James Fallows wrote a fascinating article in The Atlantic about the media and its coverage of the election. Journalists are so accustomed to “both-sides-ism” that they find it almost impossible to acknowledge that Trump is lying. He lies habitually, incessantly, and most journalists can’t say that he is lying. He has his version of reality, and “some critics” disagree.
I hope the article is not behind a paywall because it’s too long to copy. And I don’t want to violate copyright law for “fair use.”
Here’s a snippet.
In pursuit of the ritual of balance, the networks offset coverage of Donald Trump’s ethical liabilities and character defects, which would have proved disqualifying in any other candidate for nearly any other job, with intense investigation of what they insisted were Hillary Clinton’s serious email problems. Six weeks before the election, Gallup published a prophetic analysis showing what Americans had heard about each candidate. For Trump, the words people most recognized from all the coverage were speech, immigration, and Mexico. For Clinton, one word dwarfed all others: EMAIL. The next two on the list, much less recognized, were lie and Foundation. (The Clinton Foundation, set up by Bill Clinton, was the object of sustained scrutiny for supposedly shady dealings that amount to an average fortnight’s revelations for the Trump empire.) One week before the election, The New York Times devoted the entire top half of its front page to stories about FBI Director James Comey’s reopening of an investigation into the emails. “New Emails Jolt Clinton Campaign in Race’s Last Days” was the headline on the front page’s lead story. “With 11 Days to Go, Trump Says Revelation ‘Changes Everything,’” read another front-page headline.
Just last week came a fresh reminder of the egregiousness of that coverage, often shorthanded as “But her emails!” On Wednesday, September 9, Bob Woodward’s tapes of Trump saying that when it came to the coronavirus, he “wanted to always play it down” came out, along with a whistleblower’s claim that the Department of Homeland Security was falsifying intelligence to downplay the risk of Russian election interference and violence from white supremacists. On the merits, either of those stories was far more important than Comey’s short-lived inquiry into what was always an overhyped scandal. But in this election season, each got a demure one-column headline on the Times’ front page. The Washington Post, by contrast, gave Woodward’s revelations banner treatment across its front page.
Who knows how the 2016 race might have turned out, and whether a man like Trump could have ended up in the position he did, if any of a hundred factors had gone a different way. But one important factor was the press’s reluctance to recognize what it was dealing with: a person nakedly using racial resentment as a tool; whose dishonesty and corruption dwarfed that of both Clintons combined, with most previous presidents’ thrown in as well; and whose knowledge about the vast organization he was about to control was inferior to that of any Capitol Hill staffer and most immigrants who had passed the (highly demanding) U.S. citizenship test.
In his account of life with Trump, Michael Cohen wrote that Trump won because he got so much free coverage by the media. The generally accepted figure is that he got $2 billion in free coverage because he was so entertaining, so unconventional, so outrageous. The media got higher ratings. And Trump promptly referred to the press as “the enemy of the people.”
Exhibit # 1
Hair for the dramatic
Is what the Donald’s got
Hair that’s filled with static
Hair that goes to pot
Hair that gives direction
Away from something bad
Hair with an erection
Hair for heli pad
Hair that will disarm you
Hair that makes you stare
Hair that will alarm you
Donald’s orange hair
Isn’t it blatantly obvious that Trump is unfit to be president every time he opens his maw. His actual on the record, on video statements would be enough to sink the careers of any other politician. The right wingers amongst us just adore Trump because he’s socking it to the “lefties,” they don’t care if he’s crude rude and over the top so long as he roasts the “commies,” “socialists” and supposed anti-fa crowd. The fact that Trump supported that birtherism garbage should have disqualified him from any consideration to be president.
(Both-sides-ism has often disappeared in Ed Reform articles…though we’ve made progress.)
In Ed-reform articles, it’s usually one side only, with public school bashing
I believed the term is “bash-side-ism”
Here’s more of the article if it is behind a paywall.
The Media Learned Nothing From 2016
The press hasn’t broken its most destructive habits when it comes to covering Donald Trump.
