How Will the News Media Cover the Last Weeks of the Presidential Campaign of 2024?

Last year the Columbia Journalism Review published an article discussing a quantitative examination of the last two months of the coverage of the mid-term election of 2022 by the New York Times and Washington Post. That study's authors found that their front-page stories, at least, almost entirely disregarded questions of policy--what the candidates promise, and what they might do in office--in favor of the palace intrigue and campaign horse-race crapola that the addicts to "showbusiness for ugly people" who staff the media think the general public love as much as they do.

I cannot see how any intelligent person can regard this as anything but an execrable performance on their part.

Will they do any better in 2024?

As it happens, this campaign season has offered much, much more fodder for palace intrigue and horse-race crapola than most, and in spite of the self-important proclamations of the editorial boards about "how much is at stake," they absolutely lived down to my lowest expectations as they made the most of the opportunities it gave them to be on their absolute worst behavior. I see no reason to expect that they will suddenly start acting like the "professionals" they pretend to be where this election is concerned--though of course whatever happens they will congratulate themselves on having did a wonderful job, because that is what they always do.