The temperature dial, and who controls it

On Sunday night, Ben Smith, the editor of Semafor, introduced his weekly media newsletter with the words “there isn’t always a media angle.” This struck me as a strange thing to write on a weekend when a shooter tried to assassinate Donald Trump and Trump’s allies lined up to blame it on the media and its coverage of his threats to democracy, and Smith quickly appeared to contradict himself. He noted calls from leading politicians, including President Biden, to “lower the temperature” of the national discourse, and added that “you can see journalists trying.” The real-time coverage of the assassination attempt, Smith observed, “was careful to a fault.”

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