SEPTEMBER 15, 2020
James Fallows
Staff writer at The Atlantic
Both-sides-ism
This is the shorthand term for most journalists’ discomfort with seeming to “take a side” in political disputes, and the contortions that result…
But on the narrow, specific question of Republican-versus-Democratic disagreements, newspaper and broadcast reporters are profoundly uncomfortable with appearing to take a side. This issue has been extremely well discussed over the years, for example in a dispatch titled “The View From Nowhere,” by Jay Rosen back in 2010; and in an article from Dan Froomkin a few weeks ago. The simplest version of the point is that reporters are most at ease when they can quote first one side and then the other, seeming to be neutral between the two—or when they present a charge, and then the response. It’s a role idealized by John Roberts asserting, during his confirmation hearings to become chief justice of the Supreme Court, that his role as jurist was just “to call balls and strikes,” or by Fox News’s amusing motto “We report, you decide.”…
One is a habitual, even reflexive presentation of claims or statements that a reporter knows are not of equivalent truthfulness, as if they were. (Thus, “false equivalence.”) A stark recent example was an AP story on September 4, with the headline “Dueling Versions of Reality Define 1st Week of Fall Campaign.” It began:
NEW YORK (AP) — On the campaign trail with President Donald Trump, the pandemic is largely over, the economy is roaring back, and murderous mobs are infiltrating America’s suburbs.
With Democrat Joe Biden, the pandemic is raging, the economy isn’t lifting the working class, and systemic racism threatens Black lives across America.
The first week of the fall sprint to Election Day crystallized dizzyingly different versions of reality as the Republican incumbent and his Democratic challenger trekked from Washington and Delaware to Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and back, each man on an urgent mission to sell his particular message to anxious voters.
All the conflicting messages carry at least a sliver of truth, some much more than others …
The “some much more than others” phrase is a way to signal what the reporter certainly knows: that Joe Biden’s claims are within the realm of normal political spin and emphasis, while Trump’s are not true. The U.S. is nowhere near the end of its pandemic nightmare; the economy has recovered barely half the jobs lost since February, and worse times may be ahead; the urban crime rate remains near its low point in recent decades, and crime is not spilling out to the suburbs. But the story presents them merely as “dizzyingly different” perspectives—gee, it’s all moving so fast; how can we make sense of it?—with an insider’s wink and nod that not all these claims are equally true: “some much more than others.” What might the reporter have written instead? Something like “Trump is running on a falsified vision of America, and hoping he can make enough people believe it to win.” A statement like that might have seemed more “intrusive” by the canons of wire-service “objectivity” in another age, but it is far truer to the realities of this moment, and would stand up far better in history’s view…
As Dan Coats, Trump’s own former director of national intelligence, is quotedtelling Bob Woodward, “To him, a lie is not a lie. It’s just what he thinks. He doesn’t know the difference between the truth and a lie.”
People outside the business may not recognize what a step it is, culturally and professionally, for reporters and editors to act on the implications of this reality—the knowledge that what a president or his senior representatives say has exactly zero factual value. If you are trying to inform the public, you’re better off not reporting what this president says, contends, or does, unless there are external indications that it’s true.
And there is certainly no reason to present Trump’s claims on equal footing with other information. Once again, that is because the track record indicates that if Trump or one of his press representatives says something, it’s probably not true. And yet the instinct is so hard to resist, the impulse to add “some critics say …” so powerful…
My suggestion: Follow the advice from an essay by Dan Froomkin, or another by Jay Rosen, about how to drop the pretense of both-sides-ism, and channel the analytical ability that goes into tactical commentary in order to plainly say who is lying and who is not, and what is at stake…
We can’t be sure now which is more destructive: a president openly encouraging much of the public to mistrust the democratic process, or that same president openly welcoming foreign interference in the process. Both are steps toward authoritarianism and danger, and awareness of them should shape coverage every single day….
Read More:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/09/media-mistakes/616222/?utm_source=atl&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=share
Yes, one black mark against a comparative-paragon, Joe Biden, say, is made to look worse than all the sleaze Trump sloshes around in: pumps out, lives out, and with sleazy legal representation, drowns out.
I hope the James Fallows Atlantic article is a wake-up call.
I think it is important to report when in practice the press acts as “the enemy of the people”. But in Mr. Fallows article my view that in practice the press was in 2016 acting as the enemy of our Democracy. I view a difference between interest of “the people” and Democracy.
In practice the press, in our capitalist economy, is seeking to squeeze profit out of the news. The economic bottom line can make the press seem “the enemy of ” both “the people” and Democracy.
