Were they deliberately deceiving their audiences, or themselves?
Were they deliberately deceiving their audiences, or themselves?
M uch of what passes today for news analysis is anything but.
Let’s take a recent example: the legal discourse surrounding Colorado’s efforts to remove former President Donald Trump from the state’s ballot.
When the Supreme Court weighed in on the matter last week, ruling unanimously in Trump v. Anderson that Colorado lacked the legal authority to do so, the 9–0 decision must have shocked casual news consumers. After all, the legal “experts” had assured them that the Colorado supreme court’s decision to bar Trump from the ballot was legally sound.
If, for example, the casual viewer had watched CNN in December 2023, he probably saw former federal judge Michael Luttig assert that Colorado’s case against the former president “was a straightforward application of the 14th Amendment in plain terms.”
In an interview published that same month by Politico, Luttig was adamant: “I’m always exceedingly careful with my word choice in public on profound matters of great importance. What I have said is that I am confident that the Supreme Court would affirm [the] decision based upon the objective law, which in this instance is Section 3 of the 14th amendment. Which is to say that I know that the Colorado Supreme Court decision is unassailable in every single respect under the Constitution of the United States.”
Frequent NBC News guest and unofficial White House legal adviser Laurence Tribe was in full agreement that Colorado’s decision was “unassailable.”
If the casual consumer had watched PBS in December, he probably heard former acting U.S. solicitor general Neal Katyal claim that Colorado “did get it right.”
“That is,” he added, “after all, what the 14th Amendment to our Constitution added in 1868 says. And people like me kind of would much prefer to beat Trump at the ballot box. But our founders did have this absolute constitutional requirement that you can’t be an insurrectionist, just like you have to be 35 years old and a natural-born citizen.”
MSNBC and CNN legal analyst Tristan Snell also argued that any “state or local official can reject Trump as constitutionally disqualified from office, under the 14th Amendment. It does not require Congress. It does not require a lawsuit. Trump has already been disqualified. Automatically. Colorado just recognized the obvious.”
Then came the Supreme Court’s ruling. The expert legal analysis didn’t even come close to matching the result — not even by a little bit. The Supreme Court — in an opinion that united Justices Clarence Thomas and Sonia Sotomayor — held that Colorado had badly overstepped its legal authority.
What a disaster for “expertise” and “news analysis,” both of which failed to keep news audiences reasonably well informed.
The experts were so wrong, in fact, that one wonders whether there was an intentional effort to mislead or deceive. Or could it be that, rather than deceiving audiences, these pundits were engaged in self-deception, speculating wildly about the world they want to live in but not describing the one in which they do? Or perhaps their intent was merely to tell viewers what they suspected viewers wanted to hear. Perhaps this was all a business decision. Who cares about the merits of Colorado’s case against Trump? Our viewers would like the case to be legally solid and, dammit, that’s what we’ll tell them.
The media and expertise faceplant last week is reminiscent of the bug-eyed “Russian collusion” news analysis of the Trump era, when so many pundits beclowned themselves with bold predictions for a story that ultimately went nowhere. It’s also worth noting that the Colorado ballot case is similar to the collusion coverage in that the chief motivation underlying much of the analysis appeared to be a desire to punish or expose Trump, to bring him down. Did this desire supersede good judgment and solid analysis?
So which is it: Were the experts really this wrong on the merits of the Colorado court decision (as they were wrong about “collusion”), were they lying to others or themselves, or were they merely playing to their particular audience’s desires?
If the answer is that these experts and their hosting news organizations were merely feeding their viewers’ appetites, then why are we still referring to these companies as newsrooms? Promoting what viewers want to hear, as opposed to the facts or the likelihood of how a story will turn out, isn’t journalism. It’s entertainment. See: Fox News hosts who played footsie with 2020 election trutherism.
It’s okay if Laurence Tribe and MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow want to tease their audiences and tantalize them with tales from an alternate universe. It’s entertaining, sure, and it’s probably even a little therapeutic.
Call it partisan therapy. Call it crisis communications. Just don’t call it news analysis.