is the title of this column by Paul Krugman currently available on the website of The New York Times. He explains the intent of his piece in the first paragraph:
How will the news media handle the battle between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump? I suspect I know the answer — and it’s going to be deeply frustrating. But maybe, just maybe, flagging some common journalistic sins in advance can limit the damage. So let’s talk about what can and probably will go wrong in coverage — but doesn’t have to.
He then warns us of the kinds of journalistic malpractice that we can expect, for example, making the race seem close than it is in order to have a more interesting story He reminds us that we have seen this already in the primary, noting we have seen it
in suggestions that the startling outcome of the fight for the Republican nomination somehow means that polls and other conventional indicators of electoral strength are meaningless.
The polls for the Republican race have for a long time shown Trump in a strong position, and over time, gaining strength.
Here I would offer a caution before going on — those same polls also showed Trump with high negatives even among likely Republican voters, including a significant percentage who said they would never vote for him. During the primary those numbers changed, and now a majority of Republicans say they will support him, something that will be reinforced by the reluctant support of an increasing number of major Republican figures.
Why am I focusing on this? Because Krugman argues that the polls at least now are not for the most part showing what would be a close race in the general election.
So while I agree with the general thrust about Krugman’s post, on journalistic malpractice, let me take a few minutes to offer some observations about polls.
Polls are samples, and thus subject to errors. Well-designed polls from a variety of pollsters showing similar patterns are less likely to be erroneous. But they are snapshots in one moment of time, and not necessarily predictive of what might happen even several weeks out. They can change over time as the result of new information, of greater focus, of learning negative or positive information about one or the other candidate that were not previously well known. They can be influenced by gaffes, which is one reason we see a lot of journalistic focus on the perception of same. And yes, they can be influenced by aggressive negative advertising by an opponent.
Let’s consider that last. There is little that can negatively impact Hillary Clinton, unless it is not something that has been part of the picture of her over her more than 2 decades in the national spotlight. She is “known.” Much of the image is false, the result of memes repeated over and over as a means of attempting to diminish her as a political figure. The same cannot yet be said of either of the two figures officially remaining in the race, the probable Republican Donald Trump and the unlikely Democrat Bernie Sanders. The public perception of both is still subject to further deterioration as a result of negative attacks.
That said, there is no doubt that Trump has a major problem in that for many groups they have already formed a fairly fixed image of him, one that is highly negative. It is true that we saw him overcome his negatives among Republican primary voters, but it seems unlikely that he will be able to do so among Latinos, African-Americans, most women, and young people. No matter how Trump tries to pivot and explain himself, he has a real problem, one Timothy Egan notes in another column in today's Times:
if you were disliked by two-thirds of American women, 73 percent of nonwhites, 70 percent of voters under age 35 and 67 percent of college graduates, you’d feel some urgency to dial back his inner Sarah Palin.
Here we get to what is important about how the media functions. Krugman reminds us of the dangers of the kind of journalism we far too often see, whether one might describe it as both sides do it, or as on the one hand and on the other hand — it is a false equivalency, often justified in the name of “journalistic balance.” As Krugman write about the current campaign and the two presumptive nominees on their economic ideas
one candidate is engaged in wildly irresponsible fantasy while the other is being quite careful with her numbers. But beware of news analyses that, in the name of “balance,” downplay this contrast.
He says to expect a similar problem on a critical matter:
And what about less quantifiable questions about behavior? I’ve already seen pundits suggest that both presumptive nominees fight dirty, that both have taken the “low road” in their campaigns.
For Krugman, the malicious comments about Rafael Cruz are not the same as Clinton suggesting after the New York Daily News Interview that Sanders had not done all his homework.
And one key for Krugman, as it was for Egan, can be seen in these words:
Finally, I can almost guarantee that we’ll see attempts to sanitize the positions and motives of Trump supporters, to downplay the racism that is at the heart of the movement and pretend that what voters really care about are the priorities of D.C. insiders — a process I think of as “centrification.”
Krugman makes clear something anyone paying close attention already knows — that the mainstay of Trump’s support
a movement of white men angry that they no longer dominate American society the way they used to. And to pretend otherwise is to give both the movement and the man who leads it a free pass.
Krugman does not think that “bad reporting” — including on topics like this — are likely to influence the outcome of the election. He suggests that the angry white men concerned about the diminution of their role are right
America is increasingly becoming a racially diverse, socially tolerant society, not at all like the Republican base, let alone the plurality of that base that chose Donald Trump.
Lindsay Graham commented on this during the early part of the primary season when he said
We're not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.
I might note that these words were from a candidate who in a private event had joked
If I get to be president, white men who are in male-only clubs are going to do great in my presidency
although he claimed he was only poking fun at the membership of the Hibernian Society where he was speaking.
I think there is another reason the statements Trump has made will prevent the media from the normal false equivalency, that they will be forced to remind the public of the atrociousness of both the words and actions of Donald Trump: the Clinton campaign is already putting out ads, and has made clear they will continue to do so, ads, that use Trumps own words in this primary season, for starters. During the primary we did not see Trump’s opponents either use their ads in such a fashion or in a consistent way raise the issue in debates. In part that was because it was a multi-candidate setting, where if candidate A attacks candidate B both suffer while candidate C or D or … gets the benefit. It was also because Trump is very much a counter-puncher, and most of his opponents were not used to being hit as Trump did, and were not prepared to challenge his attacks directly as lies and distortions. In the general he is facing one opponent, and Hillary Rodham Clinton is quite used to being attacked in all sorts of fashion and one would assume is prepared to respond by playing back Trump’s words against him.
I would also note that Trump has not YET been fully vetted by the press. Particularly if the polls continue to show his problems, we are likely to see people more willing to speak — on or off the record — about his behavior in his business career, a behavior such that many who say he can be charming in social settings will have nothing to do with him in business.
And it probably will not help Trump that the very week of the Republican convention, civil suit cases begin in both LA and NY — the media capitals of the nation — about Trump “University.”
If the media is concerned about ratings and eyeballs, they already know that covering Trump has provided that. I might suggest that covering his past behavior would give them just as many.
But since I began with words of Krugman, let me finish in a similar fashion, with his final paragraph, which is cautionary:
Still, the public has a right to be properly informed. The news media should do all it can to resist false equivalence and centrification, and report what’s really going on.
If they do, the country will be guaranteed to be safe from the horrors of a possible Trump presidency.