Rikleen is executive director of Lawyers Defending American Democracy and the editor of “ Her Honor – Stories of Challenge and Triumph from Women Judges.”
As we near the end of a tumultuous election season, too many traditional media outlets are inexplicably continuing their practice of covering candidates who meet standards of normalcy differently than the candidate who has long defied them.
By claiming to take the high road of neutrality in their reporting, these major outlets are committing grave harm. First, they are failing to address what is in plain sight. Second, through those continued omissions, the media has abdicated its primary responsibility of contributing to an informed electorate.
The New York Times, for example, has been wandering the campaign wasteland as though its historic influence can override its present abdication of fairness and objective logic. Its coverage of Joe Biden’s age as a major re-election issue went on for years, including the 2022 headline “ At 79, Biden Is Testing the Boundaries of Age and the Presidency,” rich in irony in light of Donald Trump’s age. The relentless scrutiny of Biden’s age continued with sharp coverage of any lapse or stumble and reached a fever pitch following Biden’s poor debate performance in June. The so-called paper of record continued its focus on whether Biden was mentally fit to be president until he withdrew from the race.
In the past months, a different dynamic has been taking place as Trump has demonstrated difficulties articulating coherent thoughts, canceled interviews, failed to directly answer questions in those interviews he has done, increased his threats against opponents, amplified violent rhetoric and sharply intensified his use of profanity. These are behaviors that should cause any legitimate journalist to raise significant questions about the state of his mental health, now mere weeks before the election. Instead, sanitizing has been the order of the day.
At a weekend rally in Pennsylvania, the former president opened his remarks by spending approximately 10 minutes discussing golf legend Arnold Palmer and his penis size, and proceeded to then excoriate the current administration with profanity. The New York Times referenced Trump’s descent into a new level of “vulgarity” with the sub-headline: “ The G.O.P. nominee repeated crude insults, and his supporters relished each moment. ”
The article did not raise questions about whether the former president’s lewd comments addressing another man’s penis size in front of a family audience might have been a sign of declining mental health or possible dementia. Rather, it mused about whether the behavior was either an “expression of his frustration” or his “reflexive desire to entertain his crowds,” and then noted that it set “a curious tone.” Now imagine what the media reaction would be if any other public figure opened a speech with similar comments.
The Hill is a publication that describes itself as reporting on the “intersection of politics and business,” offering “objective and in-depth coverage” that is read by opinion leaders, including in government and the corporate sector. But it is difficult to square that descriptor with its own headlines.
The Hill’s article on Trump’s Arnold Palmer comments began with a headline stating that his “ribald remarks” drew “scrutiny.” Dictionary examples of the word “ribald” are associated with humor and “racy innuendo.” In the context of a campaign rally, this headline is a textbook exemplar of sane-washing. In an interview with the Independent, the golfer’s daughter, in measured understatement, referred to the comments as “an unfortunate way to remember” her dad.
Other Hill headlines from the same day noted that Vice President Kamala Harris has stepped up negative attacks and that she was making a “ last-ditch appeal to disenchanted Republicans.” Both articles described campaign tactics in a vacuum that would be unimaginable in the coverage of past presidential campaigns. As with so many of The Hill’s headlines this election season, the campaign coverage normalizes one party’s irrational behavior while scrutinizing the other’s actions.
And after a week of revelations from retired Gen. John Kelly, who served as Trump's chief of staff, about the former president's fascist tendencies and praise of Hitler, The Hill headlines on Friday touted that Trump’s campaign exudes confidence as it enters the homestretch. It’s the same day the headline for a Harris story highlighted that she sees troubling signs in the latest New York Times/Sienna poll. The referenced poll showed the candidates deadlocked, and the articles did not quote any campaign sources, anonymously or otherwise, to indicate that she was troubled by it.
These examples are only the latest in coverage that has long normalized the former president’s behaviors and abandoned objective standards. But asking questions and insisting that statements threatening the norms and principles of democracy and the rule of law must be reported differently than positions on taxes and tariffs does not demonstrate bias or partisanship.
