Boiling Frogs

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Around a year ago, I tried, in this newsletter, to zoom out and take stock of what sort of media moment we were then in, roughly halfway through a hugely consequential year. I concluded that the moment felt muddled. At the time, a variety of right-wing media grifters and conspiracy theorists appeared to be facing long-awaited accountability for blatant lies, leading some observers to conclude that it was a good moment for the truth. And yet mainstream news organizations often seen as guarantors of the truth appeared to be in a state of malaise, too, at least compared with the energy and purpose they exhibited in the early part of Donald Trump’s first term. At a high level, and some excellent work aside, journalists seemed to be fatigued, and to be having a hard time establishing what various huge stories—Trump’s conviction in the New York hush-money case, for instance—actually meant. And Semafor’s Ben Smith had just observed that the media-proprietor class—not least Jeff Bezos, the owner of the Washington Post—seemed to have lost their appetite for confronting the powerful, making slogans like the Post’s “Democracy Dies in Darkness” look, in hindsight, more like marketing ploys than unshakable commitments. 

Reading this newsletter now, it’s hard not to think of the old saw about frogs not noticing that they’re boiling to death as the water slowly heats up around them. Shortly after I wrote, the news cycle at least got some jolts of energy: President Biden performed disastrously at a presidential debate and eventually dropped out of the race; Trump was nearly assassinated, then won reelection. But in other ways—six months into this, another year of huge consequence—what I wrote still seems to resonate. Smith’s point about Bezos, who has become a caricature of Trump-suckuppery, now reads as particularly prescient. (According to the Wall Street Journal, Bezos went so far as to invite Trump to his lavish wedding in Venice last week, though Trump did not attend.) I, for one, still feel fatigued. And various observers seem to think that the frog-boiling metaphor remains apt. “Every day, Leader announces his plans to boil the frog. His campaign slogan was ‘BOIL THAT FROG,’” Amanda Lehr wrote recently for the humor site McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. “All frogs are encouraged to call their representatives every day to request not to be boiled. They’re told their calls are very important. You ask to turn off the stove. You’re told, ‘We can revisit this in four years.’ A panel on TV debates whether the frog is being boiled or merely poached.”

Are we being boiled or poached? To read some recent coverage, it’s easy to reach that conclusion. Stuff that, in the past, would Not Have Been Allowed to Stand, or at least would have been decried as shocking and aberrant, now flows past on the daily news-torrent, sometimes debated from Both Sides by smirking pundits on a TV panel, sometimes not covered much at all. In early June—when Elon Musk and Trump had a big falling-out, to the internet’s general and justified amusement—Brian Stelter, CNN’s media correspondent, performed a useful service by listing all of the assumptions that were “baked into the news coverage and commentary,” without always seeming surprising or being questioned on a fundamental level: that Trump might use the levers of government to punish Musk, that Musk might tweak the X algorithm to amplify criticism of Trump, that the world’s richest man used his wealth to influence an election and now had buyer’s remorse, that of course Musk would accuse Trump of being in the Epstein Files. “A Godzilla vs. Kong–style fight between two of the biggest egos on the planet was the story most people were, in fact, waiting for,” Stelter wrote. “Almost like anticipating the next season of a schlocky reality TV show.” The word “normalization” has been much abused in the Trump era, but this seemed a clear case.

