If you’re in the camp that believes Hillary Clinton has received an unfair amount of unflattering coverage this election cycle, it’s not just your imagination. In an NPR piece this week, a data analytics firm called Quid surveyed text from about 7.5 million articles generated on some 300,000 news sites about the race. After scouring the news coverage, here’s what Quid found about each candidate’s controversies.
"Two-thirds of them were Donald Trump, one-third Hillary Clinton," [Quid marketing head Dan] Buczaczer says. "So Trump is the winner in terms of overall number of controversies generated." Though Clinton had fewer controversies, they still generated as much coverage as Trump's.
Right. Trump stirred up 66 percent of the controversy but through the process of “objective reporting,” Clinton’s 33 percent of the take still garnered an equivalent amount of the coverage.
Along the same lines, Trump’s outsized penchant for lying isn’t mere fable either. Paul Krugman noted that the orange windbag lies both far more outrageously and frequently than Clinton.
PolitiFact has examined 258 Trump statements and 255 Clinton statements and classified them on a scale ranging from “True” to “Pants on Fire.” One might quibble with some of the judgments, but they’re overwhelmingly in the ballpark. And they show two candidates living in different moral universes when it comes to truth-telling. Mr. Trump had 48 Pants on Fire ratings, Mrs. Clinton just six; the G.O.P. nominee had 89 False ratings, the Democrat 27.
On the plus side of the media landscape, it finally it appears that some major news outlets are coming to grips with the reality that Trump lies with abandon. New York Times editor Dean Baquet said as much this week when NPR interviewed him about the paper’s recent embrace of the word “lie” in association with Trump.
Politicians often exaggerate their records, obfuscate, say they did something great when it wasn't so great. I think in the last few weeks, [Trump’s] sort of crossed a little bit of a line where he's actually said things – I think the moment for me was the birther story, where he has repeated for years his belief that President Obama was not born in the United States. That's not an obfuscation, that's not an exaggeration. I think that was just demonstrably a lie, and I think that lie is not a word that newspapers use comfortably.
Baquet went on to declare that “we owed it to our readers” to make a more blunt assessment of Trump’s untruths.
The media’s birther awakening paired with NBC anchor Matt Lauer’s widely criticized performance as moderator of the “Commander in Chief Forum” gives me hope that future debate moderators might—just might—give Trump a little of the medicine they have until now reserved for Clinton.
For that to happen, we need three things:
- Truth: Some real-time fact checking of Trump’s lies on things like his supposed opposition to the Iraq War, the notion that Clinton started birtherism, and his claims that Clinton wants to take everyone’s guns away and entirely open our borders to a free flow of immigrants.
- Specifics: Trump needs to be pressed on what the persistent policy drivel he spews actually means. For example, when he says, “We need to be very strong” on terrorism or he would be “very strong on the debt limit,” how would he accomplish those goals? Being “very strong” isn’t a policy—it’s a vague articulation that contains no specifics and conveys nothing about what Trump would actually do to solve problems and yet his entire platform is based on nonsense like this.
- Probing questions: An honest effort by moderators to dig for the type of policy specifics one would expect a presidential candidate to have thought about. Lauer’s vague line of questioning about whether Trump was “prepared” to be president or had thought about the “emotional burden” of making tough decisions was a complete waste of oxygen the planet will never get back.
If Trump faces a combination of rigorous inquiries, an insistence on specifics, and on-the-fly fact checking, he will finally be ushered out of the sand box and on to the same playing field that Hillary Clinton has inhabited all along.
Now that would be a debate worth watching.
Kerry Eleveld is the author of Don't Tell Me To Wait: How the fight for gay rights changed America and transformed Obama's presidency.