Journalists have an ethical obligation to accurately and impartially report the truth. Instead, by sanitizing a candidate’s abnormal words and actions, traditional media outlets have created their own biased coverage.
The public not only deserves better — it needs the media to meet this moment and engage in the fight for truth and the accurate reporting of actual facts. Doing so is not partisan engagement; it is the highest calling for journalists.
A deep look at how "All in the Family" remains a striking mirror of American politics, class tensions, and cultural manipulation—proving its relevance decades later.
All in This American Family
There are a few shows that have aged as eerily well as All in the Family.
It’s not just that it’s still funny and has the feel not of a sit-com, but of unpretentious, working-class theatre. It’s that, decades later, it remains one of the clearest windows into the American psyche. Archie Bunker’s living room has been, as it were, a small stage on which the country has been working through the same contradictions, anxieties, and unresolved traumas that still shape our politics today. The manipulation of the working class, the pitting of neighbor against neighbor, the scapegoating of the vulnerable, the quiet cruelties baked into everyday life—all of it is still here with us. We like to reassure ourselves that we’ve progressed since the early 1970s, but watching the show now forces an unsettling recognition: The structural forces that shaped Archie’s world have barely budged. The same tactics of distraction and division deployed by elites back then are still deployed now, except more efficiently, more sleekly.
Archie himself is the perfect vessel for this continuity. He is bigoted, blustery, reactive, but he is also wounded, anxious, and constantly misled by forces above and beyond him. Norman Lear created Archie not as a monster to be hated (Lear’s genius was to make Archie lovable despite his loathsome stands), but as a man trapped by the political economy of his era: A union worker who feels his country slipping away, yet cannot see the hands that are actually moving it. His anger leaks sideways, onto immigrants, women, “hippies,” and anyone with less power than he has. The real villains—the wealthy, the connected, the manufacturers of grievance—remain safely and comfortably offscreen. That’s part of the show’s key insight: It reveals how elites thrive by making sure working people turn their frustrations against each other rather than upward.
Edith, often dismissed as naive or scatterbrained, functions as the show’s quiet moral center. Her compassion exposes the emotional void in Archie’s worldview and, in doing so, highlights the costs of the divisions that powerful interests cultivate. Meanwhile, Mike the “Meathead” represents a generation trying to break free from those divisions but often trapped in its own loud self-righteousness. Their clashes are not just family arguments but collisions between competing visions of America’s future. And those visions, tellingly, have yet to resolve themselves.
The political context of the show only sharpens its relevance. Premiering in 1971, All in the Family emerged during the Nixon years, when the “Silent Majority” strategy was weaponizing racial resentment, cultural panic, and working-class anxiety to cement power. Archie was a fictional embodiment of the very demographic Nixon sought to mobilize and manipulate. The show exposed, often bluntly, how economic insecurity was being rerouted into cultural hostility. Watching the show today, it’s impossible to miss how closely that logic mirrors the present, from right-wing media ecosystems to politicians who openly rely on stoking grievances rather than addressing root causes.
What makes the show unsettling today is that its satire feels less like a relic and more like a mirror. The demagogic impulses it spotlighted have simply found new platforms. The working-class anger it dramatized has been harvested by political operatives who, like their 1970s predecessors, depend on division to maintain power. The very cultural debates that fueled Archie’s tirades — about immigration, gender roles, race, and national identity—are still being used as tools to distract from wealth concentration and political manipulation.
If anything, the divisions are sharper now because the mechanisms of manipulation are more sophisticated, for much has been learned by The Machine. The same emotional raw material Lear mined for comedy is now algorithmically optimized for outrage. The same social fractures that played out around Archie’s kitchen table now play out on a scale he couldn’t have imagined. But the underlying dynamics haven’t changed at all.
That is why All in the Family feels so contemporary. The country Lear dissected never healed or meaningfully evolved: It simply changed wardrobe. The tensions, prejudices, and insecurities remain, not because individuals failed to grow but because the economic and political forces that thrive on division have only become more entrenched. Until we confront the political economy that kept Archie and Michael locked in an endless loop of circular bickering, the show will remain painfully relevant for another fifty years.
Ahmed Bouzid is the co-founder of The True Representation Movement.