Why Donald Trump faces 'unfair' media scrutiny, and how he's trying to take advantage of it

OregonLive ^ | August 15, 2016 | Douglas Perry 

Donald Trump complains relentlessly that the media doesn't treat him fairly. Reporters, he says, are "the most dishonest people."
That's a compelling argument, especially for his supporters. Fox News media critic Howard Kurtz, in a column last week about news coverage of Trump, insisted that for the mainstream press to line up "against one candidate in a presidential election can't be justified."
Ordinarily, that's a no-brainer statement for any self-respecting journalist. These are not ordinary times.
Kurtz, who plied his trade for the Washington Post and CNN before moving over to Rupert Murdoch's conservative news channel, pointed out that journalists' "credo is supposed to be fairness." Then he goes on to argue: "And now some of them are flat-out making the case for unfairness -- an unprecedented approach for an unprecedented campaign."
That's where Kurtz goes off the rails. The case that's being made isn't for unfairness. It's for facts and context. Reporters are making clear, for example, what Trump's various "dog whistle" call outs actually mean, so that even readers who aren't racists or dedicated Hillary Clinton haters understand what he's up to. It's called responsible journalism, and Kurtz knows this.
The latest example is the GOP nominee suggesting that assassination is the patriotic answer to Clinton winning the election in November. "If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks," Trump said last week. "Although, the Second Amendment people -- maybe there is, I don't know."
Trump backers have tried to insist that the candidate's meaning wasn't what it obviously was, and that's where good journalism comes in. Any decent reporter must acknowledge that Trump here is saying that "Second Amendment people" -- that is, gun-rights proponents -- could take matters into their own hands to stop a President Clinton. And many decent reporters are indeed acknowledging it.
"In one interview after another, (Trump spokesman Jason Miller) maintained that Trump was referring to 'voting power,' though it was clear that Trump had been talking about what 'Second Amendment people' could do after losing the vote," wrote The New Yorker's Evan Osnos. He added:
"At this stage, so little that Trump says shocks us, but, now and then, it is worth stepping back and regarding the full damage of it all: the wounds to our fading global image of openness and generosity; the stomping on our admiration for intelligence, eloquence, or honesty; and now the blithe contempt for safe and civil government."
So many of Trump's lies and misdirection are transparently ridiculous, such as his response to 50 Republican national-security professionals publishing an open letter in which they insist Trump "would be the most reckless president in American history." The candidate's reaction: "Well, I respond by saying that I wasn't using any of them and they would have loved to have been involved with the campaign."
But Trump's blithe contempt for truth as well as safe and civil government is having a destructive effect on public discourse and, worse still, public knowledge. A poll of North Carolina voters found that 69 percent of Trump supporters believe that if Clinton wins in November it will be because the election has been stolen. Trump has repeatedly warned that the system has been "rigged" to elect his Democratic opponent. Another recent poll determined that 72 percent of registered Republicans nationally -- 72 percent! -- don't believe President Barack Obama was born in the United States. Trump, of course, first rose to political prominence by leading the "birther" movement that has challenged Obama's citizenship and thus his right to be president, despite iron-clad evidence that the president was born in Hawaii.
As Trump has fallen behind in the polls, he and his backers have ratcheted up their efforts to undermine facts, insisting the problem isn't Trump's lies and obfuscations but the media's unfairness.
"You don't give him a fair shot," Trump surrogate and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani said last week in a CNN interview, referring to the media. "You take his words and you parse them and you take them apart." He added: "I don't think that the overwhelming majority of your profession is fair."
That has been Republican cant for the past few decades. What they want from reporters is for them to print Trump's words and, at worst, print the Clinton campaign's response to those words, and leave it at that. It's called he-said-she-said reporting, and it's widely viewed by political partisans as the gold standard for objective journalism. (CNN provided a classic he-said-she-said example last Thursday when it reported on Cheryl Mills interviewing Clinton Foundation director candidates in 2012 while she was Clinton's chief of staff at the state department. The segment offered Trump saying "Crooked Hillary" enriched herself through government service and the Clinton campaign insisting Mills was doing unpaid charity work that fell well within ethics rules. Were Mills' actions a conflict of interest? CNN didn't say.)
Such an approach simply is not adequate this election season, where facts and lies arguably are being spun together more aggressively than ever before. Writes New York University professor Jay Rosen in New York magazine: "I treat he-said-she-said reporting as a problem ... When a new study (about, say, health-care costs) comes out, and the hospital association says, 'Costs are decreasing,' and the consumer's group says, 'Actually, that's not true, costs are continuing to go up,' and you have to write a story by deadline, then he-said-she-said makes it writable. Then you don't have to know who's right. So a lot of times repetitive narratives, or lazy narratives, or devices like he-said-she-said, are substitutes for real knowledge."
Exactly. Political campaigns want he-said-she-said reporting because it allows them to offer their own spin without being challenged on it. But with Trump, unlike with health-care costs, the average reporter has real knowledge. Which is that Trump is a shameless liar who loves to use inflammatory and coded language that could be a real threat to our democracy. "Suggesting an election is going to be stolen, this is Third World dictatorship stuff," CNN's Brian Stelter recently said.
Even many Republicans recognize that Trump is not an ordinary candidate and cannot be treated as one by the press.
"The Muslim ban, the David Duke denial, the 'Mexican' judge flap, the draft dodger denigrating John McCain's military service, the son of privilege attacking an immigrant Gold Star mother and the constant revisionism and lying about past political positions taken are but a few of the lowlights that have punctuated Donald Trump's chaotic chase for the presidency," Joe Scarborough wrote in the Washington Post last week. The former Republican congressman and current co-host of MSNBC's "Morning Joe" talk show added, referring to the "Second Amendment people" comment: "A bloody line has been crossed that cannot be ignored. At long last, Donald Trump has left the Republican Party few options but to act decisively and get this political train wreck off the tracks before something terrible happens."
That's not going to happen, despite the growing discomfort of traditional Republicans. The political train wreck will continue to the end of the line.
Which is how it should be. Ultimately, this election isn't about what journalists or even unhappy Republicans have to say. It's about what voters have to say.
Occidental College politics professor Peter Dreier has encouraged voters to consider a famous phrase political theorist Hannah Arendt coined when writing about Nazi mass murderer Adolph Eichmann. "'Sociopathic' might describe Trump's condition, but it doesn't describe our condition as we routinely hear [outrageous] Trump statements on the campaign trail," Dreier wrote on The Huffington Post. "The only thing that comes close is philosopher Hannah Arendt's notion of the 'banality of evil.' ... The 'banality of evil' also applies to an entire society. We can get used to outrageous things -- slavery, Jim Crow segregation laws, massive homelessness, widespread malnutrition, the frequent killing of black men by police -- until we are provoked to view them as unjust."
Will American voters decide, however legitimately frustrated they might be about the economy and the political status quo, that Trump's outrageousness is unworthy of them? We'll find out come November.