From a journalistic standpoint, the mainstream media is actually an interesting animal. They want to be taken seriously, but the drivel they produce and peddle to the American people is anything but. Now, amid the presidential election cycle, when seriousness and perhaps objectivity might be paramount, they have been told that it’s okay for them not to hold one of the candidates accountable, to cover them differently. Why? Well, to put it in simple schoolyard terms: “We think one candidate is icky, and the other one isn’t.”
Thankfully, some people watch MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” so the rest of us don’t have to. On Thursday, “New York Times” Editorial Board member Mara Gay showed up to hand out a bit of professional advice. When host Joe Scarborough bemoaned the traditional separation between editorial, a.k.a. opinion, and news when covering presidential candidates — as if that happens on MSNBC — he called it completely “absurd” to believe there is a moral equivalence between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.
Gay agreed and said it is “a little silly” to hold both to the same standards. Gay added that the “choice is obvious,” implying that one standard is ok for Kamala Harris and another for Donald Trump. How professional. Gay then went on to give a prime example of just exactly how to blur the line between editorial and news, saying,
“I think the challenge, not just for journalists, but really for the country, is that not only is Donald Trump a threat, but, you know, it lowers the bar. So I don’t think it’s unacceptable. And I think it’s important for our role as journalists to really push every candidate for office.”
But Mara Gay was just getting started. Again, this is a seasoned, experienced journalist.
“It’s just the context is difficult because of the extremism of the Republican Party, because of how extreme Donald Trump is, it’s hard to hold both candidates accountable equally, because one is committed to democracy and is functioning as a normal candidate from a normal American party, and the other is not. And so, you know, this is really about the extremism of the Republican ticket. And it’s important to hold all candidates accountable. It’s just that when you do that, it does sometimes sound a little silly because given the breadth of what the vice president is offering the American people, there is no comparison with Donald Trump.”
So, let me see if I understand this. Even though you say that all candidates must be held accountable and held to the same standards, because you believe your opinion to be fact, it is journalistically acceptable to be biased. Journalists like Mara Gay are precisely why trust in the media is at all-time lows for Americans.
As you might expect, this is nothing new. And we actually have Donald Trump to thank for ushering in this new “truthfulness” in media. In 2016, “New York Times” Media Columnist Jim Rutenberg actually posed the question of journalists being fair and objective when covering Trump during his first campaign. “Trump is such a dangerous guy — how are we supposed to cover him?” Rutenberg concluded that if journalists believed Trump was such a danger, then they needed to throw objectivity out the window and reflect that view in their reporting. Doesn’t this go against everything you learn in Journalism 101? Of course, it does, but it’s Donald Trump, so the rules are different.
Rutenberg concluded that journalism “shouldn’t measure itself against any one campaign’s definition of fairness.” Last time I checked, however, there is an actual definition of fairness. But this was the media’s permission to cover Trump the way they have and to have people like Mara Gay encourage it.
Some of us are old enough to remember when Walter Cronkite just reported the news and didn’t slant it based on his beliefs. No one knew until after he retired to his yacht that he was a liberal. When journalists feel like fairness and objectivity are optional, we are headed to a bad place.
