Look at that mess. That’s not some blog post written by me after a few drinks at 2 in the morning. It’s the NY Times! For reasons that are obscure they, and much of the mainstream media, is engaged in insane gymnastics trying to keep from accurately describing Donald Trump’s disintegration. It’s profound and it’s alarming.
Media critic Margaret Sullivan has a newsletter aptly called American Crisis in which she addresses the problem. She names former Timesman James Risen as one of the journalists she most respects (I agree!) and relays a communication she received from him this week:
“At first, I thought this was a parody,” Risen told me. Unfortunately, it wasn’t. Even more unfortunately, the lack of judgment it displays is all too common in the Times and throughout Big Journalism as mainstream media covers Donald Trump’s campaign for president.
“Harris and Trump Have Housing Ideas. Economists Have Doubts,” is the headline of the story he was angered by. If you pay attention to epidemic of “false equivalence” in the media — equalizing the unequal for the sake of looking fair — you might have had a sense of what was coming.
The story takes seriously Trump’s plan for the mass deportation of immigrants as part of his supposed “affordable housing” agenda.
Here’s some both-sidesing for you, as the paper of record describes Harris’s tax cuts to spur construction and grants to first-time home buyers, and Trump’s deportation scheme.
“Their two visions of how to solve America’s affordable housing shortage have little in common …But they do share one quality: Both have drawn skepticism from outside economists.” The story notes that experts are particularly skeptical about Trump’s idea, but the story’s framing and its headline certainly equate the two.
There’s only one reason I disagree with Risen’s reaction. He wrote: “This story is unbelievable.”
I wish.
Yeah, I think most of us were appalled. I know I was.
Sullivan has many thoughts about all this, all of which are worth contemplating.
She rightly observes that the Times is still immensely influential and does a lot of excellent work but it’s politics coverage “often seems broken and cluess — or even blatantly pro-Trump.”
At the same time, when Trump does something even more outrageous than usual, the mainstream press can’t seem to give it the right emphasis. Last week, NPR broke the news that Trump and his campaign staff apparently violated federal law — and every norm of decency — by trying to film a campaign video at Arlington National Cemetery and getting into a scuffle with a dutiful cemetery employee.
Of course, the story got picked up elsewhere and got significant attention. But did it get the huge and sustained treatment that — let’s just say — Hillary Clinton’s email practices did in 2016? Definitely not, as a former Marine, Ben Kesling, wrote in Columbia Journalism Review:
“Lumped together, the reporting this week left readers and listeners, especially with no knowledge of the military, at a loss to understand what actually happened — and crucially, why it mattered so much. The Trump campaign had successfully muddied the waters by alleging that the photographer had been invited to the event by family members of soldiers buried there.”
It came off, he wrote, “like a bureaucratic mix-up or some tedious violation of protocol,” not a deeply disrespectful moral failure, which it surely was. “The sacred had been profaned.”
And needless, to say, everyone knew that had Kamala Harris pulled a similar stunt it would have been screaming headlines for days. Trump gets a pass because well, he’s Trump. And his fans all love whatever sick, disgusting move he makes so there must be something right about it.
She notes that this has been going on for 10 long years now and has been the subject of endless criticism, to no avail. Nothing has changed.
And what’s more — what’s worse — they don’t seem to want to change. Editors and reporters, with a few exceptions, really don’t see the problem as they normalize Trump. Nor do they appear to listen to valid criticism. They may not even be aware of it, or may think, “well, when both sides are mad at us, we must be doing it right.” Maybe they simply fear being labeled liberal.
If you’re not on social media you don’t see just how defensive the elite media are to any form of criticism. Nobody is more thin-skinned and they don’t hesitate to show it. And it isn’t just the Times.
In the past I have felt most of the malpractice was unfair reporting of the Democratic candidate. And that’s certainly happening now. For instance:
It’s an opinion piece, but the headline and that picture were certainly a choice.
However, what I’m seeing that’s slightly different these days is in the Trump news coverage which has gotten exponentially worse. They are actively covering for him in ways that I haven’t seen them do before. During most of this unfortunate era, they’ve have at least attempted to present him somewhat realistically, even if it added up to “there he goes again.” Now it seems that they’re looking for ways to excuse, downplay, obfuscate what’s going on with him. They have completely capitulated to the normalization of his unfitness and his party’s march toward authoritarianism.
There are excellent reporters at the Times and all the elite media organizations. They need to do some soul searching and start asking some serious questions of their editorial leadership.