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In our digitally chaotic world, relying on the election-reporting strategies of the past is like bringing the rules of chess to the Thunderdome.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The October 7 rape denialists Finding justice in Palestine Biden’s safe, polite campaign stop in Scranton

New Rules

This past weekend, I was on a panel at the annual conference of the International Symposium on Online Journalism, in beautiful downtown Austin. Several journalists discussed the question: Are we going to get it right this time? Have the media learned their lessons, and are journalists ready for the vertiginous slog of the 2024 campaign?

My answer: only if we realize how profoundly the rules of the game have changed.

Lest we need reminding, this year’s election features a candidate who incited an insurrection, called for terminating sections of the Constitution, was found liable for what a federal judge says was “rape” as it is commonly understood, faces 88 felony charges, and—I’m tempted to add “etcetera” here, but that’s the problem, isn’t it? The volume and enormity of it all is impossible to take in.

The man is neither a riddle nor an enigma. He lays it all out there: his fawning over the world’s authoritarians, his threats to abandon our allies, his contempt for the rule of law, his intention to use the federal government as an instrument of retribution. Journalists must be careful not to give in to what Brian Klaas has called the “Banality of Crazy.” As I’ve written in the past, there have been so many outrages and so many assaults on decency that it’s easy to become numbed by the cascade of awfulness.

The former White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer points out a recent example in his newsletter: On a radio show earlier this month, Donald Trump bizarrely suggested that Joe Biden was high on cocaine when he delivered his energetic State of the Union address. It was a startling moment, yet several major national media outlets did not cover the story.

And when Trump called for the execution of General Mark Milley, it didn’t have nearly the explosive effect it should have. “I had expected every website and all the cable news shows to lead with a story about Trump demanding the execution of the highest military officer in the country,” this magazine’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, told The Washington Post. “If Barack Obama or George W. Bush had done so, I’m sure [the news media] would have been all over it.” (Trump’s threats against Milley came after The Atlantic published a profile of Milley by Goldberg.)

In our digitally chaotic world, relying on the reporting strategies of the past is like bringing the rules of chess to the Thunderdome. There has, of course, been some progress. The major cable networks no longer carry Trump’s rallies live without context, but they still broadcast town-hall meetings and interviews with the former president, which boost ratings. NBC’s abortive decision to hire Ronna McDaniel, a former chair of the Republican National Committee, as a contributor, despite her role in spreading lies about the 2020 election, highlighted the disconnect between this moment and much of the national media.

And then there is the internet. It is certainly possible that richer, more insightful media will emerge from the digital revolution, but we’re obviously not there now. Back in 2016, we worried that social media had become a vector for disinformation and bigotry, but since then, we’ve seen Elon Musk’s extraordinary enshittification of X. In 2016, we worried (too late) about foreign interference and bots. In 2024, we are going to have to contend with deepfakes created by AI.

This year will see some of the best journalism of our lifetime. (You’ll find much of it here in The Atlantic.) But because both the media and their audiences are badly fractured, much of that reporting is siloed off from the voters who need it most. Because millions of Americans are locked in information bubbles, half of the country either won’t see important journalism about the dangers of a second Trump term or won’t believe it.

As Paul Farhi notes in The Atlantic, MAGA-friendly websites have experienced massive drops in traffic, but social media continues to thrive on negativity and providing dopamine hits of anger and fear. And of distraction—last week, the most-liked videos on TikTok about the presidential race included a video of a man singing to Biden and Trump’s visit to a Chick-fil-A.

To put it mildly, the arc of social media does not bend toward Edward R. Murrow–style journalism.

So what’s to be done? I don’t have any easy answers, because I don’t think they exist. Getting it right this time does not mean that journalists need to pull their punches in covering Biden or become slavish defenders of his administration’s policies. In fact, that would only make matters worse. But perhaps we could start with some modest proposals.

First, we should redefine newsworthy. Klaas argues that journalists need to emphasize the magnitude rather than simply the novelty of political events. Trump’s ongoing attacks on democracy may not be new, but they define the stakes of 2024. So although live coverage of Trump rallies without any accompanying analysis remains a spectacularly bad idea, it’s important to neither ignore nor mute the dark message that Trump delivers at every event. As a recent headline in The Guardian put it, “Trump’s Bizarre, Vindictive Incoherence Has to Be Heard in Full to Be Believed.”

Why not relentlessly emphasize the truth, and publish more fact-checked transcripts that highlight his wilder and more unhinged rants? (Emphasizing magnitude is, of course, a tremendous challenge for journalists when the amplification mechanisms of the modern web—that is, social-media algorithms—are set by companies that have proved to be hostile to the distribution of information from reputable news outlets.)

