From newsrooms, living rooms and war rooms alike, a consensus emerges: Journalists did not cover this election, or President-elect Trump, correctly. By not covering him as a serious candidate from the get-go, and by stereotyping his supporters, everyone from national newspapers to cable TV failed to fully measure up on delivering coverage of the now president-elect.
But let’s be careful. Responsible reporters strive for fairness, and this election cycle has rattled them. The way they’ve begun to correct themselves, however, is admitting to not being “neutral” or “balanced” enough. To correct this, they have started to bring on more voices and to create an equal legitimacy for spokespeople from each political camp.
Talk show hosts, columnists and more have begun to give weight and legitimacy to “each side” of the Trump phenomenon. Republican victors on one side set the field goal of acceptable dialogue, and the moderate Republicans or Democrats on the other side accept this, while reporters have tried to find the point equidistant between them.
This is not how fair coverage is created. The point equidistant between two arbitrary points is not the truth. By allowing the fringe part of a political party to set the bounds of the “Right” wing — and allowing whoever opposes that to constitute the other side — journalists cede control of the truth.
This comes out of a long history of “point-counterpoint” journalism, which did often succeed in fostering deep dialogue on the issues that Americans cared about. Many journalists largely relied on a balanced approach, because major ideological camps held fairly strict internal standards over the limits of socially — and politically — acceptable standards of their representatives. Today, those we would consider to be standard-setters on the right (like John McCain, George W. Bush, Colin Powell) have been tossed aside by the new Trump establishment.
In other words, this model worked well to allow journalists to sift through elegantly-expressed, largely fact-checked, persuasive information produced from both the right and left in past political cycles.
This time, though, when parties are fracturing and truth seems negotiable, we need scrupulous journalists covering the federal government more than ever. If they want to be fair, that means drawing from more context on policy and ideas from history, more thoughtfully collected testimonies from average voters and rigorous fact-checking.
The new age of “fair” journalism is going to be much less about finding a center-point between two ideological tales and much more about tireless investigative reporting.
We need to keep a laser focus on facts and history and worry a whole lot less about a balance of rhetoric. We’re inclined to say that Christiane Amanpour, who has fairly covered wars and atrocities the world round, has delineated this line pretty clearly. Regarding her past coverage of the war in Yugoslavia, she has defended her coverage: “I’m not neutral between victim and aggressor.”
