The News Media Isn’t Biased Against Trump. It’s Biased For Him.
Going
into his NBC town hall, President Trump decided, for some reason, that his
thematic message would be his unfair treatment
at the hands of the forum in which he was voluntarily participating. Supporters
dutifully complained that Trump had to overcome hostile interrogation while Joe
Biden was handed easy softballs.
It is
true that Trump found many of the questions posed to him difficult to answer
and that Biden answered his queries more easily. It is also true that
mainstream news coverage, in general, has depicted Trump in a brutally harsh
light. (This, of course, omits conservative media, which functions as a state-controlled
message machine.)
But it’s
not the media’s fault that Trump continues to incriminate himself and is unable
to answer simple questions. The problem is not that the media holds him to a
difficult standard. He is held, by necessity, to a more forgiving standard than
any modern president. But however low the bar is set, Trump continues to trip
over it.
Here is
the question by Guthrie that gave Trump the most difficulty:
Let me ask you about
QAnon. It is this theory that Democrats are a satanic pedophile ring and that
you are the savior, of that. Now can you just, once and for all, state that
that is completely not true?
Answering
this query should have been extremely simple. Trump couldn’t do it.
Imagine
if Biden had been asked the same question. He would have had little difficulty
saying, ‘No, the Democratic party is not the cover for a satanic sex ring.’ The
reason reporters don’t pose this question to Biden is not because it would be
too difficult for him to answer, but because it would be too easy.
Now, you
might say the parallel isn’t fair, because QAnon is a pro-Trump conspiracy
theory, which places the president in a more difficult spot. You’d have to
imagine an equivalent pro-Biden conspiracy theory to ask him about, and they
don’t exist. One response to this objection is that the lack of conspiracy
theories that depict Joe Biden as the savior against demonic sex plots isn’t
really Biden’s fault. If Biden’s political coalition was so detached from
objective reality that a nontrivial number of his supporters believed theories
that could be described as “clinically paranoid,” lots of things would be
different.
Guthrie
also asked Trump why he won’t release his tax returns. Trump struggled to
explain, bluffing that he couldn’t do it because he is under audit (even though
there is no reason why public disclosure would impact his audit). Nobody asks
Biden why he hasn’t released his tax returns, because — like every other
presidential nominee since Watergate — he has.
Guthrie
asked Trump why he tweeted “a conspiracy theory that Joe Biden orchestrated to
have SEAL Team Six, the Navy SEAL Team Six, killed to cover up the fake death
of bin Laden.” If Biden had tweeted out a claim that Trump had killed somebody,
and that person was in fact alive, he would probably be asked about it — a lot.
Indeed, if Biden had tweeted a ludicrous murder accusation, it would represent
a crisis for his campaign so dire that the press would likely talk about little
else. His allies would be pressed to denounce him, and Democrats would be
discussing ways to force him off the ticket. For Trump, it was just another
item on the list of questions.
This of
course is the problem with covering Trump. The scale and frequency of his
offenses is so far outside the historic norm that it is impossible to measure
him by normal standards. The only way to cover his lies and misconduct is to
create a different, lower standard. Attempting to cover Trump’s violations the
same way you’d cover them if they had been committed by Barack Obama or George W.
Bush would create a press storm so large that it would exceed the limits of
time and space that news coverage can consume. Holding him accountable to a
normal standard is physically impossible.
Joe
Biden’s town hall featured several detailed policy questions pressing him on
ambiguities or contradictions in his public platform. The first, a “softball,”
asked Biden to specify what policies he would have enacted differently than
Trump — both retrospectively and going forward. You could ask
Trump a question like that, but he would never come close to answering it with
the level of detail Biden provided.
Indeed,
at Trump’s forum, a voter did ask the president a similar question: “Why did
you only put in place a travel ban from China and not put in place other measures
mitigating the spread of COVID-19, potentially saving tens of thousands of
American lives?” After specifically being asked what other measures he should
have employed besides the travel ban, Trump’s response was to
tout the travel ban:
Well, I
did put it in very early. As you know, Joe Biden was two months behind me, and
he called me xenophobic and racist and everything else because I put it in. And
it turned out that I was 100 percent right. I also put it on Europe very early,
because I saw there was a lot of infection in Europe. And it’s sort of an
amazing question. And I appreciate the question and respect the question, but
the news doesn’t get out the right answer.
Because
I put on a travel ban far earlier than Dr. Fauci thought it was necessary. Who
I like. Far earlier than the scientists … I was actually the only one that
wanted to put it on. And I did it, actually against the advice of a lot of
people, including Nancy Pelosi who had no clue what she was doing. And Biden.
When I put on the travel
ban … You know, I put it on in January. The end of January. When I put on the
travel ban, Joe Biden and others said, “This is ridiculous. You don’t do that.”
Well, Dr. Fauci said I saved thousands and thousands of lives.
Guthrie
could have jumped in to point out that the questioner had conceded that he
imposed a travel ban — a generous concession to Trump, given that his “ban”
actually exempted 40,000 travelers — and asked specifically for other policies.
But she didn’t, because Trump almost never answers difficult questions, and
there are too many lies to get into. Had Biden dodged his “softball” question
like Trump did, there probably would have been a follow-up.
When
conservatives complain about Trump’s coverage, they are decrying not the
standards being set but the outcomes. If their president is unable to clear
even the lower bar set before him, it must be lowered further still, so that he
can hop over it at least occasionally.
His
inability to grasp basic facts about public policy, avoid obvious lies, or
conform to minimal standards of ethical behavior guarantees he will fail even
the forgiving standards the media has been forced to adopt. The conservative
view is that this failure reflects badly not on Trump but on the media.