The Media Is Finally Calling Trump Out. But Is It Too Late?

The double standard Kamala Harris is being held to by the media is mind numbing

LEFT: Republican presidential nominee, former U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally. Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images. RIGHT: A view of The New York Times building in New York City. Photo by Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images.

Donald Trump has devoted his entire political life to undermining the credibility of the media.

He dubbed mainstream media outlets “fake news” or “the enemy of the American people”—or both, as he did in this hall of fame tweet a couple of years into his presidency.

It is a well-worn tactic of dictators, of course, to call into question the entire notion of truth, and to set up the canard that the media cannot be trusted and that he alone is the one source of real truth. 

But it is also a decades long project of the American right, dating as far back as 1964 when Barry Goldwater castigated the “Eastern Liberal Press.” And while Goldwater would go on to a landslide loss that year, per CNN:

Yet even in defeat, he’d pioneered an argument that would become a staple of Republican campaigns: the US media favored Democrats and liberals, and skewed their reporting to help their preferred candidate.

As long as I can remember, Republicans have whined about the “liberal media.” 

It is not to be trusted, except when saying something positive about Trump or critical about his opponents. Then, hey, if even the “fake news” said it, it must be true!

But over the past year, doesn’t it seem like this very same “liberal media” has simply thrown up its hands and surrendered to the right? Its coverage of Trump versus its coverage of Democrats is almost comically distorted (looking at you, New York Times.) It’s as though the media has made the calculation, “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.” The ridiculous double standards and lack of accountability for Trump’s lies and authoritarian threats have served to normalize a candidate who should be disqualified as radically unfit for any office. Yet here we are.

In today’s piece, I’ll take a look at the ways the media has held Kamala Harris—and before her Joe Biden—to an absurdly higher standard than they’ve ever held Donald Trump. And while there are some outlets scrambling to correct for the error late in the game, with less than a month until election day, has the damage already been done?

Et Tu New York Times?

As a younger man, Donald Trump famously had a fixation on being accepted by The New York Times set. And by all indications, mission accomplished.

Of all media outlets this election cycle, The Times best exemplifies the double standard by which Democrats have been judged compared to Trump. 

We all recall the fixation this Winter and Spring on Joe Biden’s age and mental capacity, even as Trump, just three years Biden’s junior, spouted disjointed nonsense from his rally stages and even touted having passed a cognitive test that is actually a test for dementia. 

How can we forget this gem from the Opinion pages:

Or this classic:

UPenn’s CSSLab tried to quantify whether The Times really did publish a disproportionate number of stories about Joe Biden’s age. And what they found was quite damning.

During the week that the Special Counsel’s report came out, we examined the top 20 articles on the Times’ landing page every four hours. In that time, they published 26 unique articles about Biden’s age, of which 1 of them explored the possibility that Trump’s age was of equal or more concern. This seems like a lot of articles in a short amount of time, but it’s hard to say whether or not it is excessive without some other equally relevant issue to compare it with.

Helpfully, an obvious comparison arose when, on February 10, 2024, Trump announced that if he regained power he would pull the US out of NATO and even encourage Russian invasions of democratic allies if their financial commitments were not to his liking. This announcement that Trump would upend the world’s core military alignment of the last 75+ years, garnered 10 unique articles in the timeframe. The figure below charts all of these unique articles (and 1 which covers both topics) and how long they stayed in the top 20.

Concluding:

We believe that the choice of the Times to publish almost three times as many articles about Biden’s age as about Trump pulling the US out of NATO represents a clear example of biased coverage. In turn, this choice misinforms the NYTs millions of readers about the relative value of these topics and their underlying facts.

This is certainly hard to dispute:

It would take the Times until October 6 to publish an article titled “Trump’s Speeches, Increasingly Angry and Rambling, Reignite the Question of Age.”

In it they wrote:

Former President Donald J. Trump vividly recounted how the audience at his climactic debate with Vice President Kamala Harris was on his side. Except that there was no audience. The debate was held in an empty hall. No one “went crazy,” as Mr. Trump put it, because no one was there.

