Lost in space: Media election coverage of Trump, Clinton in a free fall
We are lost in space.
We have arrived at a point in the presidential campaign in which no one believes what either candidate says, and no one trusts what the media report about them.
Thus the campaign for the most important job in the world has turned into a kind of free for all — or is it free fall? Fragmentation of media and a wall between ideologies more effective than anything Donald Trump could dream of building have resulted in a bizarre scenario in which real news and legitimate reporting mean little or nothing, but a Fox News personality's second-hand TV-based diagnosis of a coughing fit carries real weight.
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The candidates have not helped themselves or anyone else on this front. Hillary Clinton's distaste for the media and her ultra-controlled access give us little insight into what she is like. So when she turns out to have pneumonia, her opponents can more openly question what else she may be hiding – and a hungry media takes the idea and runs with it.
Trump, on the other hand ... well, he’s Trump. Win or lose, his candidacy will be studied for many reasons — his pandering to an entire group of people who are angry and scared with imaginary solutions, his bigotry, his boasting — and the media's strange willingness to play along with it. (People complained that Clinton left her media pool behind when she fell ill at the 9/11 ceremony Sunday that touched off the pneumonia revelation. Trump doesn't even have a media pool.)
The media hasn’t really helped itself, either. Matt Lauer was rightly and roundly lambasted for his separate interviews at a recent presidential forum with Clinton and Trump, in which he seemed unprepared and out of touch with what each candidate was saying. And no matter how you feel about Clinton, even a casual observer would have to conclude he went tougher on her.
The next big media event is the first debate, coming up on Monday, Sept. 26. The Republican debates were a verbal food fight, with Trump dishing out the biggest pile of mashed potatoes. It’s how this thing is done, the media said — these things will sort themselves out.
And so they did.
It’s not as if all the recent presidential debates were some sort of Lincoln-Douglas model of civility. (Those debates, by the way, were for the U.S. Senate, not the presidency. And the format has changed just a little: One candidate would speak for 60 minutes, the other for 90, then the first had 30 minutes for rebuttal. Tough to sell ads for that show. Or stomach any candidate for that length.)
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So what can we expect? Honestly, at this point anyone who tries to tell you with any kind of certainty is lying or deluded. It was, however, troubling to hear Fox News’ Chris Wallace, who will moderate the Oct. 19 debate, tell the network’s Howie Kurtz, “I do not believe it is my job to be a truth squad. It’s up to the other person to catch them on that.”
Sadly, his view of the job appears to be one shared by many media outlets, particularly on television.
And it’s dead wrong.
Of course it is his job, and the job of all of us in the media, to be a truth squad. We have no other job. And that is where we have come up short, particularly in regards to Trump. He makes outrageous claims and we validate them by reporting on them, by giving them voice.
Clinton certainly doesn’t cloak herself in civility when she says half of Trump’s followers can be put in the basket of “deplorables.” Still, though her wording is unfortunate, it’s a statement of opinion — and her assertion that Trump attracts racists, homophobes, etc., is not news to anyone who has seen one of his rallies. Whatever you want to call it, it’s not a wholesale misrepresentation of facts.
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It’s been ugly, on all sides. It’s difficult to think it won’t get worse. And it is unrealistic to think that the media will have a sudden change of heart and, despite Wallace’s absurd description of his work, go back to doing their job — the truth-squad one.
The presidential election will be over on Tuesday, Nov. 8 (assuming it’s not too close to call). Who will win? Who knows? The question beyond that, though, is how long it will take the media to recover. Or will it?
Reach Goodykoontz at bill.goodykoontz@arizonarepublic.com. Facebook: facebook.com/GoodyOnFilm. Twitter: twitter.com/goodyk.