If there’s a revolution, will we hear about it?

“The revolution will not be televised.”
— Gil Scott-Heron

And, it turns out, it may not get much coverage on your favorite news site, either.

Margaret Sullivan, the estimable columnist for the Washington Post, wondered in a recent column about the paucity of coverage of a memo written by a legal adviser to Donald Trump to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

She wrote:

“For the most part, the memo slipped past the public — just another piece of flotsam from the wreckage of American society, drifting by unnoticed.

“Why wasn’t the Eastman memo treated as what it is: a flashing red alert, signaling that Trump’s allies were (and almost certainly still are) plotting the end of free and fair elections in America?

“Here’s one theory:

“‘Trump and his ilk have flooded the zone with so many attacks on democracy that it’s paradoxically become less likely for journalists to focus on any specific case,’ said Matthew Gertz, senior fellow at Media Matters.

“But the former and current network executives I spoke with offered a different view — and largely agreed with decisions to downplay the memo.

“For Tom Bettag, the document landed in his ‘shocked but not surprised’ category. A former executive producer for ‘CBS Evening News’ with stints at three other networks who now teaches at the University of Maryland, Bettag saw the story as merely ‘an unknown lawyer, who says he’s on the Trump legal team and had said Kamala Harris was not a citizen, wrote a crazy memo.’

“He echoed the view of one network representative who told me: ‘After all, it didn’t happen.’”

“It didn’t happen” has a certain sulky teenager logic to it, but never mind that. What if it had happened? What would the coverage have looked like?

• “In a surprise, Trump allies use untested procedure to extend his term” — The New York Times
• “Pelosi under fire from progressives, centrists over next electoral steps” — The Washington Post
• “AOC vs. MTG — this round goes to Georgia firebrand” — Politico

These imagined headlines may be fanciful, but the reluctance of news organizations to take on the big picture is not. Reporters and editors focus on what’s new today — not compared with the sweep of history, the past year, or even sometimes the past week, but compared with yesterday or an hour ago.

Some sober analysts warn that democratic principles have eroded in the United States. While those warnings are showing up in some opinion columns, they are not baked into daily news coverage on television or the web.

The experience of the past decade suggests we would not see a single defining moment with accompanying headlines confirming our democratic norms damaged beyond repair, if it were to come to that. Rather, it would be unacknowledged: another incremental story detailing another political squabble.

That outcome might not seem the most likely, but consider parts of the U.S. Constitution that already have become quaint, operationally speaking — something we paper over with verbiage:

• The power to declare war is in the hands of the Congress, but the country has committed lives and treasure to military actions over the past 60 years without such a declaration — supported instead by legislative actions to do little more than signal Congress won’t object to whatever the president decides.
• Congress holds the power of the purse, and has elaborate procedures to fund the huge enterprise that is the U.S. government: a budget resolution to provide a framework, appropriations bills that supply the money, and authorizations with the legal foundation for programs that receive funding. It’s a process more honored in its breach in recent years.
• Then there’s the Senate. Congress often has had a Rube Goldberg-esque quality — the very nature of democracy — which some of us find almost inspiring. But now there are senators using the intricate mechanisms of legislating to hamstring the Senate itself, making a mockery of the institution and threatening the democratic future of the country.
• Meanwhile, the Supreme Court heads into a new term with a disquieting propensity to treat precedents as, well, not precedents. The tell: justices are giving speeches warning Americans not to view the court as a gang of partisan hacks. (“It’s not us — it’s you.”)

These are large cracks in our democratic foundation. Whether you agree or disagree with these developments, surely, whatever the Constitution’s architects had in mind, they weren’t thinking, “Well, if it’s hard, don’t bother with this part.”

While the press alludes to these fundamental problems in passing or in snark, it does not center its coverage around them, or around the trends that produced them. Rather, when the press hears the expression “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic,” it races to cover who’s getting a good seat.

It’s not clear if we’re on the Titanic or just enduring the kind of rough seas we’ve experienced during other challenging times, times we weathered and came out with our democracy intact, if battered.

But one thing is clear: We probably won’t find the answer in daily news coverage.