Balance, Fairness and a Proudly Provocative Presidential Candidate
8th August 2016
Jim Rutenberg, proud Voice of the Crust, takes the mask off.
If you’re a working journalist and you believe that Donald J. Trump is a demagogue playing to the nation’s worst racist and nationalistic tendencies, that he cozies up to anti-American dictators and that he would be dangerous with control of the United States nuclear codes, how the heck are you supposed to cover him?
Because if you believe all of those things, you have to throw out the textbook American journalism has been using for the better part of the past half-century, if not longer, and approach it in a way you’ve never approached anything in your career. If you view a Trump presidency as something that’s potentially dangerous, then your reporting is going to reflect that. You would move closer than you’ve ever been to being oppositional. That’s uncomfortable and uncharted territory for every mainstream, nonopinion journalist I’ve ever known, and by normal standards, untenable.
In other words, so-called journalistic objectivity is just a Clever Plastic Disguise that applies only when the ‘news’ doesn’t get too far beyond the Narrative.
It’s much dodgier for conventional news reporters to treat this year’s political debate as one between “normal” and “abnormal,” as the Vox editor in chief Ezra Klein put it recently.
In a sense, that’s just what reporters are doing. And it’s unavoidable. Because Mr. Trump is conducting his campaign in ways we’ve not normally seen.
In other words, it’s All Trump’s Fault for being such an outlier that it forces, forces ‘journalists’ to dump impartiality and support the Narrative. Yup. All Trump’s Fault.
For a proper fisking, go here.