How Media’s “Fairness” Helped Elect Donald Trump

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One might expect journalism majors to emerge from school determined to call a fact a fact, a non-fact a lie, and a fool a fool.  But that is not what seems to happen.  Objectivity seems to be what they are taught to seek.  This objectivity, at its best, is what was just described, at its worst, it is merely reporting on contrasting opinions.  Balance in reporting opposing views is seen as a path to “fairness.”  But not all views are of equal value, so presenting two sides of an issue is not necessarily fair.  In fact, it can be decidedly unfair when an acknowledged expert on one side is contrasted with a crackpot on the other as if both were equals.  This is the easiest path for a reporter or editor to take, and they too often take it.

Paul Starr wrote a review of a couple of books on the health of journalism in this country, both as a business and as a public service.  It appeared in the New York Review of Books as  Fall from Grace. One of the books reviewed was Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics by Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts.  These authors studied news media over the past few years to assess how political news was treated and how it was propagated.

“In Network Propaganda, Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts illuminate this new “media ecosystem” through an analysis of how political news was linked, liked, and shared from 2015 to 2018 and how the news media either amplified or checked the diffusion of falsehoods. The study is based on four million political stories from 40,000 online sources, as well as case studies of conspiracy stories, rumors, and outright disinformation.”

Their study concluded that the left and the right were two different beasts in how news was created and propagated, making balance and “fairness” something quite problematic as a concept.

“The pattern that emerges from the data contradicts the idea that there are two symmetrical echo chambers on the right and left. On the right, Benkler and his colleagues find an insular echo chamber skewed toward the extreme, where even the major news organizations (Fox and Breitbart) do not observe norms of truth-seeking. But from the center-right (for example, The Wall Street Journal) through the center to the left, they find an interconnected network of news organizations that operate under the constraint of established journalistic norms.”

Fake news tends to be suppressed and not propagated by organizations that actually check facts before printing things.  That is the way it works on the left according to the study.  But on the right, there is an industry focused on creating and propagating fake news.

“On the right, major news organizations amplified stories concocted in the right’s nether reaches, such as Pizzagate (Democrats were purportedly operating a child-trafficking ring out of a pizza shop in Washington) and the Seth Rich murder conspiracy (an aide at the Democratic National Committee was killed supposedly because he divulged its e-mails to WikiLeaks). False stories originated on the left as well, but they were generally not relayed to a wider public. The right-wing media failed to correct falsehoods or to hold their journalists accountable for spreading them, whereas the rest of the media checked one another, corrected mistakes when they made them, and in several cases disciplined or fired those responsible for errors.”

“These differences contributed to the greater susceptibility on the right not only to home-grown propaganda but also to Russian disinformation and commercially fabricated clickbait whenever these were consistent with what the authors call the ‘tribal narrative’.”

Although most of the media had good intentions, their interest in “fairness” led them to foolishly highlight many of the outrageous claims emerging from the far-right.

“In 2016, Benkler and his colleagues argue, the right was able to ‘harness’ the press to its cause because of journalists’ preoccupation with ‘balance’ and eagerness for scoops. They note that the press had an institutional problem: How would it maintain balance if reporters did hard-hitting stories about Trump? Borrowing from a study by Thomas E. Patterson, they conclude that the solution was to run equally hard-hitting stories about Hillary Clinton. Journalists ‘performed’ neutrality with harshly negative coverage of both candidates.”

The media countered many articles about real Trump misbehaviors with even more articles about “alleged” Clinton misbehaviors.  The net result was that Hillary Clinton was accorded more negative coverage than Donald Trump. 

“In fact, according to Patterson’s analysis, negative coverage of Clinton outpaced positive coverage 62 percent to 38 percent, while coverage of Trump was 56 percent negative to 44 percent positive.”

Even the New York Times comes under criticism for its treatment of Clinton.

“A clear instance of this pattern is the coverage of the Clinton Foundation. The Times entered into an arrangement that gave it advance access to Clinton Cash, a book by a Breitbart editor, Peter Schweizer, sponsored by a project founded by Schweizer and Steve Bannon and funded by Robert Mercer. The resulting Times article insinuated that in exchange for money for the Clinton Foundation, Hillary Clinton had enabled a Russian firm to acquire control of American uranium assets, even though the Times had no evidence that she had intervened in the decision to approve the deal, which a committee representing nine government agencies had made. The Times article and other overwrought and often misleading pieces in the mainstream press about the Clinton Foundation and the Clinton and DNC e-mails became some of the most widely shared news items in 2016, thus helping the Republican effort to depict Clinton and the Democrats as corrupt.”

The book provides this conclusion about the 2016 election.

“The negative mainstream coverage of Clinton, according to Network Propaganda, mattered far more than Russian disinformation to the outcome of the 2016 election.”

Paul Starr provides his own conclusion about the current state of journalism.

“But when so much of journalism is at risk of disappearing and so many Americans inhabit a right-wing echo chamber, we ought to recognize that our country is in a crisis that strikes at its foundations.”

 The interested reader might find the following articles informative:

Journalism: Objectivity, False Equivalence, and Extremism

The Making of the Fox News White House