The media challenge will be to emphasize the abnormality of Donald Trump without succumbing to a reactionary ideological tribalism, which would simply drive audiences further into their silos. Put another way: Media outlets will need all the credibility they can muster when they try to sound the alarm that none of this is normal. And it is far more important to get it right than to get it fast, because every lapse will be weaponized.

The commitment to “fairness” should not, however, mean creating false equivalencies or fake balance. (An exaggerated report about Biden’s memory lapses, for example, should not be a bigger story than Trump’s invitation to Vladimir Putin to invade European countries.)

In the age of Trump, it is also important that members of the media not be distracted by theatrics generally. (This includes Trump’s trial drama, the party conventions, and even—as David Frum points out in The Atlantic—the debates.) Relatedly, the stakes are simply too high to wallow in vibes, memes, or an obsessive focus on within-the-margin-of-error polls. Democracy can indeed be crushed by authoritarianism. But it can also be suffocated by the sort of trivia that often dominates social media.

And, finally, the Prime Directive of 2024: Never, ever become numbed by the endless drumbeat of outrages.

Related:

Political analysis needs more witchcraft. Right-wing media are in trouble.

Today’s News

The Senate dismissed the articles of impeachment against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and ruled that they were unconstitutional, ending his trial before it got under way. House Speaker Mike Johnson will proceed with a plan, backed by President Joe Biden, to vote on separate bills to provide aid to Ukraine, Israel, and U.S. allies in the Indo-Pacific. The proposed move has raised criticism from some conservative representatives. Four Columbia University officials, including the president, Nemat Shafik, testified in a congressional committee hearing about student safety, free speech, and anti-Semitism on campus.

Dispatches

The Trump Trials: The first days of the criminal case against Donald Trump have been mundane, even boring—and that’s remarkable, George T. Conway III writes. The Weekly Planet: The cocoa shortage could make chocolate more expensive forever, Yasmin Tayag writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Something Weird Is Happening With Caesar Salads

By Ellen Cushing

On a November evening in Brooklyn, in 2023, I was in trouble (hungry). I ordered a kale Caesar at a place I like. Instead, I got: a tangle of kale, pickled red onion, and “sweet and spicy almonds,” dressed in a thinnish, vaguely savory liquid and topped with a glob of crème fraîche roughly the size and vibe of a golf ball. It was a pretty weird food.

We are living through an age of unchecked Caesar-salad fraud. Putative Caesars are dressed with yogurt or miso or tequila or lemongrass; they are served with zucchini, orange zest, pig ear, kimchi, poached duck egg, roasted fennel, fried chickpeas, buffalo-cauliflower fritters, tōgarashi-dusted rice crackers. They are missing anchovies, or croutons, or even lettuce … Molly Baz is a chef, a cookbook author, and a bit of a Caesar obsessive—she owns a pair of sneakers with “CAE” on one tongue and “SAL” on the other—and she put it succinctly when she told me, “There’s been a lot of liberties taken, for better or for worse.”

Read the full article.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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Interstate 81, southbound, you can’t miss it: Exit 185 PRESIDENT BIDEN EXPRESSWAY. The three-quarter-mile road leads into downtown Scranton, Pennsylvania, birthplace of Joe Biden. Keep going straight and you’ll eventually end up—where else?—on Biden Street. That these namesake roads exist while the president is still alive, let alone still in office, feels odd. But this exact strangeness—forced nostalgia, preemptive memorialization—is the essence of Biden’s 2024 reelection campaign.

Yesterday afternoon, inside the Scranton Cultural Center, Biden sought to remind a few hundred supporters of his lifelong Scranton values. His address coincided with the release of a new campaign ad, titled—wait for it—“Scranton.” The president’s event took place just down the road from his childhood home. Of course he popped by the old place to say hello, with his traveling press corps in tow. Subtlety has never been a Biden virtue.

The hometown crowd wasn’t treated to the booming, bombastic State of the Union version of Biden, but the president still managed to land a few genuine laughs during his 30-minute speech. His savviest moment was a fake-out. Biden appeared to be unspooling one of his trademark failed American-dream stories about a poor man drowning in debt, but it was a setup for a punch line: “I said, ‘I’m sorry, Donald. I can’t help you.’” Mentioning Trump’s name at all, as Biden repeatedly did yesterday, was a notable departure from an earlier period of this campaign season, when both Biden and his allies treated his opponent like Voldemort.

[David Frum: Why Biden should not debate Trump]

Still, an overwhelming sense of safety and caution defined the day—perhaps a fear of messing something up. Biden’s gathering wasn’t a rally so much as a town hall without the questions. He didn’t wax on about the Middle East, or Ukraine, or abortion, or other polarizing issues. He was laser-focused on taxes. Just a few hundred chairs were arranged in a semicircle, and the small-scale optics did not help him. Before Biden took the stage, a misleading image of many empty seats began going viral on social media. In reality, they were all eventually occupied, but there was no arguing that this campaign stop was a fraction of the size of the average Trump event. Yesterday’s energy was tame. It felt more like an early primary event for a minor candidate than a rally by the sitting president.

