DEADLINE: If Trump runs again, what do you think reporters should keep in mind in covering him just given what happened on January 6?
JONATHAN KARL: I think it’ll be one of the greatest, maybe the greatest challenge ever facing campaign reporters. How do you cover a candidate who is effectively anti-democratic? How do you cover a candidate who is running both against whoever the Democratic candidate is but also running against the very democratic system that makes all of this possible? I think it’s tremendously challenging, because you know that — especially now, more than ever — that he is just saying things that are not true, that are designed to misinform, that are designed to erode credibility and belief in our electoral system. And it’s actually dangerous.
So how do you cover a debate? How do you cover a speech? How do you sit down for long live interviews with him as a candidate? I think these are really difficult questions because he is obviously not a typical candidate. He’s never been a typical candidate, but now he has been demonstrated to be a candidate that is trying to destroy the very system that makes this election possible. And yet we cover campaigns. That’s what we do. It is a very difficult, precarious situation, and I don’t know how it is going to play out, to be honest.
I wish I were confident that the media had learned any lessons from the last go-round but I’m afraid they did not. Right now they are spending vast amounts of time on a “reckoning” over the Steele Dossier which was a minuscule part of the Russia scandal but is now being seen, even by people who know better, as some sort of proof that it was all a hoax. They are doing this to “virtue signal” their credibility but it’s well on its way to turning Trump’s sleazy behavior (remember, he lied and said he had no deals going in Russia when we know he did.) into some kind of hit job by the Democrats.
So, I have my doubts that a new Trump campaign will be covered better. But you can bet we’ll be hearing lots and lots about Biden’s health, Kamala’s spending on cooking pots and the like. You know, in order to be fair n’ balanced. Remember they live on the belief that if they are getting hit by both right and left it means they’re doing their job right. And that is a fallacy.