Media must do better to avoid claims of bias
Whenever I read something about Donald Trump, my eyes go straight to the credit line at the bottom of the story to see where it came from. If it’s sourced from the Washington Post or the New York Times, I read it with a degree of scepticism. These once-great newspapers have dangerously compromised their credibility by allowing their almost obsessive dislike of the American president to contaminate their reportage.
This is made worse by their tendency to allow fact and opinion to become so entangled that it’s hard to tell where one ends and the other starts. It’s open season on Trump, and many American journalists make it clear that they despise him.
I understand why they feel that way. I despise Trump, too, and worry about the damage his presidency might do to America and to the world. He’s a man who appears to have no moral compass and no respect for the truth.
He has also, consciously and deliberately, made an enemy of the media. The terrible mistake made by news organisations such as the Washington Post and the New York Times is that they have been suckered into playing his game.
There is always tension in the relationship between politicians and journalists, but it’s usually kept under control by both sides. Not so with Trump. He has weaponised public distrust of the media in much the same way as Robert Muldoon did in New Zealand 40 years ago.
Trump knows, as Muldoon did, that it can be politically advantageous to portray the media as biased and elitist. He plays this political card more blatantly and unscrupulously than even Muldoon did, repeatedly branding the American media as the enemy of the people.
Sadly, by buying into the adversarial relationship and adopting an openly hostile stance towards the White House, the media have perversely enhanced Trump’s political capital. He can point to their antagonistic coverage as proof that the liberal media can’t be trusted to report things fairly and accurately. This played well to his supporters on the campaign trail in 2016, and it continues to play well now.
And it has to be said that many journalists are elitist and out of touch – especially in the US, where the big media organisations are headquartered far from the neglected heartland where Trump’s support base is located. That helps to explain why the media so dismally failed to foresee Trump’s victory in the presidential election.
The best counter to Trump’s game, surely, is to do what reputable newspapers used to do as a matter of course: play it straight.
This doesn’t preclude journalists from documenting inconsistencies and obvious untruths, or from reporting the turmoil created by Trump’s erratic behaviour. Neither does it stop columnists and editorial writers from expressing themselves freely in opinion sections.
But tone is everything, and what passes for news coverage in papers like the Washington Post and the New York Times is often freighted with emotive rhetoric and laced with the reporter’s obvious contempt. In those circumstances, even readers who dislike Trump are entitled to wonder whether they are getting a reliable, unbiased account, or whether the media are reporting only what happens to align with their perception.
All of this leads me, in a roundabout way, to last month’s declaration by Patrick Crewdson, editor-inchief of Stuff, that his organisation will no longer give space to the views of people classified as climate change sceptics and ‘‘denialists’’.
OK, the parallel with Trump isn’t obvious, but Stuff’s stance does raise a serious question relating to trust in the media. When a news organisation decides to shut down comment on an issue as important as climate change on the basis that the debate is ‘‘settled’’, it assumes a position of omniscience that will rankle with many readers. But far more importantly, it raises doubts in readers’ minds about its commitment to free and open debate.
I would have thought the media faced enough challenges in the current environment without incurring accusations of elitist bias. That threatens to take us into Trump territory, and who wants to go there?
Trump knows . . . that it can be politically advantageous to portray the media as biased and elitist.
Editor’s note: Stuff has not shut down discussion on climate change, but we will not provide a forum for its factual existence to be countered with fictions and call it ‘‘balance’’. This is in line with our masthead’s longstanding editorial policy to only publish correspondence and opinions from readers and contributors that are based on fact.