Jane Coaston’s new podcast is up at the NY Times and it’s an interesting discussion about the media featuring two guests. Jay Rosen is a journalism professor at NYU who seems to spend the majority of his time on Twitter. Ross Douthat is a columnist who tries to push back a bit on Rosen’s thesis about what it is the media ought to be doing in 2021 and beyond.

Rosen’s basic idea, at least the one he’s sharing here and in other places recently, is that the Republican party is an authoritarian group that no longer acts like a normal political party and therefore the media is mistaken to cover the GOP the same way it covers the Democratic party, a party he repeatedly says is a “normal” party. Rosen wants the media coverage to reflect that difference but at the same time he claims he doesn’t want them to put their thumb on the scales for Democrats.

Well, I don’t think journalists should put their thumb on the scale for the Democrats because of how bad Donald Trump is. It’s not something that I believe. I’ve never written that. It’s not my point of view. Ross wants to argue against it. But he’s not arguing against anything that I’ve ever said. My starting point is a little different. We have a situation that is unanticipated by the craft of political journalism. Rather than two roughly equal parties fighting it out for advantage, we now have a radical imbalance between the two parties. One is normal. And by normal, I don’t mean angelic or that it has all the answers or it’s the one right way to go, but it’s just a normal party. The Democratic Party looks roughly like what we expect our major parties to be. And the other political party is bowing to an authoritarian mindset and willing to break the election system in half in order to return an authoritarian to power. And my point is not that journalists, as I said, should put their thumb on the scale. It’s rather they have to recognize that the picture of politics on which they base their practices is shattered. And therefore, they have to rethink their practices, in a sense, from the beginning because the premises underneath it have collapsed. We still have, of course, elections between Democrats and Republicans. But increasingly, the conflict that really matters is between those willing to uphold the democratic system and those who are seeking another way. And political journalism is still stuck in this world of two parties, that has vanished from our grasp.

That, in a nutshell is his argument. I personally think it’s pretty incoherent but, unfortunately, Coaston didn’t really challenge him on it at all. Rosen is literally saying two things at once and they don’t jibe at all. On the one hand he’s saying we only have one real party at this point, the Democrats. The other group, which used to be the Republican Party, is now just looking to end democracy as we know it. That’s his premise. And yet, he claims he doesn’t want journalists to put their thumb on the scale between the two.

Really? If the situation is as dire as you’ve described it, why wouldn’t you want journalists to side with democracy, i.e. the Democratic Party?

My own take is that Rosen clearly does want that. The way he’s framed this, he’s really arguing that journalists have a duty to support Democrats. And if you’ve spent any time on Twitter, it’s probably clear to you that Jay Rosen acts as if that’s the case all day, every day. He’s very much a left-leaning partisan who always supports the Democratic Party and never (that I’ve seen) suggests the GOP has a valid point on any issue. Put another way, if he’s a model of how the media ought to cover things, then he wants them to support Democrats 100% of the time without fail.

And contrary to what he claimed in this discussion, you can literally see him trying to put his own thumb on the scale on Twitter. Here’s Rosen just a couple of weeks ago, trying to embarrass left-leaning journalist Sam Stein for tweeting something critical of President Biden:

As this is a good look at your priorities, Sam. https://t.co/kp9i1J7rHl

— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) November 24, 2021

What should Sam Stein’s priorities be? Not criticizing Biden, obviously. Anyone doing that has the wrong priorities. Which probably explains why, when Rosen was pressed by Douthat to explain what he wanted the media to do, he couldn’t really answer.

Douthat: So I just want to know, what is the recalibration for an era where the Republican Party — or at least part of the Republican Party — is not abiding by democratic norms — what else should the media be doing while it’s covering the real problems that Biden is wrestling with? Jay has already said it’s not just a matter of criticizing Trump more, even as he’s somewhat offstage. What is it? What is the recalibration?

Rosen: Well, it begins with a sense of freaking proportion. I mean, Donald Trump is not just a wild and crazy guy who happened to luck into the presidency. He’s, in a sense, systematically un-building American democracy and is preparing for the final stage of that. It’s an autocratic movement that he is heading. And he’s breaking almost every bipartisan norm for how candidates and presidents should behave and attacking the very heart of the democratic system, which is the integrity of the vote. And so it’s not that we should bury bad news about Biden because Trump is so bad. One has to report what’s happening in politics. I think there are tons of legitimate criticisms to be made of Biden, including some from the left as well as from the right. So it’s maintaining some sense of proportion when you have a normal president doing normal things within a normal party and trying to act normally like a leader, and a rogue figure who has, through the political movement that he created, the engine of which is the denial of reality or straight-up lying — the comparison between the two is bizarre. And so I think this is what journalists have to recognize, not that they should be nice towards Biden, but that, when they are critical, they have to set what he’s doing within this larger context, and that’s not always what I see.

Douthat: But I want to know what that means in practice, though. So I’m looking at like looking at the front page of The New York Times, so, as the Omicron variant surges. And let’s say that you have a series of stories about rising Covid cases and Russian saber rattling on the border of Ukraine, and so on, the big stories of right this moment. Is it a question where those stories should somehow find more room to say, all of this is happening in the context of Donald Trump planning to have state legislatures overturn votes that he loses in 2024? Is it in the stories that you need it? Is it that the front page of The New York Times should always have a feature saying, here’s what Donald Trump is doing to undermine democracy? I want to know what the practice is.

Rosen: Well, to some degree, that’s up to journalists, because, when you tell them from the outside what to do, you don’t usually get a very good response…Yeah. But I think one thing we need is a kind of urgency index. That’s the way I would put it. Where starting from the disaster that we can all see coming — this train that we know is going to just wreck us in 2024 if he runs and the election is close, which seems likely. We need some way of knowing how far from that collapse are we. Are we at the 11:59 stage? Do we have a little bit more time? Are things getting better?

So after all of that tap-dancing, the best Rosen can come up with is a Trump-doomsday clock. Yeah, I’m sure having the Washington Post and the NY Times run that on the front pages every day between now and election day in 2024 will really help…No, scratch that, it won’t help anything. It’s just a second-rate progressive meme that probably wouldn’t go viral on Twitter because it’s lame. What Rosen really wants is for already left-leaning journalists to cover the GOP primarily as an imminent threat whose closest analogue is the threat of global thermonuclear war. That’s what he wants.

But, hey, don’t accuse Jay Rosen of wanting reporters to put their thumbs on the scale for Democrats. He’s never said that.