False equivalence has become a major issue this campaign cycle, given the gulf that separates the presidential candidates’ policy knowledge and relationship to the truth. Now, the New York Times’ public editor, Liz Spayd, has tackled the subject, and has somehow managed to be worse than her newspaper’s many offenses in this category, producing a piece that leaves one staring in befuddlement that this is the person a major newspaper chose to be its go-between with readers. Spayd focuses on the Times’ reporting on the Clinton Foundation, arguing that it “started with a legitimate issue.” But!
On the other hand, some foundation stories revealed relatively little bad behavior, yet were written as if they did. That’s not good journalism. But I suspect the explanation lies less with making matchy-matchy comparisons of the two candidates’ records than with journalists losing perspective on a line of reporting they’re heavily invested in.
So … it’s not an attempt to make Hillary Clinton seem on par with Donald Trump ethically, it’s just that our reporters and editors got so “heavily invested” in investigating one of the candidates that they “lost perspective” and produced “not good journalism.” She seems to be offering the defense that they’re just terrible at their jobs, not trying to suggest that the Clinton Foundation is as big a problem as, say, Trump’s ties to a white supremacist movement. Even if that is what they suggested, whether or not they were trying to do so. And, Spayd suggests, shut up about it because it’ll be fine:
If Trump is unequivocally more flawed than his opponent, that should be plenty evident to the voting public come November. But it should be evident from the kinds of facts that bold and dogged reporting unearths, not from journalists being encouraged to impose their own values to tip the scale.
Which might be true if editors were assigning bold reporters to report doggedly about facts they’ve unearthed about Trump. But just about the only major newspaper reporter doing bold and dogged reporting to unearth facts about Donald Trump is the Washington Post’s David Fahrenthold, and the Times isn’t even mostly picking up on the stories he breaks, however significant they are.
Here’s another way to look at it: If all the big Times investigations are on the Clinton Foundation, or Hillary Clinton’s email … well, first, that doesn’t leave a lot of room for bold and dogged reporting on Trump, and second, there are values being imposed there to tip the scale. For instance, as Barbara Morrill detailed, the Times has dedicated far more attention to covering the inability of the husband of a Clinton staffer to keep it in his pants than it has to Trump having made an illegal political contribution to the Florida attorney general as she was considering whether to investigate him for fraud—an investigation she decided not to pursue just days after that contribution. If you judge by the Times coverage, the illegal contribution isn’t even equivalent to the staffer’s husband’s dick pics.
Talk to me again about reporting facts through bold and dogged reporting? False equivalence might be something for this newspaper to aspire to!