Another example, to my mind, was the frantic news cycle that surrounded the release, last month, of Original Sin, the book in which Jake Tapper, of CNN, and Alex Thompson, of Axios, detailed a “cover-up” of Biden’s decline prior to his disastrous 2024 debate. In many ways, this news cycle was legitimate, even worthwhile. (I was among those who contributed to it.) But the palpable fury that marked some of the coverage of Biden and his inner circle’s conduct was striking to me. Again, some of it was justified—and some of it clearly came from a place of hostility toward Trump (the argument here being that Biden’s selfishness or delusion tanked the effort to keep a dangerous man out of office). But it also seemed to me to reflect a double standard. This is not to say that there hasn’t been, and continues to be, fury about Trump filtering through the news cycle. But during this episode, Biden seems to have been held, quite literally, to a different standard of accountability than Trump. I would ask you to imagine how Biden would have been covered if, say, he had spent his final year in office posting like Trump does every day on Truth Social. But we don’t need hypotheticals—we just need to remember how Trump actually did leave office the last time he held it. Again, there’s been plenty of fury about this in the media. But it now, often, seems like background noise, at best—an inconvenient fact that many in the media seem to see as having been somehow erased by Trump’s fresh electoral mandate. Biden is a conventional politician subject to conventional standards of judgment. Trump is clearly something else.

(This is not a new dynamic, of course. When I was younger and sillier, I liked to tell people that I saw the 2016 presidential contest in terms of walls with shit on them: Hillary Clinton’s wall, at least in conventional-scandal terms, was clean save for a splotch of shit left by Emailgate, which stood out against the wall behind it; Trump’s wall was so covered in shit that it just looked like a brown wall. Last week, I was reading David A. Graham’s newsletter in The Atlantic when he offered a much nicer way of thinking about this, citing a 2021 study that found that “although scandals exact a toll on candidates, multiple scandals don’t hurt them more, because the ‘cognitive load’ required of voters to process additional stories is too great.” Graham was writing not about Trump, but the strong position of Andrew Cuomo heading into New York’s Democratic mayoral primary. Inconveniently for this take, Cuomo lost surprisingly decisively to Zohran Mamdani, the progressive insurgent—though Cuomo appears poised to remain on the ballot for the general election, and may not yet have had his last word. In any case, Trump is on a different level from Cuomo as a media object.) 

I say all this not to damn the media, necessarily. Putting the news in proportion is subjective, and difficult. And Trump makes it that much harder, not least through his much-discussed strategy of “flooding the zone” with unprecedented actions. (Again, this is a nicer metaphor than the “wall of shit” but communicates roughly the same idea.) But that’s not the entirety of what’s going on here: if Trump is flooding the zone, he’s also succeeded in moving the coordinates of the zone; if Trump had behaved in 2017 as he is behaving now, it’s not hard to imagine that the coverage would have been much more vociferously alarmist. Times change, of course, and baselines along with them—it would be bizarre for the news media to operate from permanently static standards of accountability. What made the recent Biden coverage stick out to me, though, was that it showed that things that always used to be outrageous can still be treated as such. The episode also put me in mind of a different frog-related fable, this one from Aesop, that Jill Lepore referenced in The New Yorker in April, about frogs who demand that Zeus send them a king, but are contemptuous when he sends them a passive piece of wood, and so ask for a new king and this time are sent “a water-serpent, which seized them and ate them all up.” It wasn’t necessarily wrong to complain about the inanimate piece of wood. At the same time, the water-serpent king was clearly worse.

This isn’t to say that media coverage must always be vociferously alarmist to communicate proportion—as humans, it’s hard to compute every news story as a five-alarm fire, even if any one of the fires Trump has lighted might have justifiably been covered as such under, say, Biden. A few weeks into Trump’s second term, I wrote in this newsletter about an emerging debate as to whether major news outlets were covering his maneuvers loudly enough, noting that this debate wasn’t necessarily playing out between those alive to the threat of Trump and those complacent about it—as might have been the case in the past—but between those who saw the best way of communicating the threat as being to shout about it, and those who worried that doing so risked rhetorically imbuing Trump with powers that he doesn’t actually have under the Constitution, and thus, however inadvertently, legitimizing his pretensions to be a king (water-serpent or otherwise). While I sympathized with the latter school of thought, one obvious shortcoming was that Trump has often proved that he can do things he shouldn’t be able to and get away with them. One example I cited in that newsletter, Trump’s move to terminate birthright citizenship, came back around last week in a way that, at least to some extent, demonstrated my point, via a Supreme Court ruling that didn’t address the merits of the order, but did significantly curtail the ability of lower courts to block it and others like it, however illegal they might appear.