Anyone can misremember, of course. But the debate had been just a week earlier and a fairly memorable moment. And it was hardly the only time Mr. Trump has seemed confused, forgetful, incoherent or disconnected from reality lately. In fact, it happens so often these days that it no longer even generates much attention.

Ah, ya don’t say. 

So what has fueled such bizarrely divergent standards of coverage from the so-called paper of record? Back in April, we got an inside understanding of what was fueling the anti-Biden lean of The Times:

Could it really be just that petty?

According to Politico, yes:

the newspaper carries its own singular obsession with the president, aggrieved over his refusal to give the paper a sit-down interview that Publisher AG Sulzberger and other top editors believe to be its birthright.

And from the perspective of Biden’s team:

they see the Times falling short in a make-or-break moment for American democracy, stubbornly refusing to adjust its coverage as it strives for the appearance of impartial neutrality, often blurring the asymmetries between former President Donald Trump and Biden when it comes to their perceived flaws and vastly different commitments to democratic principles.

“Democrats believe in the importance of a free press in upholding our democracy, and the NYT was for generations an important standard bearer for the fourth estate,” said Kate Berner, who worked on Biden’s 2020 campaign and then as deputy White House communications director before departing last year. “The frustration with the Times is sometimes so intense because the Times is failing at its important responsibility.”

The Times’ disparate coverage of the race has since carried over post-Biden to affect how it covers Kamala Harris.

Just look at these headlines, posted on October 9, juxtaposing its imposition of a high bar for Harris while giving Trump a pass, indeed, with a take that makes him seem downright thoughtful.

Stuart Stevens puts it well:

This is all the more maddening because the newspaper is clearly aware of the danger Trump poses.

In their September 30th endorsement of Kamala Harris, the Times called her “the only patriotic choice for president.”

And the editorial board absolutely eviscerated Trump.

It is hard to imagine a candidate more unworthy to serve as president of the United States than Donald Trump. He has proved himself morally unfit for an office that asks its occupant to put the good of the nation above self-interest. He has proved himself temperamentally unfit for a role that requires the very qualities — wisdom, honesty, empathy, courage, restraint, humility, discipline — that he most lacks.

Those disqualifying characteristics are compounded by everything else that limits his ability to fulfill the duties of the president: his many criminal charges, his advancing age, his fundamental lack of interest in policy and his increasingly bizarre cast of associates.

This unequivocal, dispiriting truth — Donald Trump is not fit to be president — should be enough for any voter who cares about the health of our country and the stability of our democracy to deny him re-election.

For this reason, regardless of any political disagreements voters might have with her, Kamala Harris is the only patriotic choice for president.

So why uplift Trump at all?

The Double Standard 

After complaining ad nauseam that Harris was avoiding the media—even after she and Tim Walz sat down with Dana Bash and even as she regularly took questions from reporters on the tarmac—it turns out, doing interviews isn’t what the media wanted after all.

The goalposts keep shifting.

Even after Harris announced she would be embarking on a media blitz that included 60 Minutes, The View, and Stephen Colbert, sit-downs with Howard Stern and Alex Cooper of the Call Her Daddy podcast, as well as a Univision townhall, not to mention Tim Walz on Fox News…Politico just couldn’t help itself, writing

“After avoiding the media for neigh [sic] on her whole campaign, Kamala Harris is … still largely avoiding the media. The VP is set for a series of interviews that likely won't press her on tough issues, even as voters want more specifics.”

The double standard was galling.

See below how Politico Playbook just had to get a dig in at Harris while never once mentioning that Donald Trump canceled his appearance with 60 Minutes.

The New York Times took it further, complaining that Harris is being evasive:

Her media swing provided a glimpse into how she often responds to unpleasant questions without answering them, questions the very premise of questions she finds unfair and can take it upon herself to reword a query she considers unhelpful.

Ms. Harris, 59, can turn the typically defensive crouch of a non-answer into a bit of verbal jujitsu, as she did in declining the opportunity to identify Mr. Netanyahu as an ally. She can nimbly field a query and quickly lace her reply with trip wire for her opponent, as she did last month in her debate with former President Donald J. Trump.

