This boring election cycle is a challenge for the media — and they’re failing

“Stupor Tuesday” is mercifully over, and it was, as expected, a snooze. Nikki Haley snuck a win out in Vermont. Some dude named Jason Palmer won the Democratic caucuses in American Samoa.

But by and large, it was a crushing victory for former President Donald Trump on the Republican side and President Joe Biden on the Democratic side. If it wasn’t crystal clear before, it is now — the primary race is over.

And that’s bad news for the corporate media — the cable news outlets, the legacy broadcast networks, the digital and print press — who rely on election cycles for audience building, and the financial boost that comes from them.

I talked to a variety of media insiders, both current and former, about what they’re observing now — and what they expect over the next eight months — as the Acela media tries to drum up some excitement during this boring cycle. And the diagnosis is downright disastrous.

One big roadblock is the elephant in the room: the presence of Donald Trump. “There are tens of millions of Americans, including many who run newsrooms, who think that even though Donald Trump is the frontrunner for the nomination and to win the presidency, he should be covered using different rules,” longtime journalist Mark Halperin, author of the Wide World of News daily newsletter and founder of Concierge Coverage, told me. “I understand intellectually why they feel that way … but it still needs to be a lot more thoughtful than it’s been.”

“He’s inarguably the toughest presidential candidate to cover fairly of all-time,” Halperin said. “But people have to try harder.”

“All he does is take advantage of what he’s correctly identified as the habits of the media,” Jon Klein, former president of CNN and now cofounder of the sports streaming service HANG, told me about Trump. “He plays to it, and they eagerly lap it up and take the bait.”

But the issues extend beyond Trump too — and relate to the “horserace” aspect of the coverage. “You’re doing a disservice defining the election down to frankly its most boring components, instead of looking at what are these guys are going to do about the hugely impactful trends facing us today,” Klein told me.

Halperin describes this sort of coverage as “largely silly,” and that the “less exciting and sexy work” is the kind that informs viewers about what the candidates “are going to do if they get four more years.”

The problem, though, is the traditional legacy media business is dying — either slowly or rapidly, depending on your outlook. The business model is broken. So 2024 needs to get exciting — even if the attempt to get there is artificial and contrived. People I talked to described how the press should accept the boring nature of this election cycle in an effort to win back audience trust — but that was unlikely to happen because of financial demands of the moment.

Klein said news consumers would be much better served if we had a media apparatus that broke away from the geographic power centers that drive the narrative. “What’s always made me cringe is the groupthink that happens on the left and the right,” he told me. “A template gets created, and all the inside Beltway Washington reporters apply it and adhere to it. We fought hard against that at CNN, to get the correspondents to stop trying to impress one another and inform the audience.”

And that was back when Klein ran CNN, from 2004 to 2010 — in a very different media environment. But it’s something I know Klein has been warning about for decades — I interviewed him on Super Tuesday back in 2008, and he told me then that CNN was “more popular than the partisan rants that permeate the airwaves.”

This exemplifies two related but challenging issues. CNN is no longer getting the ratings it once did, even for big political moments. And the channel is still suffering from the hangover effect of a post-Klein Trump Era strategy that pushed away the guardrails, and no longer allowed it to claim the mantle of simply objective news.

There are pathways to authentically exciting political journalism this cycle, but they aren’t along the traditional paths. There are the Trump trials, of course — and the prospect that 2024 is the “Court TV” election, as I’ve written about before. It may still happen, but it’s looking increasingly less likely that the most compelling trials — in D.C., Florida and Georgia — will happen at all before November.

And there’s the very real possibility the Democrats could push out Biden for a younger candidate. Of course, if the corporate press gave this story the weight it deserves, they would draw the ire of the Democratic establishment for potentially helping Trump by shining a light on the legitimate issue of Biden’s mental fitness. When the media starts to make editorial decisions based on what it thinks the reaction will be, that’s when the worst problems of this current era arise.

So for now, we get the muted Super Tuesday coverage this week. And a media that is desperate to find a thread of drama in a cycle where it appears to be in short supply.

Steve Krakauer, a NewsNation contributor, is the author of “Uncovered: How the Media Got Cozy with Power, Abandoned Its Principles, and Lost the People” and editor and host of the Fourth Watch newsletter and podcast.