Nonetheless, I’m finding that the most valuable coverage of this moment is that which fearlessly, but clinically, documents what is happening. I have thought about this preference a lot, and considered that I might just be getting older and losing my edge. And maybe I am. But I also think that when Trump retook office—as soon as he won again, even—we crossed some Rubicon from one moment into another. The point of alarms is that you hear them and get out before the fire burns down your house. The fire is now raging. And there has been a lot of fearless, clinical coverage of it. For all the talk of media cowardice in the face of Trump, my sense is that this is (still!) a problem among the proprietor class much more than in the newsroom. Sure, the coverage hasn’t been uniformly to my liking—and problems of proportionality persist (see above)—but from the outside, I’m not seeing a complacent journalistic corps failing to understand the stakes of this moment. I just wish those had been more universally understood earlier. Around this time last year, say.

Fortunately for us all, the old saw about boiling frogs is a myth. When the water around them gets hot enough, they tend to jump out of it.

Other notable stories
By Jon Allsop

• Last week, Trump and officials in his administration blasted the media for reporting on an early intelligence assessment that cast doubt on the effectiveness of the US strikes on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure last weekend: Trump called for journalists at the New York Times and CNN to be fired, and reportedly threatened to sue both outlets over their coverage; meanwhile, Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, bashed the press at a news conference, including by singling out Jennifer Griffin, a national security correspondent at Fox News, where Hegseth used to work. (Journalists at a range of outlets came to Griffin’s defense.) Elsewhere in Trump’s Washington, Voice of America, the overseas broadcaster that Trump is trying to gut, rescinded mass layoffs that it initiated due to errors in the notices, though it intends to try again soon.

• Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, is suing Fox News for $787 million—the same amount that Fox paid to settle the defamation case brought by Dominion Voting Systems over the network’s coverage of Trumpworld’s 2020 election lies—alleging that Jesse Watters, a Fox host, falsely accused Newsom of lying about his interactions with Trump amid the latter’s militarized response to protests in Los Angeles earlier this month. (Fox described the suit as “frivolous.”) Newsom’s suit also accuses Fox of unfair business practices, echoing suits that Trump has filed against various news outlets. One expert told the Times that the parallels appear to be intentional, arguing that Newsom is looking to “flip the playbook here a little bit.”

• Last year, Germany’s then–interior minister moved to ban Compact, a far-right magazine, and associated entities, on the grounds that they posed a threat to Jews, migrants, and the parliamentary democracy established by the country’s postwar constitution. A court subsequently suspended the ban, however—and last week, it was overturned entirely, with the court ruling that the constitution guarantees freedom of speech “even for the enemies of freedom,” and that Compact’s conduct didn’t meet the high legal bar needed to supersede this principle. (ICYMI, I discussed the ban and related matters with the German media critic Bernhard Poerksen last year.)

• Meanwhile, a court in Australia ruled that the ABC, the country’s public broadcaster, unlawfully fired Antoinette Lattouf, a stand-in host, over a social media post about Gaza in 2023; the ABC had denied any wrongdoing, but the judge accused it of acting out of “panic” amid an “orchestrated campaign” of complaints, and it has now acknowledged making errors. In related news, Usman Khawaja, an Australia cricket star, refused to do a postgame interview with SEN, a sports network, in apparent protest of its decision to fire a journalist who was outspoken about the war in Gaza. 

• And Anna Wintour said last week that she would cease being editor in chief of American Vogue—though she isn’t really going anywhere. The post will be abolished, to be replaced by a new “head of editorial content” reporting directly to Wintour, who will remain the magazine’s global editorial director (and also chief content officer at its parent company, Condé Nast). “This is my all-in moment at the company,” Wintour told staff. “I won’t be moving offices—or a single piece of my Clarice Cliff pottery.”

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