Abstract
So how would you feel if you were a member of the Conservative Party and you saw Evan Davis and Laura Kuennsberg, glasses of wine in hand, bopping along to loud music with delegates at a post-Labour Party conference? Donald Trump – along with everyone watching CNN on the last night of the Democrat national convention – saw footage of a similar scene, this time involving the CNN anchorman Wolf Blitzer and the network's chief political analyst, Gloria Borger, showing their best moves at a post-Democrat convention party. Hillary Clinton had just come off the stage to thunderous applause in Philadelphia a couple of hours earlier and Team Trump inevitably complained the incident summed up what the conservative clickbait king Matt Drudge called the “media and Democratic cabal”. Other party guests insisted the party was celebrating the end of the convention season and not Clinton's official nomination, but you might be forgiven for being a little cynical. After months of giving Trump a lamentably easy ride and then (as I discussed in the last issue of BJR) flagellating itself for that sin, the mainstream US media have inevitably reacted by wildly over-compensating.
I covered both party conventions and CNN – traditionally the more impartial news network compared with Fox and MSNBC – might as well have thrown a celebration party for the Democrats every night, for all the attempt at objectivity it made. At the end of every day, an array of pro-Democrat commentators gathered to gush over what they'd seen, pausing only to pull apart the token Republican, invariably a blonde Trumpite who certainly hadn't been chosen for the depth of her analysis.
With the pendulum swinging back in the opposite direction, press and broadcasters alike aren't even bothering to try to disguise their contempt for Trump and their determination that he doesn't win. Obsessive impartiality and ruthless fairness – those pillars of US journalism – are rather less pressing than performing the crucial public service of stopping a man they regard as a dangerous moron from getting into the White House.
Much of the US media clearly feel the election is too close to call and that, for all their earlier feebleness in highlighting Trump's shortcomings, they have a duty to bring him down now that his candidacy can no longer be dismissed as a bad joke. The New York Times, the high temple of American journalistic navel-gazing, has tackled the dilemma in its inimitably sonorous way. “If you're a working journalist and you believe that Donald J Trump is a demagogue playing to the nation's worst racist and nationalistic tendencies, that he cosies up to anti-American dictators and that he would be dangerous with control of the United States nuclear codes, how the heck are you supposed to cover him?” wrote the Grey Lady's media correspondent, Jim Rutenberg. “Because if you believe these things, you have to throw out the textbook of American journalism has been using for the better part of the past half century, if not longer, and approach it in a way you've never approached anything in your career.”
It's war – that moment in the westerns when the old gunslinger who'd locked away his six-shooter and turned to farming, reluctantly unwraps and oils it one more time. He tried the ways of peace. Megalomaniac local landowner who wants to drive the poor Mexicanos off their land – watch out!
The Columbia Journalism Review, which bills itself as “the most respected voice in press criticism”, has called this a Murrow Moment. I assumed this was a reference to the iconic American broadcaster Edward Murrow's memorable pro-British bias in reporting from London during the Blitz – not for him any attempt at impartiality over Churchill v Hitler – but it's apparently a nod to his standing up to senator Joe McCarthy This is no time for people to oppose his witch-hunting methods to “keep silent”, he told viewers in 1954.
And how have these brave heirs to Ed “This Is London” Murrow been standing up to The Donald? It's pretty weak stuff, to be honest. The most effective measure I've seen is CNN's habit of fact-checking Trump “in real time”, putting up captioned corrections to his factual howlers during speeches – rather than the traditional day and a half later when his supporters have long moved on to the next controversial outburst. What would really damage Trump would be to stop covering him, full stop, but the blow to ratings would be too catastrophic to contemplate.
Similarly, Trump's growing list of “banned” media outlets that have offended him isn't worth the Twitter feed it's published on. He might ban the Washington Post or Buzzfeed from the odd rally but it is obsessive media coverage that has allowed him to get so far without having to spend anything much on conventional advertising. They need each other too much.
Of course, I don't doubt the media are genuinely as alarmed about Trump as many Americans, but it's not in their journalistic DNA to go for him with the sort of savagery and unrelenting attacks that would be needed to reach his less dogged supporters. Besides, we all know by now that hardcore Trump supporters simply don't believe anything the “‘lamestream media” tell them about him. He regularly calls reporters “very bad people” and reminds his faithful that “the liberal media can't stop telling outrageous lies about me”.
Perhaps it's all too late to tell the even more outrageous truth about Trump: lack of movement in the polls suggests pretty much that everyone has made up their minds who they will vote for, and it will come down to who can get them out on the day.
In the meantime, I also fear US journalists have shot themselves in the foot – for a second time. Failing to take Trump seriously was a slip-up, but waving the flag for Clinton may set them up for trouble ahead. In her own way, she is as hostile to the media as he is (she hardly ever gives press conferences and is almost as prone to fibbing when she does). If she wins – as I suspect she will – and skeletons fall out of the closet, only then the media can expect to get blamed. As for Trump, he's been warning that a hostile US media may cost him the election. If and when he does lose, the Murrow Moment brigade can expect to have every partisan remark and sentiment hurled back at them. They may decide that's a price worth paying.