Many versions of Joe Biden exist, and they often compete against one another. There’s the doddering old man, there’s Dark Brandon, there’s the bighearted consoler, there’s the guy who uses variations of the word fuck under his breath. Biden’s campaign seems to hope that voters will come back around to good old Scranton Joe. This is the Biden who talks about faith, families, factories, and fairness. Millions of voters pine for this Norman Rockwell version of Biden—and of America, in general. Millions of others are demanding that the president plunge into the present moment and engage with Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza. Specifically, a significant portion of Democrats and liberals want Biden to call for a cease-fire and reduce (or eliminate) military aid to Israel. Biden knows this. Yet his campaign is doubling down on kitchen-table issues, such as the tax code.

He seemed most comfortable when operating squarely within the realm of the classic and the domestic. “I am a capitalist,” Biden proclaimed. Still, he occasionally sounded like his old Democratic rival, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. “No billionaire should pay a lower tax rate than a teacher!” he yelled at one point. He scoffed at trickle-down economics and preached about the long-term effects of the child tax credit. All the while, he peppered in sayings from his grandpa, sayings the elder Biden may or may not have ever said.

Many voters don’t want to believe that it’s really going to be Biden and Trump again. And some people still seem surprised that Biden, in particular, is officially seeking a second term. A swath of Democrats dream of him withdrawing before the party’s convention. There is perpetual talk of a younger candidate—namely a governor such as Gavin Newsom, Gretchen Whitmer, or Josh Shapiro, who yesterday served as Biden’s opening act—stepping up to be the Democratic nominee in Biden’s place. All of this seems like West Wing fan fiction. The race is set, and it’s a rematch. (With wild cards like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. promising to make trouble.)

[Read: The RFK Jr. Strategy Clicks Into Focus]

Biden long ago realized the stakes. Now he has to figure out how much to talk about himself and his accomplishments versus warn voters about Trump. “Listen to what he says, because you know he means it,” Biden said. Though he didn’t opt for the 30,000-foot “democracy is on the ballot” message in Scranton, he drew stark comparisons between himself and his rival. “He’s coming for your money, your health care, and your social security,” Biden warned.

Successful political campaigns are also movements. Trump and RFK Jr., for all their flaws, long ago internalized that simple truth. Until recently, Biden has more or less run what his allies referred to as a “Rose Garden campaign.” This week, he’s changing that. Scranton marked Biden’s first of three stops across Pennsylvania; he’s off to Pittsburgh and Philadelphia next. By no accident, the president is traversing a swing state while his Republican rival is glowering inside a Manhattan courtroom. But yesterday’s crowd struck me as a bunch of polite, well-behaved people who knew when to sit quietly with their hands folded, when to laugh, and when to cheer. It did not feel organic.

Just outside the venue’s security perimeter, I spoke with three University of Scranton students who had tried to see Biden and were turned away. One of them, Neveah Wall, a 19-year-old sophomore, told me that this would be her first time voting, and that she was torn between going Democrat or independent. She said she was passionate about prison reform, and that she liked where Kennedy stood on the issue. Her family members would likely vote for Biden. “I think I am pretty much leaning towards RFK,” she said.

It may seem surprising that the Biden campaign would put on an event within walking distance of a university and not try to welcome in as many students as possible. (A 20-something attendee inside the room told me he had been personally invited by a local politician.) Incumbents often go to great lengths to avoid disruptions and control the narrative. In a statement last night, a Biden campaign spokesperson told me, “Members of the public are invited through various methods including local groups and organizations, mass emails to subscribers to the campaign's email list, and by utilizing the voter file, which allows the campaign to target the voters we need to reach.” But new, younger, or first-time voters, such as Neveah Wall, may not even have voter files yet—and, like her, they may end up drawn to another candidate after being denied entry to a Biden event.

Perhaps Biden’s campaign was worried about young people bringing some of the present-day challenges into the room. When the crowd spilled back outside into the street, attendees were met by pro-Palestine protesters chanting “Genocide Joe!” One person held a sign that read I’M VOTIN UNCOMMITTED!

Biden can keep leaning into his roots as an antidote to Trumpism, but it may not be enough. Near the end of his speech, he brought up Trump’s infamous “losers” and “suckers” remark about veterans. “Who the hell does he think he is?” Biden shouted.  He could have used more of this. Scranton Joe—a harmless, affable character—doesn’t necessarily inspire unwavering devotion. Biden has just over six months to find a message that can simultaneously ground him in the present and point toward the future. He can only sell so many tickets as a tribute act playing old hits.