News media are obsessed with covering former Pres. Donald Trump.

Spectrum

There are mutual obsessions between the news media who cover former President Donald Trump and Donald Trump and the news media.

Both rely on the other and both benefit from the other. The news media makes money off covering Trump and Trump gets unending publicity from the news media, regardless of his activities or misstatements of facts.

This unholy alliance is unhealthy for the true dissemination of news and for our democracy, according to Dr. Michael Bugeja, Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Iowa State University.

While networks like Fox, MSNBC and CNN are singularly focused on Trump’s every move, other news events no longer get covered, says Bugeja.

Instead of news on national and international levels, we get a constant diet of analysis from all political viewpoints, he adds. Analysis and speculations on what might happen next have replaced hard news coverage of truly breaking events.

We also are bereft of local news coverage in many parts of the country, leading to a true news void.

As a result, people have migrated to their own media silos for opinions that match our own and the general public becomes more ignorant about true news and news events.

Bugeja also notes that the news media are ill equipped to cover a possible autocracy if Trump gets elected in November 2024.

In a recent article for Poynter, a think-tank for journalists, Bugeja said:

“Tenets about impartiality and balance do not apply when covering autocracy. Journalists cannot hold a tyrant accountable by framing his viewpoint as one side of a partisan story.”

Many experts, quoted by Bugeja, fear retribution towards journalist if Trump is re-elected and overt attacks being made on the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

He strongly suggests that Americans need to prepare themselves to fight an autocracy by reading and understanding the powers within our Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

For more articles by Dr. Bugeja: https://www.poynter.org/author/michael-bugeja/