of the most fundamental conventions of election coverage is the framing of all developments in terms of winners and losers, as exemplified by the prevalence of horse-race coverage. For example, in April, The Wall Street Journal reported that “Trump leads Biden in six of seven swing states,” which multiple corporate news outlets, including NBC News, The New York Times, and U.S. News & World Report, subsequently re-reported.
As political scientist Thomas Patterson has noted, “The complex nature of the presidential primary system does not sit easily with news values.” Attention to who is ahead—and by how much—fulfills news outlets’ need for stories that are fresh and urgent, at the expense of reporting focused on the issues that, in principle, ought to be decisive for the election’s outcome. When campaign coverage actually does focus on those issues, it is typically through the lens of how they might affect the electoral outcome rather than as newsworthy topics in their own right.
Financial interests also encourage news outlets to emphasize what we call margin of error drama, not only on election night but throughout the primary season. When the horse race is close, margin of error drama helps emphasize an uncertain outcome, which in turn galvanizes the attention of readers and viewers. When one candidate leads the other by a large margin, the margin of error script is adapted to focus on the validity of the polling that projects a landslide—or the legitimacy of the voting process itself when an outcome differs significantly from what previous polling had projected.
Unfortunately, the corporate media’s fixation on margin of error analysis seldom extends to include critical assessments of voter disenfranchisement and systemic efforts, especially by Republican legislators, to limit who is permitted to vote. Nor have corporate news outlets done much, if anything, to inform the public about how political violence, promoted by rightwing extremists, has corrosive effects on political participation. As historian Rick Perlstein has written, “Omitting political violence from political coverage is an abdication of basic journalistic responsibility. Horse-race reporting has its place. But it won’t matter much if the men in the MAGA hats blow up the horse track.”
Framing elections as horse races fits neatly with a second deep flaw in coverage of elections by the establishment press: the corporate news media’s relentless focus on what several media critics, including independent journalists Matt Taibbi and Alan MacLeod, have dubbed “Team Red” versus “Team Blue.” This is a basic example of the power of framing to shape how we (are supposed to) understand news events: With rare exceptions, establishment news coverage treats election campaign issues primarily in terms of partisan (i.e., Republican versus Democrat) politics.
In this frame, national and global events of tremendous significance—such as Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza since October 7—are treated primarily in terms of their impact on the balance of power between the two parties and, during election years, the “electability” of each party’s nominee.
The Team Red/Team Blue news frame also bolsters media slogans that promote each new election cycle as “historic,” “a watershed,” or “unprecedented” in its significance for the fate of democracy, which is “on the ballot.” In 2024, such hyperbole may seem apt, but sheer repetition of this framing, every election cycle, by the establishment press has led many Americans to adopt a “boy who cried wolf” attitude toward these warnings, leading to civic disengagement and voter apathy.
Yet another measure of the power of the Team Red/Team Blue news frame can be found in reporting from establishment news outlets effectively attacking “uncommitted” voters in order to corral and admonish them during the primary process.
Just as every Hallmark holiday movie features a predictable threat to the happiness of its star-crossed couple, so, too, the corporate news media fixates on Russian influence debasing the integrity of the U.S. electoral process. It’s almost as if the Hallmark script has been mashed up with the plot of a zombie apocalypse movie. Russiagate, or Russian interference in the 2016 election, is the electoral bogeyman that seemingly cannot be dispatched. The past is prologue, and the United States has a storied history of casting Russia as a stand-in threat to American democracy.
Corporate media have done a disservice to the nation and its voters by providing narrow, stereotypical horse-race news coverage of the presumptive front-runners, regardless of tepid public support for either of them.
As if channeling the ghost of Joe McCarthy, rabid anti-communist U.S. Senator from Wisconsin, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and their corporate media proxies (such as MSNBC) have once again tapped their go-to villains, Vladimir Putin and anonymous Russian hackers, to suppress domestic political debate and discourse around key campaign issues. Even ostensibly progressive commentators—such as Rachel Maddow, for whom Russia has been a persistent source of distress (and ratings), and Thom Hartmann—have helped revive the Russiagate specter in 2024. Their concerns sidestep carefully researched investigations, including Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics by Harvard University’s Yochai Benkler and colleagues and Jeff Gerth’s report for the Columbia Journalism Review, which reveal Russiagate as a phantasm.
As Project Censored has reported, the “litany of false or baseless” Russiagate stories promoted by legacy news media include, but are not limited to, Russia putting a bounty on U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan, the fact-checking organization PropOrNot identifying hundreds of websites as controlled by Russia, and claims that seventeen U.S. intelligence agencies concluded cyberattacks in 2016 originated from the “highest levels of the Kremlin.”
This is not to say Russia made no efforts to interfere in U.S. elections—which the United States has itself done in other countries, more than eighty times, from 1946 to 2000—but that there was little to no discernible impact of alleged Russian efforts on the results of any recent U.S. election. As journalists from The Intercept, Truthdig, Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, Rolling Stone, and other independent outlets documented, “corporate media coverage of Russiagate has created a two-headed monster of propaganda and censorship.”
Although corporate media should be held accountable for failing to provide election coverage that serves the public interest, responsibility for “none of the above” votes in the 2024 presidential election also traces back to public doubt about the electoral process itself, including the corrosive influence of dark money and the shady dealings of the DNC and its Republican counterpart.
As Project Censored previously reported, during the 2016 presidential election, the DNC candidly expressed its right to choose the candidate, regardless of how Democrats voted in the primaries. A DNC attorney asserted the committee’s right to withdraw “into back rooms like they used to and smoke cigars and pick the candidate that way.” Bruce Spiva, the DNC attorney, said, “That’s not the way it was done. But they could have. And that would have also been their right.”
Since 1987 the Commission on Presidential Debates, a private nonprofit corporation created by the Republican and Democratic parties, has sponsored presidential debates and implemented debate contracts, with the effect of marginalizing or altogether excluding third-party candidates. The establishment media have followed suit, seldom providing meaningful airtime to anyone but the Republican and Democratic contenders.
By contrast, for more than a decade, Pacifica’s news program Democracy Now! has been notable for hosting expanded, live-broadcast debates that include third-party candidates. News programs like Democracy Now! should not be outliers but rather the norm for major media outlets, which conventionally cannot be bothered to promote political plurality in the public interest. This further illustrates the importance of the independent press.
Declaring “none of the above” in an election between two flawed candidates poses genuine challenges for democracy. We may have limited options for presidential candidates, but we have an ample supply of good choices when it comes to independent journalism that actually serves the public interest.
Not all news outlets prop up dead-end candidates, even when they’re historically unpopular. That approach to election coverage is the domain of corporate news media. Independent news outlets highlight the stakes rather than the odds during election campaigns, providing news that serves the public interest.
But too many Americans, especially those who identify as politically disengaged, continue to turn to the same old news sources or pay no attention to any substantive news. “News snacking” and the misperception that any important news will find us via our social media apps have pernicious consequences for political engagement and people’s estimates of how well informed they are, as Project Censored has warned elsewhere. Far too many people have convinced themselves that their individual opinions, because they are strongly held, carry the same weight as analysis by others who have studied the problems we have faced for decades.
Becoming more critically media literate, expanding our sources of news, and committing to support trustworthy news sources can help create a broader, deeper public understanding of our fractured, perilous political landscape. These practices will also help cultivate our capacity for more meaningful civic engagement.