Thread by @whstancil

Okay, here's my plea to media organizations, especially the Times:

The major story of this election is Trump's unprecedented efforts to lock in a victory through non-electoral means. It's effectively a coup. Please, please treat this as more important than the hors race.

At this point, no one could possibly have any real doubt that Trump want to at least ATTEMPT some scheme to overturn the election, probably involving mail-in votes and the Supreme Court. He talks about it constantly, and he's not a subtle man.

Even the possibility of such a scheme being attempted is a monumental story: the president of the United States attempting to disrupt democracy in the United States. If it is attempted, it's a much bigger story. And of course, if it succeeds.. that's the end of the Republic.

Consider what it means for you, as a news organization, that this will likely become the major significant story of the election in 40 days. Where do you want to be? What will you wish you'd done in the previous 40 days?

Do you want to be caught by surprise, because you spend the lead-up to the election focusing on ordinary campaign narratives? Or would you rather that you'd met this building crisis with coverage to match the moment - front-page, crisis coverage, hard news, investigations?

Very bluntly, the prominence of political correspondents at news organizations has blinded you. These people struggle to see anything that doesn't fit into a conventional horse race, in the same way sports reporters are sometimes reluctant to discuss "off the field" subjects.

But that's no excuse for missing the biggest story of the 2020 election - potentially one of the biggest stories in US history - while it plays out in plain view. You need to shunt aside your pundits and your campaign writers, if they insist this is all part of the game.

This problem is particularly profound at the Times, which is why it needs to hear this the most. Its clique of political correspondents seems both inordinately powerful and closely connected to the paper's inability to gain perspective on Trump.

I'm begging you: please recognize that we're facing a plot against American democracy. Please give it the wall-to-wall coverage it deserves. Please do not get caught by surprise again, like 2016, because your reporters live in a DC bubble that is unable to take Trump seriously.

One last thing: I know many, many people in media organizations agree with this. They say so privately; some say so publicly. But they need to figure who is powerful in their networks and petition those people directly. It's the only way.

Thank you @nytimes for providing the perfect capstone to my thread

https://twitter.com/jamisonfoser/status/1308933241643003904?s=21

News organizations: take a step back. A sitting US president just threatened election violence and said to “get rid of the ballots.” Figure out why your editing processes decided this wasn’t news. Processes that produce an absurd result are malfunctioning

https://twitter.com/mattgertz/status/1309097166661615619?s=21

It’s not impossible to understand how this happened. Most of your organizations exist in a bubble dominated by political horse race correspondents. That coverage isn’t selected by newsworthiness but focuses on the things your political writers think are likely to move voters.

Notwithstanding that these writers are often very wrong in their predictions (remember how sure they were Clinton would win, etc.), the primacy of punditry also sharply alters the underlying aim of your outlets.

If your entire news organization focuses around the horse race, you are no longer trying to identify the most important stories of the day. Instead, you are elevating stories that you believe (erroneously, often) will have electoral impact.

That’s how Clinton emails gets a full-page spread (“we think this will swing the election”) or violence in Kenosha gets front-page treatment (“we think this will swing the election”) but Trump threatening a coup goes on A15 (“we don’t think this will matter in the election”).

This is often a self-fulfilling prophecy - powerful news organizations choose what people hear about and focus on and therefore what matters politically. But beyond that, it’s a bizarre, inhuman way to view the world. Events don’t only matter if they affect US election results.

Seemingly without realizing it, because of who they elevated in their newsrooms, most of our major news organizations have lost their generalist perspective and become narrow, horse-race focused specialty outlets.

Think “Golf Magazine,” except replace “golf” with “swing states.”

The difference, of course, is that if the president spends months before the election threatening to overturn it, and Golf Magazine decides to talk about golf instead, that’s understandable. But if the New York Times decides to only talk about the horse race, something is broken.