46 United States The EconomistSeptember 14th 2019
N
otwithstanding thehelp he got from fake news reports, Do-
nald Trump probably owes his presidency more to the tradi-
tional kind. Only a small minority of voters absorbed made-up ac-
counts of Hillary Clinton’s endorsement by Islamic State,
lesbianism and links to a child-sex ring. Yet most were subject, in-
directly or directly, to an incessant drumbeat of negative reporting
by mainstream outlets such as the New York Times, Washington
Postand network news channels on the Democratic candidate’s
wooden public speaking and the largely confected scandals she
was said to be embroiled in.
In a multi-part study of the media’s role in the election, Thomas
Patterson of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government found that
Mrs Clinton’s use of a private email account at the State Depart-
ment, among lesser supposed scandals, received four times as
much coverage as Mr Trump’s alleged record of harassing women.
That unrelenting focus opened the gates for Mr Trump’s wilder at-
tacks on his opponent. It also helped persuade many voters, who
had initially balked at the Republican’s character, that the two can-
didates were comparably flawed. “If everything and everyone is
portrayed negatively, there’s a levelling effect that opens the door
to charlatans,” wrote Mr Patterson.
Could history be about to repeat itself? Hostile coverage of Joe
Biden’s presidential campaign suggests it might. The septuagenar-
ian former vice-president is increasingly coming across in the
same mainstream outlets as outdated, forgetful and sloppy with
the truth. The question of his relative fitness for Mr Trump’s office,
by contrast, has rarely surfaced. Last month an inaccurate account
Mr Biden gave of a conversation with a war hero—in which he con-
flated exchanges with two different medal-winners, mashing up
their heroism—made the Washington Post’s front page. Meanwhile
the paper consigned to page ten the president’s use of a crudely
doctored government map to try to justify his false and apparently
politically motivated insistence that Alabama lay in the path of a
hurricane. Such coverage will exacerbate an existing argument
among left-leaning journalists and academics over whether Amer-
ica’s mainstream journalistic traditions, which strive for non-par-
tisanship and balance, can handle such an unconventional figure
as Mr Trump.It was evident in the leaked transcript of a meeting of the New
York Timesnewsroom last month, in which the paper’s executive
editor, Dean Baquet, fielded criticism from reporters who wanted
to call the president a “racist” more unambiguously and often. Mr
Baquet pushed back because—as a native of the segregated
South—he said the word lost its power with frequent use. In a sub-
sequent interview he suggested that preserving the Times’s hard-
pressed reputation for non-partisanship was another concern.
“We don’t want to change all our structures and rules so much that
we can’t put them back together—we don’t want to be oppositional
to Donald Trump.”
Yet that is what many left-wing commentators, and perhaps a
good few in Mr Baquet’s newsroom, want. Some consider the risk
of becoming aligned with the Democratic Party worth running in
an effort to give the most accurate measure of Mr Trump’s failings.
Others just want to be aligned with it, either out of political convic-
tion or, as Nathan Robinson of Current Affairsmagazine has ar-
gued, because they also believe the increasing strain apparent in
the mainstream outlets’ claim to be non-partisan is undermining
public trust in them. Only by being more upfront about their lean-
ings, as the Republican Party moves to the right and their news-
rooms to the left, it is argued, can such outlets hope to restore it.
Without wishing to minimise the challenges of covering Amer-
ican politics—with which this newspaper also grapples, not al-
ways successfully—these arguments should be dismissed as the
attempted left-wing power-grab they are. The media has much less
potential to give Mr Trump an unwarranted advantage over his op-
ponent next year than it had in 2016. The election is likely to be a
referendum on his presidency, not a face-off between two novel
candidates, and most voters have already made up their minds on
that. This is not ground for emergency media measures.
Americans’ calamitous loss of trust is also fuelled by the ex-
treme partisanship that has made their politics and related insti-
tutions so dysfunctional. The fact that a dwindling number of
mainstream outlets have retained readers and viewers from both
sides of the divide makes them, despite their imperfections, the
closest thing to a neutral arbiter going. This was underlined by a
study suggesting Mr Trump performed best in 2016 in areas with
the lowest levels of subscription to newspapers, whether of the
centre-left or centre-right. A more partisan media environment is
the last thing America needs. Those who doubt that should consid-
er that it would be squarely in Mr Trump’s interest. The president’s
attempt to gin up his supporters by depicting the media as biased
is one of his most powerful lines. Why vindicate it for him?Plumbing the mainstream
Retrofitting American political journalism to defend it against
populists—to which, mind, the left has historically been as sus-
ceptible as the right—calls for more modest change. It should start
with an acknowledgment that the country’s style of election cover-
age can seem frivolous—especially compared to the rigour of its
reporting on government. The characteristic features, including
an obsessive focus on the candidate’s personality and details of the
campaign—especially glitches—are as entertaining as any soap-
opera, but rarely useful in appraising the relative merits of a poli-
tician’s qualities for public office. This is a lesson with broad appli-
cation. Mr Trump’s relentless attacks on America’s institutions
have, by and large, done damage only where he has hit on some
pre-existing weakness. For those who would defend them, steely
self-criticism may be more effective than outrage. 7Lexington A full-court press
The prospect of another Trump election causes an unwarranted panic among political journalists