A trained prosecutor, Ms. Harris is lawyerly, argumentative and fundamentally defensive. She often deflects or sidesteps. She can speak passionately about her values in a way that leaves listeners feeling as if the question had been acknowledged, even if the substance remained unaddressed. To avoid delineating her stance on some issues, she will instead focus on her dedication to progress and inclusion.

Robert Reich noted this as well in his Substack:

“She keeps answering the question she wants, not the one that was asked,” writes Michael Bender for The New York Times — as if Bender has found in Harris a notably new trait among politicians, as if candidates for office usually answer questions they are asked rather than questions they want to answer…

The media is applying a vicious double standard here — letting Trump get away scot-free with his salads of meaningless blather while holding Harris to an unrealistic standard of cogency and candor.

Reich is absolutely right:

She “often responds to unpleasant questions without answering them, questions the very premise of questions she finds unfair and can take it upon herself to reword a query she considers unhelpful.”

Oh, please. That’s what a smart candidate does.

In a both-sides-ism for the ages, the Times does acknowledge Donald Trump’s own…limitations in this area within the same article:

Mr. Trump continues to shatter the norms of generally accepted practices of political communications. He is known for defending blatant lies. He rambles and reverts to nearly decade-old slogans to avoid answering a question. He regularly sheds a prodigious amount of exaggerations and falsehoods. After two presidential campaigns in which he took pride in ignoring fact-checkers, he has recently refused to participate in interviews or debates that include fact-checking.

The roughly three dozen interviews Mr. Trump has given in the past five weeks have been almost exclusively with conservative outlets or with hosts who are openly supportive of his White House bid. He has declined an invitation for a second debate with Ms. Harris, and canceled an interview he had previously agreed to with “60 Minutes.”

Yet it is quite telling that the headline of the Times article reads:

In Interviews, Kamala Harris Continues To Bob And Weave

Nothing about Trump. Funny how that works.

We’ve Seen This Movie Before

The reason all of this is so concerning, besides the obvious implications of how Harris is covered by the legacy media, is that we saw in 2016 the way the media’s coverage of Hillary Clinton helped seal the Electoral College deal for Trump in the closing days of that campaign. 

On October 28, 2016, FBI Director James Comey sent Congress a letter informing it that the DOJ had reopened an investigation into Clinton’s email server.

On October 2, 2024, Judge Tanya Chutkan unsealed a new indictment from DOJ special prosecutor Jack Smith in the case charging Trump with corruptly attempting to overturn the results of the free and fair 2020 election.

How did coverage of these two events compare year to year? 

Pretty much says it all.

The good news is that this isn’t 2016. During that election eight years ago, both candidates had universal name recognition and were historically disliked by the electorate.

In 2024, while Harris is still working on introducing herself to voters after an abbreviated campaign, she has positive favorability ratings and according to a new Gallup poll is trusted on questions of likability, trustworthiness, and moral character.

But yes, voters do tell pollsters they feel like they still don’t know the Vice President. And whose fault is that…?

Perhaps if the media did fewer process stories and more substantive reporting on Harris’s extensive economic agenda, including her proposal to give a $6,000 tax credit to new parents, her proposal to give $25,000 in downpayment assistance for first-time homebuyers, and her proposal to allow Medicare to cover home health care for seniors, perhaps voters WOULD feel like they had enough information about her.

Just a thought.

Fortunately, the media is not all hopeless. Some members of the media refuse to fall for the false equivalencies and double standards, holding Trump and Republicans to just a basic journalistic standard.

Case in point:

CNN's Kate Bolduan calling out Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt for Trump’s hypocrisy over FEMA funds.

CNN’s Jim Acosta shutting down an interview with Trump aide Corey Lewandowski for his refusal to pronounce Kamala correctly.

Brian Stelter on CNN calling out right-wing lies about the government’s hurricane response:

We need more people like Democratic commentator Kaivan Shroff calling News Nation out for this double standard directly to their faces.

Bravo, sir!

We could use much more of this in the final weeks of the campaign. But one has to wonder, is this too little too late to erase the damage the media has already done? They have already dangerously normalized a criminal con man grifter, making him just a coin flip away from the White House.

If Trump regains office, a substantial part of the blame will rest with our media, just as it did in 2016. How they sleep at night knowing this is beyond comprehension.