I’d love to see Ugh! disqualified, but presidential requirements (35 years old or older and US Citizen) like most (all ?) public offices are thin. Ugh! never held elective governmental office before, isn’t a lawyer and never served in the military. The Electoral College selected him in 2016 and should be held accountable. 😮🔔
As an aside, I don’t think Jim knows what the heck he’s talking about.
But the article was probably right-on when written. Late, but NOW it seems many of “the press” are calling a lie a lie–finally, they have recognized that Walter Cronkite died some years ago. CBK
I have always believed that if Jon Stewart had not stepped down in August 2015, the both-siderism of the NYT and CNN and the rest of the so-called “liberal” media would have been greatly diminished and Trump would not have won — he probably would not even have won the nomination. In fact, I think Obama would have lost his 2 elections had there been no Jon Stewart to keep the media honest.
What Jon Stewart did so brilliantly in his segments was highlight the idiocy of what reporters were writing and saying on tv appearances. And Stewart spent a great deal of his segments highlighting what was said on CNN or MSNBC by so-called “liberal” reporters, and it wasn’t pretty.
Instead of looking “smart” — as those reporters view themselves — they looked like the most inane ninnies going overboard to “report” that there is now a serious debate that the earth is flat because Republicans say it is and these very important reporters take very seriously their “duty” to report that there is now a huge debate about whether the earth is flat. And what made those NYT and CNN reporters look particularly idiotic is when Jon Stewart’s clips showed them as people who said their little brains couldn’t handle figuring out whether or not the earth was flat because their sacred journalistic duty as “very important reporters” was to inform readers that “Republicans say the earth is flat, partisan Democrats disagree.”
Jon Stewart shamed reporters simply by highlighting exactly what they write and said instead of just allowing their “journalism” to stand without comment or critique. And when the public saw those “bothsiderism” reporters at the NYT and CNN and other news outlets acting like ninnies, they laughed at them. They laughed at them A LOT!
Of course, the Fox News reporters didn’t really care about Jon Stewart’s viewers knowing they were ninnies. But the reporters at the NYT and CNN and other so-called “liberal” news outlets fashioned themselves as having an ounce of intelligence and what Stewart did is show their friends and family and people they’d run into at the supermarket what ninnies they were.
Jon Stewart publicly shamed reporters from the so-called “liberal” media by simply showing their own words and statements!
So many of them actually tried to do better and be real journalists instead of defending themselves by saying “real journalists can’t ever know the true fact, so real journalists just report both sides”. Some tried to make that argument but their journalistic colleagues — as well as the public — laughed at them even more! What ninnies.
Since Stewart retired, those reporters have been acting like ninnies all they want. Sure some people call them out, but none of them had the ability that Jon Stewart did to clearly pierce those reporters’ bubble of credibility to show them as total idiots to his many viewers who kept laughing at their idiocy. And by focusing not on Fox News reporters but on so-called “liberal” media reporters and their idiocy, Jon Stewart made them think twice before writing or saying something incredibly idiotic that would be highlighted in the next Jon Stewart segment.
NYT reporters gave Stewart so much material to highlight with their idiotic “bothsiderism” in 2016, but he wasn’t there to cover it. If he had, they would have likely been shamed into doing less of it, as they did during the 2008 and 2012 campaigns, where they weren’t writing articles about the “concern” so many Americans had that Obama was a Kenyan and the “concern” so many Americans had that Obama was a supporter of terrorism against the US. Without Jon Stewart around, I suspect the NYT reporters would have believed that their sacred journalistic duty in 2008 and 2012 was to write endless stories about how “no one knows whether Obama is a Kenyan or terrorist, and partisans disagree on which is true.”
Trump didn’t get 2 Billion in free media.
What he did is provide fascinating content and high ratings for media companies , who then profited thru charging higher advertising costs.
The talking heads at Fox wasted no time in propagating ugly views of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. In doing so they had no regard for the matter of “both sides” journalism. In other words those reporters were engaged in an RBG attack in no time and within a very large bubble of ideological Trumpism, free of any constraints from “elite” journalistic traditions and values.
The talking heads at Fox are paid to create and amplify audio/visual venom far worse that the worst paper tabloids sold in the checkout lines of many stores.
