This Election, the Task of the Press is to Hold Both Parties to the Same Standards

That's also the task of the public -- including advocates who want one side to win.

Photo by Unlimited Access on Unsplash

One of the most infuriating aspects of our Trumpian political culture is the degree to which Trump is so endlessly outrageous and untruthful that his lies and outrages cease to be news — and that the GOP has learned from him that there are few consequences to profound hypocrisy. The foundations for this were laid well before Donald Trump ascended to power. But in this third major Trump campaign, we’re seeing just how effective a strategy it is to be so repeatedly dishonest that your dishonesty is no longer newsworthy.

The mainstream press has struggled to figure out how to cover Trump fairly and effectively. And look, I know it’s very fun and satisfying to complain about all of the ways mainstream outlets fail in their Trump coverage and even to theorize that they’re covering him in x, y, or z way to give him an advantage or boost their own ratings, but I do actually believe that most journalists and editors who are covering Trump are thinking hard about how to balance newsworthiness with public interest with truth-telling. And these are not easy calls to make. During Trump’s 2016 run, his rallies were covered pretty extensively, because they were so shocking and ridiculous; the result of that, though, wasn’t that Americans were broadly turned off by him, but that a lot of people were surprisingly turned on. I see a lot of media critics making inherently conflicting demands: Don’t “platform” Trump, but also don’t ignore him. Don’t “normalize” Trump, but also don’t cover him as some alien force, given that his bigotries and conspiracies are American-made. At least some of the complaints about media coverage of Trump seem to come from a frustration that journalists are not universally covering Trump simply by condemning him. But that’s not the primary job of the journalist.

That said, there are real asymmetries in media coverage of Trump versus Harris (and before her, of Trump versus Biden and Clinton), and more broadly of Republicans versus Democrats. And in the final few months of this presidential campaign, news outlets should be thinking of how to correct for them.

The first is the craziness asymmetry. If one candidate or party just says tons of crazy stuff, the newsworthiness bar for crazy gets higher and higher. This is why we see news articles about Harris or Biden saying some incorrect or mildly off-putting thing that would never be written if Trump had done the same. For Trump’s craziness to get covered, he has to say something more shocking and crazy than all the rest of the crazy stuff he’s been saying for a decade. You can see how this happens and why it makes for some difficult editorial choices. Do newspapers really want to publish article after article about every nutty thing Trump says? Will readers even register the volume of crazy, or will all of it then turn into background noise, making it even harder for the truly outrageous to break through? I don’t actually know the answer to the question of how, exactly, news outlets should cover Trump’s craziness. But it does seem fair to say that news outlets should treat candidates equally — not “this is crazy for Trump” versus “this is crazy for Harris,” but according to a single craziness threshold: if it wouldn’t make the paper if Trump said it, then it shouldn’t make the paper because Harris does.