Media: Putting "fairness" ahead of truth

 Michael Tomasky, New Republic - With dizzying regularity, Trump lies. He says toxic, antidemocratic things over and over again. And he still gets treated like a normal candidate. It’s often the case that the media, presented with another one of his addled rants, will dive in, scoop, and separate enough words to make it seem like he’s got enough actual gray matter gooping around in his skull to form a complete sentence, and present their director’s cut of his wandering mind for public consumption. 

The Democrat, first Joe Biden and now Harris, gets called evasive or worse if he-then-she doesn’t respond to Trump’s ridiculous lies. The effect is to legitimize Trump—in this case, to make it seem as if he raised fair and reasonable questions about Harris’s identity.

But this isn’t even the most glaring recent example of the press lying down on the job. That prize goes to the two New York Times reporters who recently gave us this gem, which ran under another genius headline: “Harris and Trump Have Housing Ideas. Economists Have Doubts.”….

A reality-based article comparing the candidates’ “housing plans” would have gone something like: Harris, who talks about housing all the time on the stump, has a real and reasonably detailed plan that economists say has some good points and bad points; Trump shows no sign of having given even 10 seconds of thought to the housing crisis (on Trump’s 20-point platform, the word isn’t mentioned), and by the way, he spent four years as president, during which time he amassed a thoroughly rotten record on housing and never once showed any interest in ameliorating the affordable housing crisis; how about that?...

... On Saturday, Trump spoke to the Moms for Liberty conference. He said a lot of strange things. But he went on one rant that was patently false and particularly poisonous: “The transgender thing is incredible. Think about it, your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation. The school decides what’s going to happen with your child, and many of these children, 15 years later, say, ‘What the hell happened? Who did this to me?’”

That, whatever else you want to call it, is news. …So how did the big dailies cover the event?

The New York Times: “Conservative Moms, Charmed by Trump, Would Rather Avoid His Misogyny.”

The Washington Post: “Moms for Liberty fully embraces Trump and widens role in national politics as election nears.” (That was actually an AP story.)

Incredibly, neither article used the quote about schools operating on kids....

This is just one example of something that happens many times a week. At his rallies, he lies constantly, makes toxic accusations ceaselessly. Why aren’t news organizations with the resources to do so—the Times, the Post, CNN, the other networks—systematically analyzing and deconstructing those speeches and keeping specific count of the lies and accusations? Isn’t that journalism’s fundamental job—to tell the truth?

Sadly, many journalists, especially top editors at our country’s leading outlets, think it is not. They think “fairness” is more important. Fairness, in this context, means bending over backward to be fair to Republicans and conservatives so as not to be accused of being liberal….

I’m all for being tough on any public official who deserves it… That’s all good. That’s reporting. The media’s failing today is the “fairness” impulse and the urge to put this concept of fairness ahead of truth. I understand why they indulge the impulse—they believe that it will keep MAGA off their backs (although any amount of real reflection would reveal that it doesn’t even do that, really). Is it serving readers to pretend that mass deportations are a housing policy? Reporters and editors need to stop worrying so much about whether what they’re producing is fair and worry a lot more about whether it’s true.