COLIN MCENROE Are we all dancing to Trump’s tune?
When I got up on Friday morning, there was a nice email in my box from a man named Scott. Well, sort of nice. Scott appreciated last week’s column, which struck him as profound and thought- provoking; but he is “not a fan” and he avoids my column because of my “extreme bias” against President Donald Trump. If I could be more “even- handed,” perhaps more people would read me, he suggested, “including me.”
I get this a lot, although most of the time people are not as nice as Scott. I wrote back, thanking him for his nice words and then adding that I always find comments such as his puzzling: “I regard Trump as the most corrupt president since Harding. ( This is not an extreme or unusual view of him.) I regard him as more destructive of our civic norms than any president since Andrew Johnson. ( Also not a particularly niche view.) Why in the world would I be ‘ evenhanded’ about him?”
Scott probably has a job and/ or a set of duties that would have made it inconvenient for him to spend 62 minutes — as I did Thursday — watching the president address a White House East Room packed with toadies, grinning cowards and people Trump has broken to his will.
Unsurprisingly, the unscripted performance was full of lies, insults, profanity and relitigation of the 2016 election. What stood out a little more was his inability to stay with a single thought for more than 60 seconds. To call this presentation “rambling” would vastly overstate its coherence. It was like watching a housefly try to tell its life story through interpretive dance. If it had been a competency hearing, it would have ended with Trump as a ward of the state.
I watched this verbal explosion on Fox News while it also played nearby by on a screen tuned to CNN. I was sitting in a newsroom of Connecticut Public Radio, where the East Room rant also aired live, preempting my show.
I’m sure somebody said — because somebody always does — “Why are we carrying this?”
It’s a persistent question. Jay Rosen of NYU is probably the most important press critic in America today, and he regularly points out that it’s a mistake — a betrayal of mission, even — to air Trump speeches and rallies because it amounts to broadcasting falsehoods at such volume and velocity that we will never manage to set the record straight.
Rosen has also long argued that networks should not invite people such as Kellyanne Conway to speak on the air because she doesn’t provide reliable information and openly announced, from the jump, a strategy of “alternative facts.”
It’s an argument that, at every moment, feels enormously persuasive and demonstrably wrong; and that paradox is mirrored in what the public tells the press. Half of American thinks we created Trump, and the other half thinks we treat him like the Prince of Darkness.
They’re both right, which is why I spend a lot of time thinking I no longer know how to do my job. Look, it was never a simple job, but it went something like this: “Tell what you know and say what you think. Be prepared to buttress what you say with verifiable facts.”
But when we do that, Scott and many other people perceive “extreme bias.” Scott, by the way, said he didn’t vote for Trump. That’s not the issue for him. He’d just like to see people like me move a little closer to the center. Maybe split the difference once in a while. Be a little more fair.
Scott, you will be horrified to learn that some of the big thinkers of American journalism — Rosen, Margaret Sullivan of the
Washington Post, John Harris of Politico and David Leonhart of The New York Times — have begun to use the term “centrist bias.”
Centrist bias can be summed up in a line George Carlin used at the time of the O. J. Simpson murder trial. “I don’t like to judge. Maybe she really had it coming.”
Centrist bias is the assumption that each side of an argument begins with an equal claim on the truth. Sometimes that’s just not true.
Let’s take a simple example from this week. In his State of the Union address, Trump said, “I’ve also made an ironclad pledge to American families: We will also protect patients with pre- existing conditions.”
Perhaps it is true that Trump has made such a pledge, but it’s certainly not true that he intends to keep it. The Affordable Care Act is America’s first and only meaningful effort to protect the health insurance of patients with pre- existing conditions. Trump has done everything in his power to undo the ACA in Congress and in the courts. He has never proposed an alternative that would continue those protections.
So it would not be “fair” to treat this as a statement that somehow had a 50 percent chance of being true. It’s a lie, and a whopper at that. It’s saying “up” when you really mean “down.” It’s an attempt to mislead the public about the president’s past actions and future plans.
I can hear the opposing chorus. “But Hillary ...” “But Obama ...” “But all politicians.”
And here is where the case against centrist bias gets a little trickier. It’s true that politicians regularly lie and shade the truth. But it’s not true that opponents of Trump do it as much as he does. The Washington Post’s fact- checking operation tracks Trump’s lies and misleading claims and the rate at which he repeats them. As of Jan. 19, they had documented 16,241.
So, yes, all politicians lie, but to claim that Trump is no different from his peers is like equating a dusting of snow with full- on whiteout blizzard conditions.
Of course, Rosen would say I’ve made an additional mistake by treating statements emitted by the Trump administration as high priority news and as “facts” that need to be “checked.” He says the press should mainly report the truth about an issue such as health care: What’s really happening should be the meat and bread of the sandwich. A false claim about the issue — repeated again and again by the same person, even if that person is the president — is at best a shriveled bit of pickle in the sandwich. It’s not important.
In a way, Scott, you and Rosen agree. People like me spend way too much time dwelling on the lies and the damage of the Trump era. Even when we’re negative, we’re still dancing to his tune. We should ignore him and just tell you the truth.
It sounds so easy when I put it that way.