By the summer of 2016, Donald Trump had secured the Republican nomination for president. In the eyes of the elite media, a Trump presidency no longer seemed an outlandish fantasy but rather a menacing if unlikely outcome. Angry and anxious, prominent journalists asked in earnest whether the old norms – report the facts, get the story right, separate news gathering from opining – were still adequate.
The obvious answer should have been yes. One could accurately report Trump’s loopy and alarming statements, his many character flaws, and his dubious policy pronouncements – along with his preternatural ability to give voice to many people’s discontent with elites of both parties – without embellishing the facts, inventing misdeeds, and adopting an oppositional stance.
Instead, having convinced themselves that Trump posed a fatal threat to democracy in America and apparently doubting that citizens could be trusted to evaluate the facts about his candidacy on their own, some of our most prestigious journalistic outlets decided to scrap the old norms. They downplayed or obscured Hillary Clinton’s unlawful use of a private email server to conduct State Department business (including the transmission of highly classified information) while sugarcoating the extraordinary indulgences Clinton and her team received from investigators in the Obama administration FBI and Department of Justice. At the same time, elite journalists took the lead in convicting Trump in the court of public opinion of Russia collusion based on a dossier of tall tales marketed to the public and the FBI by the Clinton campaign.
As part of The 1735 Project – a special RealClearPolitics series that explores the precipitous decline in public trust in the media, the consequences for freedom and democracy, and remedies to the deepening crisis – RCP Washington Bureau Chief Carl Cannon recently revisited questions that journalists raised in 2016 concerning the norms that should guide their coverage of Trump. In “The Art of Covering Politicians Who Lie,” Cannon observed that elite journalists largely concur with the elastic new legal theory advanced by the Biden administration Justice Department’s criminal indictment of Trump for his conduct in relation to the Jan. 6 Capitol Hill riots: A president breaks the law by lying to the public to hold onto power.
Cannon identifies three........