As we get down to the wire, everyone’s sensitivities about fair or unfair coverage get rubbed raw by the proximity of actual election consequences. If he has succeeded at nothing else, President Trump has definitely amped up both the stakes of the coverage and people’s emotional response to it.
I am no exception. I have been alarmed how once again, the president has largely invented a story, the time an out-of-control “invasion” of the United States by a group of migrants. The press, this news organization included, has played along, insofar as the amount of attention that has been given to a subject of Trump’s selection. It is the amount of attention as much as the content of the event that concerns Trump, and one hopes, often in vain, for editors who see that.
I am also dismayed by supportive stories of speculation already making the case that Trump always somehow wins, even when he loses. We will be hearing enough of this from Trump himself after the election. There is no need to help him place the bar as low as he would like.
There have been more than a few stories about Trump’s outrageous and/or false claims on the campaign trail that do little more than repeat the claims. This gets at an inherent weak spot for the media, of feeling an obligation to report what happens, but Trump is exploiting that weakness maniacally. He knows full well that his interest lies in getting his statement repeated and thereby amplified, and it is painful indeed to see the media manipulated into helping him do his dirty work.
The goal of real campaign coverage should be to focus relentlessly on the stakes in terms of actual policy (see: climate change, please) rather than the tactics. It’s an old complaint.
But one real and damaging effect of tactical coverage of campaigns is that it encourages voter disengagement from real legislative agendas and the consequences. This process has been going on so long now that we have ended up with the vastly unrepresentative government we now have, as one side has been deliberately nurtured in its own ecosystem with fear and loathing, and the other side has been lulled into political atrophy with disheartening coverage implying that it’s all a game with both sides just as bad and nothing crucial at stake.
The functionally disenfranchised (Senate seat malapportionment, House district gerrymandering, repeated electoral-college and Supreme Court calls) are finally this year trying to overcome the significant impediments and reclaim a sliver of the actual power they are due in a democracy. The least the media could do would be to give them the kind of nontrivial coverage they deserve.
But regardless of what anyone says, go vote tomorrow and show them YOU mean business.
