Journalists Can't Take a Break Under Biden

Joe Biden is sworn in as the 46th president, Jan. 20, 2021 [AP/Andrew Harnik]

Amid the pomp of yesterday’s inauguration, the new White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, hosted her first briefing. The New York Times noted that the vibe was “extraordinarily normal.” This echoed the resounding cry across Twitter yesterday — that with President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, “boring is the new thrilling.”

The media’s collective relief raises certain questions for journalism, though. Will reporters accustomed to four years of combat with the Trump administration, now faced with a new Biden administration, uphold the same aggressive reporting standards?

Here are four pieces looking ahead to the media’s role under the new administration:

Journalism changed under Trump — will it keep changing under Biden?
Nieman Lab

C.W. Anderson writes that the Trump administration transformed political reporting, formerly a practice “largely driven by elites, written by elites, and consumed by elites.” Now, under a Biden administration, the U.S. media should learn the crucial lesson “that it should always be opposed to political elites, whether Republican or Democrat, and that this oppositional stance also needs to embrace the marginalized and the historically left-out: women, Black and Latinx communities, LGBT and trans people.”

Three ways the media can vanquish the Big Lie that will linger even after Trump is gone
Washington Post

This column by Margaret Sullivan focuses entirely on how journalists can continue to refute the “big lie” that the election was “stolen” from Trump, but some of her strategies can be used to strengthen political reporting during a Biden administration. When reporting on lies, she writes, don’t mince words, don’t give air to sources who deal in bad-faith lies and don’t lean on the impulse to get “both sides” of an issue as a replacement for seeking the truth.

The Resistance’s Breakup With the Media Is at Hand
The Atlantic

McKay Coppins looks back at his career and the careers of journalists like Olivia Nuzzi and Jim Acosta, who gained notoriety and social media supporters for their aggressive reporting on Trump even amid his attacks on the press. However, it’s unclear if these high-profile reporters see themselves as transformed arbiters of the truth, or if they will take the same steadfast approach to covering Biden without the support of a critical public. Nuzzi told Coppins: “There is kind of this temptation to satisfy the resistance with worldview-confirming reporting chum,” and “on a purely social level, I don’t know that reporting critically on Joe Biden will feel as safe for reporters … you’re not going to get ‘yass queen’–ed to death.”

Journalism gets unmasked
Nieman Lab

In this piece, AJ+ presenter Imaeyen Ibanga takes the concept of a potentially “bored” news industry under a Biden administration to task: we are only six months out from 2020’s “so-called ‘racial reckoning,’” and now is the time to learn which journalism groups are committed to structurally changing for the advancement of racial equity in the newsroom now that they’re supposedly no longer consumed by the chaos of a Trump White House. “The biggest challenges in journalism are the same ones the industry has had since its inception — and 2021 will be the year we all learn if journalism actually wants to be better, because it has the time,” she writes. “I hope it does.”