See this roundup to see how indifferent their talking heads to “both side-ism.”
https://www.mediamatters.org/supreme-court/right-wing-media-figures-make-disparaging-remarks-after-ruth-bader-ginsburgs-death
Laura H. Chapman: This is my favorite:
Fox’s Jesse Watters: Republicans should confirm a justice as soon as possible because Democrats are “bloodthirsty political killers”
09/19/20 9:42 PM EDT
And the “liberal” NYT would write an “unbiased” story: “Democrats deny that they are ‘bloodthirsty political killers’ but Republicans insist that they are.”
And those “liberal” NYT reporters would pat themselves on the back for being superior and unbiased journalists, while Fox News reporters are just “hacks”.
Is the New York Times liberal or conservative? 😐
The NY Times is a mixed bag. Their reporting is usually first rate. They do great investigative reporting. On most issues, the editorial board is liberal. But awful on education issues. Not liberal or conservative but obsessed with flawed metrics and swayed by uninformed billionaires.,
Laura Another point: Calling out a lie is not equivalent to “taking sides.” . . . insofar as good journalism is about telling the truth regardless of who is at issue? CBK
Catherine King: Good point. In high school journalism class we were taught to look at “who, what, where, when and why” and to double check to be sure that what we wrote was factual.
Now, too many journalists [I’m thinking mostly far R] simply make up stuff. If you repeat things often enough it becomes a ‘fact’. That is what Trump, the GOP do repeatedly. Ex: Climate change is a hoax, COVID-19 is a hoax, BLM are destroying our cities and will soon be coming to the suburbs if not stopped, Trump has a great plan for better healthcare that will soon be coming out, cutting taxes on the wealthy will make our country richer, choice will give our children a better education, Medicare for All is socialism and enacting it will cause the U.S to become Venezuela, only Trump can fix everything and Make America Great Again. It never ends.
Lets not forget the Presses utter failure to discuss the Economy. I cringe when I hear Trumps economic approval rating. Now; no one can deny that the economy for the first three years was doing very well . But the question is why was it doing so well . What specific Trump / Republican policies would have been responsible. The answer to that would be none with the exception of massive deficit increases the Republicans never gave Obama in the heart of a recession.
. As Germany and England saw multi decade record lows in unemployment lower than even the USA. And even the entire EU saw unemployment numbers never seen since its creation. What Trump policies were responsible for economic growth in Europe again the answer would be none!
The unemployment rate sunk to 3.6 percent but it was already at 4.3 percent in Obama’s last month. While the last 3 years of the Obama administration saw 1.7 million more jobs created than the first 3 years of Trump’s .
The answer to the question would be that the easing of the Euro crisis and the increased demand in the “World Economy ” for oil ; brought the US out of a mini recession in 2016 as US fracked oil was priced out of the market by Mid Eastern oil. Low demand ending oil extraction related pipeline and equipment manufacturing . All the manufacturing increase through q2 18 can be traced to the end of the Euro crisis.
But the American public is clueless . Because the Press barely reports.
Exactly. The failure of the press to educate people about really basic stuff is monumental.
Today’s outrage from Vlad’s Agent Orange = eyeballs = ad dollars
Right now would be a damn good time to report frequently and loudly on the economy. I’m not talking about analysis, just current stats put in context. There should be regular daily features at homeless shelters, soup kitchens, those miles-long car lines for free food. Interviews with people out of work for 6 months and now out of covid relief too, small biz owners who’ve gone bankrupt, people being evicted, etc. Showing everybody, not just “those” poor people– quit w/the virtue-signaling and show us the millennials who lost their gig jobs, suburbanites in their 40’s whose biz is bust & now they’re postponing house payments while tossing around boxes at Amazon, etc. People seem to be in a coma about govt inaction as election approaches, & all we see/read is breathless horse-racing DC coverage.
Robby Mook (Hillary’s campaign) was one of those who described, in hindsight, Trump’s impact. “Trump sucked all of the oxygen out” of media’s environment. One contributing factor in 2016- a Democratic primary with a pre-ordained nominee.
In 44 days, we will hold an election to decide whether the United States will continue to be led by an agent of the Russian government. Vlad’s Agent Orange. Moscow’s Agent Governing America (MAGA). I’m not kidding about this. And some of our highest-ranking intelligence personnel think so, too.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-makes-america-more-like-russia-every-day
That the U.S. Intelligence services have not yet definitively outed this traitor has to be the greatest intelligence failure in history.
Control the education of students…one more way to make Trump the ‘dictator’.
