Sanewashing is the Corporate Political Press Grasping at Relevance

The mainstream press is in denial about its fate under a second Trump administration

Long ago, in The Before Times, I used to listen to The Slate Political Gabfest, a podcast where mildly liberal journalists chatted amiably about the insider strategies of Washington DC politics. You know the format. It’s the standard for every non-Fox Sunday morning political talk show: “why did Senate Republicans do this?” “How will this policy affect Democrats in the midterms?” and similar yadda yadda, world without end, Amen.

Then Trump Happened.

Shortly after that gut punch of an election night, I downloaded the podcast onto my iPod to hear what the Gabfesters made of this electoral catastrophe. How do people whose schtick is collegial banter describe a four-alarm fire? To their credit, they expressed mild concern with this development, but nothing in their tone or message said, “this changes everything; all the rules of politics we thought applied before? They’re all swept away.”

Instead, they spoke as if Trump’s America like the one we had before November 2016: a place where facts mattered, and rules applied. And most of the corporate political media still clings to that illusion. Meanwhile, people who care about living in a functioning democracy ask, “where’s the media’s reckoning with their wildly imbalanced ‘both-sides’ coverage?” “Why won’t they learn from its mistakes in 2016?” and other questions, to which the press bravely replies:

Regardless whether my fellow liberal writers point to click-driven content revenues, right wing pressure, or billionaire owners, they have not been shy about pointing out the base motives and effed-up incentive structures that made the press so unequal to this moment in history.

The America the Corporate Free Press Can’t Imagine

To the alternative media’s large and growing list of Corporate Press failings, I would add one more: failure of imagination. Just as most of us can’t imagine our own deaths, the corporate press can’t imagine an America where they cease to exist, except as a dictator’s bullhorn. They feel secure both-sidesing fascism and democracy because they’re collectively incapable of imagining themselves in the kind of America where telling any other side of any story besides the dictator’s sets you up for a world of hurt. They sanewash Trump’s oddest, most disturbing words and behavior in the name of journalistic impartiality, because they genuinely can’t imagine themselves parroting the autocrat’s pathologies under compulsion.

Yet that’s exactly the sort of America the Corporate Media would find themselves in under a second Trump administration. He has said as much and in this, if little else, we should believe him.