Citing a headline in New York Magazine, “Welcome to Kamalot,” an editor at The Deseret News decided in a recent commentary atop the home page that the news media is promoting the new Democrat presidential nominee, Kamala Harris, instead of covering her.

That was weird. I don’t mean the assessment of the coverage.

The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, The New Yorker, The Atlantic et al are “the media” or “the press.”

So what does that make The Deseret News, The Wall Street Journal, FOX News, National Review? The anti-press? Reality shows? The definitive secular voice of God?

The conceit, of course, is that a conservative-minded commentator is somehow different — more accurate, more sincere, while standing apart from the lowly “press” — than a liberal-minded commentator critiquing conservative coverage, barely concealed lip curls and eye rolls as identical as their hairstyles and suits.

There’s nothing remarkable about either in the political press — let’s call that what it is — all intoning from on high. You know what you’re going to get tuning in to FOX or CNN, reading The Journal or The Times.

Pick your preferred Truth, basically. You’d have to read or view broadly if anything approximating reality is what you’re after. But so few of us are after that. There’s the real truth.

People don’t want an unbiased media. They want the media biased their way.

Blowtorch journalism

Last Saturday, the center piece of The Deseret’s home page was an analysis about “grievance journalism” — going for outrage instead of more even-handed coverage.

The commentary focuses largely on punditry about the press: New York Times columnist and author Frank Bruni and his book, “The Age of Grievance” (2024), along with other authors plowing similar themes about the ways journalists have gone wrong.

I have a minor quibble that the essay is more about commentary than news coverage, though the topic is sins in reporting. The author turns to pundits like Sean Hannity for examples as if journalists. Hannity will tell you he’s not a journalist, putting himself more in Rush Limbaugh’s shoes as self-described “entertainer” — cheese food, cherry flavoring, in essence. Limbaugh was honest about that much. Whatever ditto heads fell for, then, was on them.

But the grievances outlined by Bruni in this retelling do fit much of journalism’s failings in practice, left and right: reporting that hews to partisan tropes, magnifies slights, stokes tension, reflexively interprets differences among people as power imbalances, insinuates the worst, features only one part of a story as if the whole.

These pestilences have plagued American journalism from the beginning, though, especially in political coverage and comment.

There’s a part of us that reacts like a herd of cattle to midnight thunder. Reporting that appeals to this powerful force sold papers in the age of Yellow Journalism, and it has only metastasized with the advent of social media. Careers today are made and broken on clicks.

We’re also vulnerable to messaging that supports our instinctual us vs. them, which lies most obviously in the dark heart of cable news.

National outlets of all genres have done best appealing to their audiences — layers of liberalism or conservatism in culture as well as politics — each with a critical mass that community journalism can’t touch.  

The truth becomes secondary in this hierarchy. It’s all about attention now. That or join the news desert. The press has gone TikTok. This is a business decision, actually, though I’m not sure we recognize the empty calories, rage as sugar high, what should be our dollars flowing instead to the likes of Google and Meta free of reinvestment into journalism, a long desiccation.

Fairy tale; horror show

The coverage of the Ballerina Farm offers some useful insight.

Again I turn to the Deseret News, which milked the story for moral understanding after a reporter for The Times of London turned a profile of the family into somewhat of a feminist parable.

Of course the biz hinges on a fairy tale about family and farm life — hard work and a kind of rough bliss with Mormon faith at the center. This has all the charm of “Little House on the Prairie” with modern twists outside Kamas.

The interest for me is how a family makes a farm work in an age when family farms are about as endangered as the local press. Almost no one earns their living from their land this way anymore. They need day jobs, too.

So this family also harvests a rich story about a ballerina and a scion who discover their love for farm life and grow a large family while staying true to their faith. Oh, and the ballerina wins Mrs. American and does well in the Mrs. World pageant, too, eight children in.

The story entrances 10 million or so Instagram followers and about that many on TikTok, along with attracting no end of commentary about why or why not women buy in. It fits right in the seam between tradwife and cat lady, badass boss and bowing to a man’s every whim.

A woman’s proper role in life is a thing, still. A lot of ink and airtime have gone into this after The Times of London hinted at a domineering husband, and the ballerina mom responded that this just isn’t so.  

So what does this have to do with the political press? Nothing. Everything! With the peculiarities of the Electoral College, a close presidential race could well hinge on it.

The family’s Faustian bargain was a world looking on and commentators weighing in. And they’ve done so right in line with Bruni’s list of sins. Or are those just the fault lines that pull us in?

Don Rogers is the editor and publisher of The Park Record. He can be reached at drogers@parkrecord.com or (970) 376-0745.