We have finally reached the point where journalists are wrestling with how to fulfill their professional responsibilities when dealing with Donald Trump. The question I used for my subject appears in the first paragraph of an op ed for the Sunday New York Times titled How to Cover a Charlatan Like Trump, written by Nicholas Kristof, the winner of multiple Pulitzers for commentary.
Kristof acknowledges that the normal journalistic practice when controversy is involved is to give voice to both sides of the argument and let the journalistic audience, be they readers or viewers, decide. But he acknowledges that this political cycle is very different and is concerned
that we in the media (particularly some in cable television) have enabled a charlatan by handing him the microphone and not adequately fact-checking what he says.
Now note the bluntness of the words that immediately follow:
If a known con artist peddles a potion that he claims will make people lose 25 pounds and enjoy a better sex life, we don’t just quote the man and a critic; we find ways to signal to readers that he’s a fraud. Why should it be different when the con man runs for president?
Kristof then touches on cases where people challenge Clinton on truthfulness, but immediately asserts that there is no comparison between the two candidates. Given what we are now seeing in polling data on the perceptions of the truthfulness of the two candidates, the following sentence is very relevant:
Of course we should cover Clinton’s sins, but when the public believes that a mythomaniac like Trump is the straight shooter, we owe it to ourselves and the country to wrestle with knotty questions of false equivalence.
He reviews some of what has happened, and ends successive paragraphs with pointed sentences, first this:
In our effort to avoid partisanship, we let our country down.
and then this:
We are normalizing lies and extremism.
He notes the recent tendency to use the term “lie” and then turns to the debates, where he acknowledges that fact-checking can be a problem, how difficult it can be to fact check on the fly. And yet:
Yet playing it straight does not preclude adding value with journalistic judgment — such as, in extreme cases, calling out a lie when we see it. And I believe that debate moderators can press Trump when he lies or evades.
Of course, we wonder if they will, and we know the one registered Democrat among the five moderators, Chris Wallace, has said he will not fact check.
One problem he acknowledges is that the press is held in very low regard. Of course, we have seen decades of attacking the press from the Right, and unfortunately are seeing something similar however lesser on the left. There is the further problem of well-established incorrect beliefs, Kristof citing that only 62% of American believe President Obama was born in the US, before noting
Facts may be stubborn things, but so are myths.
Even thought Trump may have nothing seem to stick to him, especially among his more committed supporters,
We owe it to our audiences to signal that most of us have never met a national candidate as ill-informed, deceptive or evasive as Trump.
Calling him to account would not, according to Kristof, be breaking new journalistic ground: certainly Edward R. Murrow did it to Joe McCarthy in the early days of television, as Kristof reminds us. He also reminds us that during the Civil Rights struggles that followed journalism was not just on the one hand and on the other, simply letting the two sides speak:
Great journalists like Claude Sitton and Karl Fleming took enormous risks to reveal the brutality of the Jim Crow South.
Last week, the Public Editor of the paper for which Kristof writes, did a horrible job of addressing concerns people have about the nature of journalism this cycle. There has been particular criticism of what we have at times seen from what is normally consider the nations “newspaper of record.”
Kristof is not alone in demanding something more. This column is framed from the perspective of one of that paper’s most honored and respected writers through the lens of what journalism should be.
Which brings us to Kristof’s final, and absolutely on target, paragraph:
Our job is not stenography, but truth-telling. As we move to the debates, let’s remember that to expose charlatans is not partisanship, but simply good journalism.
Indeed.