An ugly case of 'false balance' in the New York Times
The mainstream media is still getting it wrong about Trump
I once asked Jill Abramson, the former top editor of the New York Times, to name the best reporters she had ever encountered.
I recall she mentioned her friend and co-author Jane Mayer — definitely on my list, too — and a few others. Mayer’s book, “Dark Money,” about the Koch Brothers, is a classic of investigative reporting.
Another one was James Risen, the renowned investigative reporter formerly of the New York Times, and later at the Intercept. I agreed again, particularly because of an investigation that Risen did during the George W. Bush administration about the government surveillance of American citizens through warrantless wiretapping. (There’s quite a backstory there, but suffice it to say that Times editors held back the investigation for many months after the administration claimed that publishing would threaten national security; Risen eventually forced the hand of his editors, resulting in the publication of the blockbuster co-authored with Eric Lichtblau — and it won a Pulitzer Prize.)
I heard from Risen a few days ago, as I do from time to time; I got to know him while I was the Times public editor or ombudswoman. He wrote to express his outrage at his former employer for a recent story. I pay particular attention to him as a former Timesman himself and a journalist of integrity.
“At first, I thought this was a parody,” Risen told me. Unfortunately, it wasn’t. Even more unfortunately, the lack of judgment it displays is all too common in the Times and throughout Big Journalism as mainstream media covers Donald Trump’s campaign for president.
“Harris and Trump Have Housing Ideas. Economists Have Doubts,” is the headline of the story he was angered by. If you pay attention to epidemic of “false equivalence” in the media — equalizing the unequal for the sake of looking fair — you might have had a sense of what was coming.
The story takes seriously Trump’s plan for the mass deportation of immigrants as part of his supposed “affordable housing” agenda.
Here’s some both-sidesing for you, as the paper of record describes Harris’s tax cuts to spur construction and grants to first-time home buyers, and Trump’s deportation scheme.
“Their two visions of how to solve America’s affordable housing shortage have little in common …But they do share one quality: Both have drawn skepticism from outside economists.” The story notes that experts are particularly skeptical about Trump’s idea, but the story’s framing and its headline certainly equate the two.
There’s only one reason I disagree with Risen’s reaction. He wrote: “This story is unbelievable.”
I wish.
Stories like this run rampant in the Times, and far beyond. It matters more in the Times because — even in this supposed “post-media era” — the country’s biggest newspaper still sets the tone and wields a great deal of influence. And, of course, the Times has tremendous resources, a huge newsroom and the ability to hire the best in the business. Undeniably, it does a lot of excellent work.
But its politics coverage often seems broken and clueless — or even blatantly pro-Trump. There’s so much of this false-balance nonsense in the Times that there’s a Twitter (X) account devoted to mocking it, called New York Times Pitchbot.
Sometimes, sadly, it’s hard to tell the difference between the satire and the reality. Hence, Risen’s parody line.
At the same time, when Trump does something even more outrageous than usual, the mainstream press can’t seem to give it the right emphasis. Last week, NPR broke the news that Trump and his campaign staff apparently violated federal law — and every norm of decency — by trying to film a campaign video at Arlington National Cemetery and getting into a scuffle with a dutiful cemetery employee.
Of course, the story got picked up elsewhere and got significant attention. But did it get the huge and sustained treatment that — let’s just say — Hillary Clinton’s email practices did in 2016? Definitely not, as a former Marine, Ben Kesling, wrote in Columbia Journalism Review:
“Lumped together, the reporting this week left readers and listeners, especially with no knowledge of the military, at a loss to understand what actually happened — and crucially, why it mattered so much. The Trump campaign had successfully muddied the waters by alleging that the photographer had been invited to the event by family members of soldiers buried there.”
It came off, he wrote, “like a bureaucratic mix-up or some tedious violation of protocol,” not a deeply disrespectful moral failure, which it surely was. “The sacred had been profaned.”
The political cartoonist Darrin Bell, however, certainly got the point across in a time-lapse video cartoon. Check it out here.
Why does this keep happening, not just in the Times but far beyond?
Nearly 10 years after Trump declared his candidacy in 2015, the media has not figured out how to cover him. (My last major piece in the Washington Post laid out how coverage should change if Trump decided to run again, and I’ve also written recommendations here from the Media and Democracy Project.)
And what’s more — what’s worse — they don’t seem to want to change. Editors and reporters, with a few exceptions, really don’t see the problem as they normalize Trump. Nor do they appear to listen to valid criticism. They may not even be aware of it, or may think, “well, when both sides are mad at us, we must be doing it right.” Maybe they simply fear being labeled liberal.
All of this matters immensely as the extraordinarily important campaign for president heads into its last couple of months. I’ll be continuing to monitor coverage here, and trying to find ways to improve it.
Warm thanks to all subscribers for your support and attention. I know you care about the relationship between the press and our fragile democracy, as I do. Let me know in the comments below what you’re seeing in the media that’s praiseworthy, as well as deserving of criticism. (A hat tip here to my friend Jeff Perrotti, who always encourages me to be more positive; he has taught courses in positive psychology at Harvard.)
What gives you hope? What gives you a headache? What did you think of Dana Bash’s CNN interview with Kamala Harris?
I hope you’ve had a good summer and are enjoying the Labor Day weekend. I will spend some of it preparing for the journalism-ethics course I’ll teach this fall to graduate students at Columbia University. Wish me luck!