(Image courtesy of Gayatri Malhotra on Unsplash)

Last Saturday night, President Biden urged Washington journalists assembled at the annual White House Correspondents’ dinner to show what’s at stake in the 2024 presidential race.

I’m sincerely not asking of you to take sides but asking you to rise up to the seriousness of the moment; move past the horserace numbers and the gotcha moments and the distractions, the sideshows that have come to dominate and sensation- — sensationalize our politics; and focus on what’s actually at stake.  I think, in your hearts, you know what’s at stake.  The stakes couldn’t be higher.

In a way, President Biden’s plea is unobjectionable. Political journalists are supposed to describe the policy stakes of any election, not just a presidential one—economically, socially, internationally, and culturally. To avoid the topic would be shallow, irresponsible, and self-defeating—the worst possible trifecta for an industry struggling not only financially but also with its credibility.

Before 2016, the question for Washington journalists was not, “Should we write about the policy stakes of the presidential election?” but rather “How much should we write about policy?” The answer was in dispute.

In the late 1990s, journalist James Fallows ran U.S. News and World Report on the principle that a media outlet should write about little except public policy. Despite being a noble experiment, a policy-only national publication couldn’t beat its two-better known rivals, Time and Newsweek, or please its mercurial owner. The experiment was shuttered.

Which storylines should reporters pursue?

Since 2016, the question has changed. It’s no longer the extent to which journalists should write about policy. It’s which policies should they explore?

On that score, President Biden, naturally, has an answer: they should take sides in the presidential race by describing the threats former President Trump poses to American democracy:

On the third anniversary of January 6th, I went to Valley Forge.  And I said the most urgent question of our time is whether democracy is still — is still the sacred cause of America.  That is the question the American people must answer this year.  And you, the free press, play a critical role in making sure the American people have the information they need to make an informed decision.

The defeated former President has made no secret of his attack on our democracy.  He has said he wants to be a “dictator on day one,” and so much more.

He tells supporters he is their “revenge” and “retribution.”  When in God’s name have you heard another president say something like that?  And he promised a “bloodbath” when he loses again.  We have to take this seriously.

Eight years ago, you could have written off it as just Trump talk.  But no longer.  Not after January 6th.

Some conservatives interpreted President Biden’s plea to mean he was telling them what to do. This is overstated.

What he did was urge reporters to follow his preferred storyline: Mr. Trump’s anti-democratic deeds, most notably his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election culminating in the riot at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Mr. Biden has a point. Reporters should cover Mr. Trump’s anti-democratic and authoritarian streak, although they hardly need encouragement to do so.

The question is, should Trump’s strongman habit be the only issue? What about abortion? What about the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza? What about inflation? What about the Ukraine? What about crime? What about immigration legal and illegal?

Those questions are legitimate. Yet the premise of President Biden’s speech was they weren’t. He wants reporters to act as field agents for his presidential campaign and the DNC.

I don’t believe I’m overstating the case. Reporters should not boil down a U.S. presidential election to one storyline, even one as important as democracy. Conservatives have little faith in the media already, upset as they are, justifiably, about the mainstream press’ effort to minimize news about Hunter Biden’s laptop in 2020 (and tech firms’ efforts to suppress the news) and the Steele dossier in 2016.

You can’t blame President Biden for making his plea Saturday night. He was doing what all presidents do: He worked the refs to get favorable calls. But if reporters accept his advice uncritically, they deserve blame for taking their cues from a politician rather than time-honored standards of fairness, impartiality, and objectivity.

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