By Dan
McLaughlin
Thursday,
October 19, 2023
The era
of Donald Trump has produced a lot of handwringing from the mainstream
political press, and a lot of loud pressure from progressives, both leaning
into the same basic point: that the press should abandon the “bothsidesism”
approach of reporting competing claims by political figures, and should even
move beyond “just the facts” reporting, in order to bluntly tell the audience
that Trump is a lying liar who is lying yet again. There is some merit to
giving readers and viewers enough facts to draw conclusions about who is
telling the truth, but the entire movement has also amplified the existing
biases in favor of pushing the political press into more blatantly partisan
advocacy.
This is
dressed up as an elevation of journalistic ethics. In 2016,
when CNN started posting chyrons on screen calling Trump a liar, Matt
Yglesias wrote at Vox that “CNN has finally
figured out how to cover Donald Trump’s constant lying.” That went on for
years; in one pandemic press
conference, CNN was
telling its viewers things such as “Trump melts down in
angry response to reports he ignored virus warnings,” “Angry Trump uses
propaganda video, produced by government employees at taxpayers’ expense,” and
“Trump uses task force briefing to try and rewrite history on coronavirus
response.”
In 2021,
WGBH’s Dan Kennedy moaned that “the media remain wedded
to their old tropes, covering political campaigns as though they were horse
races and treating the two major parties as equally legitimate players with
different views.” Nicole Hemmer interviewed NYU journalism professor Jay
Rosen on Ezra Klein’s podcast and noted Rosen’s view that “the American
mainstream press must make a choice: Will it double down on its commitment to
detached, nonpartisan neutrality? Or will it choose instead to boldly and
aggressively defend truth and democracy? These days, Rosen’s view seems almost
common-sensical.” Dana Milbank of the Washington Post argued, “Too many journalists are caught
in a mindless neutrality between democracy and its saboteurs, between fact and
fiction. It’s time to take a stand.” There was a torrent of similar commentary
after CNN hosted a town hall with Trump in May; PBS NewsHour ran
a segment on how “CNN town hall
highlights media’s struggle with how to cover Trump and his lies,” in which
James Fallows argued that “Trump has his own set of rules, which he has
earned.”
Well,
okay. New rules, right? But Trump’s “own set of rules” somehow don’t apply when
the very same press is covering Hamas, a terrorist group with a track record of
false propaganda claims stretching back years, and which committed one of the
most enormous terror attacks against civilians in world history less
than two weeks ago. The American press immediately
blasted out unfounded
claims by Hamas about a supposed Israeli missile strike on a hospital in Gaza,
has walked back
those claims grudgingly from a bald repetition of Hamas claims to “Palestinians say,” even
when presented with evidence by the U.S. and Israeli governments, and has not
circulated correction with anything like the eager amplitude of the original
claims. (How many emails and push alerts on your phone did you get saying the
Israelis bombed a hospital? How many did you get from the same sources saying
the story was false?) The same people who demanded that the press stand up
bravely for the truth against Trump are now agonizingly careful to give “both
sides” of the story — or worse.
If you’re
going to treat a sitting (and now former) president of the United States like a
terrorist group, maybe the least we can ask is that you also treat a terrorist
group like a terrorist group?
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