Long before Fox News adopted “fair and balanced” as its motto, American media struggled to meet that standard. Unlike Fake News, which has since it fell Those words, as well as almost any pretense of aspiring to them, the mainstream media still aspires to, to a fault.
opinion columnist
Jackie Calmes
Jackie Calmes brings a critical look to the national political scene. He has decades of experience covering the White House and Congress.
That was the case in 2016 with the excessive coverage of Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server for some State Department business, a performance that generated numerous critical journalistic autopsies (and the meme). “But your emails.” The media, obsessed with appearing fair to Donald Trump, sought to balance all the negative coverage he generated due to his lies, slander, and bigotry by turning Clinton's email habits into a pseudo-scandal. In the end, that amThe balance in insisting on the matter was United Nationsright with her.
The media seems to be at it again. The new “but his emails” is “but his age,” meaning President Biden's age, even though Trump is only three years and seven months younger.
The question is not unjustified. Both men are by far the oldest to seek the presidency, breaking the record. they set in 2020.
What is unwarranted is the barrage of “but Biden's age” coverage unleashed since late last week, when a Republican special counsel joined his finding that Biden should not face charges for storing classified material after his vice presidency with totally inappropriate chatter about the “diminished powers” of the “elderly” president.”
On Monday, media analyst Margaret Sullivan provided a summary of some of the coverage. It is “nothing less than journalistic negligence,” she said. wrotefor the media to make Biden's age “the general theme” of the 2024 campaign, especially against aging and Trump, who threatens democracy. According to Popular Information NewsletterIn the four days following the special counsel's report, the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal published a total of 81 articles on Biden's age and memory.
Trump's memory lapses, lies, name confusion and gaffes, a man so confused he thinks repeating “person, woman, man, camera, television” proves the opposite, receiving much less journalistic scrutiny. On the one hand, the media is as accustomed as the public to Trump's falsehoods and malevolence; It's “white noise,” Bulwark, a Never Trump news site, lamented this week. Even so, it accumulates atrocities that cannot be ignored, such as attractive Russia attacks or “does whatever it wants” against NATO allies.
And as negative coverage of Trump piles up, the media is disproportionately exploiting Biden's weaknesses and mistakes to even the score.
That's just another way of both sides-ism long evident in journalism: the tendency – in the interest of being fair and balanced – towards reporting that suggests that both sides, both parties or both candidates should receive equal measures of critical coverage, or are equally culpable in some respect. The result is too often a false equivalence.
A warning to journalists from political scientists Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein, in their 2012 book documenting that Republicans were more responsible than Democrats for the dysfunction and polarization in our politics, is worth repeating: “A balanced treatment of an unbalanced phenomenon is a distortion of reality and a disservice to its consumers.”
Even the New York Times Pitchbot, a Twitter/X account that mocks the media simply for this bias on both sides, couldn't caricature the real thing on CNN. The satirist behind the account aware a photo of the network screen during a round table. The chyron at the bottom read: “Is Biden's age now a bigger problem than Trump's accusations?”
Some in the media have try to explain why many more voters care about Biden's age and mental acuity than Trump's. TO ABC News and Ipsos poll released Sunday found that 86% of Americans say the president is too old for another term compared to 62% who say the same about Trump.
Among the reasons is the perception that Trump, although hardly physically fit, appears more energetic than Biden. Plus, journalists talk a lot to Democrats, who, as a party, tend to overreact to unfavorable news, polls, whatever…wet the bed,” as Obama officials used to make their stomachs hurt. Then you get stories like one this week headlined “'A Nightmare': Special Counsel's Assessment of Biden's Mental Fitness Triggers Democratic Panic.”
Republicans, on the other hand, typically give journalists nothing when it comes to the disgraced former president. They are Trump sycophants, obsequiously silent about his transgressions when they are not actually defending him. Take Trump's obscenity about abandoning NATO allies: “I couldn't find a single sitting Republican who openly opposed what he said.” he lamented former Rep. Adam Kinzinger, a rare Republican who has opposed Trump. Kinzinger also said Trump's ramblings were further evidence that he “is clearly mentally deteriorating.”
One factor missing from the media's explanations for why Trump does better than Biden on assessments of age and mental stability: the media's own role. Could the polls be less bad for Biden if the coverage were different?
It was a Trump sycophant, Florida Senator Marco Rubio, who in 2016, when he was still questioning his support for Trump, he warned that he, voters and the media would one day have to “justify how they fell into this trap.”
The unprincipled Rubio certainly has a lot to account for. The same goes for conservative media. As for traditional media, it is not too late in the election year to avoid the trap of both sides.
