Skip to main content
Wednesday, November 11, 2026Nov 11
Subscribe
All Sections
Search
More

Kristof: Lessons from the media’s failures in its year with Trump

President-elect Donald Trump, left, and New York Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., right, appear during a meeting with editors and reporters at The New York Times building, Tuesday, Nov. 22, 2016 in New York. (Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times via AP)
President-elect Donald Trump, left, and New York Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., right, appear during a meeting with editors and reporters at The New York Times building, Tuesday, Nov. 22, 2016 in New York. (Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times via AP) President-elect Donald Trump, left, and New York Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., right, appear during a meeting with editors and reporters at The New York Times building, Tuesday, Nov. 22, 2016 in New York. (Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times via AP)

By Nicholas Kristof/New York Times News Service 4 min read

The last year has not been the news media’s finest.

Despite some outstanding coverage, overall we misled many people into thinking that Donald Trump would never win the Republican nomination, let alone the White House. Too often we followed what glittered, didn’t dig hard enough or hold politicians accountable for lies.

In 2008, the three broadcast networks, in their nightly news programs, devoted over the entire year a total of three hours and 40 minutes to issues reporting (defined as independent coverage of election issues, not arising from candidate statements or debates). In 2016, that plummeted to a grand total of just 36 minutes.

ABC and NBC had just nine minutes of issues coverage each; CBS had 18 minutes. So ABC and NBC each had less than one minute of issues coverage per month in 2016.

Those figures come from Andrew Tyndall, whose Tyndall Report monitors the news programs. By Tyndall’s measures, there was zero independent coverage in 2016 on those nightly programs about poverty, climate change or drug addiction.