WaPo:
Trump joins dictators and demagogues in touting ‘patriotic education’
Ishaan Tharoor
with Ruby Mellen
It was a vintage scene of Trumpist agitprop. Last week, President Trump stood before original copies of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence and declared a new national campaign to promote “patriotic education.” He tapped into a long-standing grievance within America’s right wing over supposed “left-wing indoctrination” in the country’s schools and universities, linking the unrest of this past summer to an education system that overly stresses the legacy of slavery, racism and sins of America’s past.
“Patriotic moms and dads are going to demand that their children are no longer fed hateful lies about this country,” Trump said. “American parents are not going to accept indoctrination in our schools, cancel culture at work or the repression of traditional faith, culture and values in the public square. Not anymore.”
There’s nothing particularly new about this latest shot across the bow in the United States’ divisive culture war, apart from the president using his bully pulpit to make it. Trump can’t exactly rewrite textbooks and curriculums, which are the province of the states and local districts. But it’s yet another dynamite charge to stoke a nativist base. Weeks away from an election, Trump said his administration would launch a national panel to create a “pro-American curriculum,” which he dubbed the “1776 Commission.”
That appears to be a White House response to the “1619 Project,” a Pulitzer Prize-winning set of essays published by the New York Times last year that sought to reframe the story of American democracy as centered on the legacy and experience of slavery. Many educators and historians see this sort of revision as a welcome complement to the standard teachings of history most Americans receive in their school systems and are bewildered by Trump’s tirades against liberal teachers. A recent study also poured cold water on the right-wing shibboleth that universities are zones of “indoctrination,” finding little variation in the political views of students before and after they enter college.
“I am not teaching my students to hate America,” said Chris Dier, a high school teacher in Louisiana who was the state’s 2020 Teacher of the Year, to my colleagues. “We are teaching our students to embrace our country, even the things that are negative. We’re choosing not to ignore the ghosts of our country’s past.”
A great irony in Trump’s invocation of “patriotic” education is that it apes the language and decades-long policies of the Communist regime in Beijing, a frequent rhetorical punching bag for the Trump administration. But it also fits into a global battlefield where democratically elected right-wing nationalists have put universities and schools in their crosshairs. In many cases, educators find themselves on the front lines of political struggles they are doomed to lose.
Thousands of Turkish academics, including prominent liberal intellectuals, were removed from faculty positions and teaching jobs in recent years amid a broader purge carried out by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government. In India, professors and student activists on university campuses have been demonized by the country’s jingoistic media networks and its ruling Hindu nationalist party, which has also sought to revamp the nation’s history textbooks.
Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, came to power breathing fury over “Marxist” infiltration in the country’s schools, which he and his allies even claimed promoted “homosexuality and promiscuity.” In office, Bolsonaro’s government cut funding to the humanities and social sciences and ended an affirmative action policy that helped disadvantaged Black and Indigenous students enter certain postgraduate programs. For Bolsonaro, tackling the country’s education system is part of a far deeper ideological clash with the Brazilian left.
And sexism
Code for telling the unvarnished truth:
REVISIONIST HISTORY CBK
What a great article, Diane. I should have read this one before the post on Susan Collins, it ties right into that discussion. I’m always nostalgic for the days when—I thought—media separated “reporting” from “analysis” and “opinion.” But Fallows shows choices are made at every level of reportage. This article explains very well my sense of how today’s media is always chasing its own tail, updating ‘stories’ that are really just speculations of their own, or some other writer’s—that weren’t news to begin with. They end up distracting from the actual news with endless hairsplitting.
We’re all familiar with the aggravating ‘both-sides’ approach, but Fallows brings out something I hadn’t noticed: in the obligatory search for ‘the other side,’ writers diminish what’s really news by implying [false] equivalence with something that’s often trivial by comparison. And I love the ‘horse-race’ bit, another nuance I hadn’t seen: deflecting one’s focus from what actually happened to speculations on whether it was the best move [tactics]. This is sports-announcing to a T. They have to talk about something for 2 hrs, so they fill in between ball-game events by second-guessing coach’s intentions & bringing supposed comparative stats out of the archive. I’m guessing both moves derive from the 24/7 cable news circuit. Print media would be smart to offer folks like me something different. I’m sick of having to google the actual text of a pol’s remarks in order to separate wheat from chaff.
Did my rosy-eye version of the news of the past actually exist? If so, what changed?