The fact is most of the credibility problems the media are facing today over election reportage are products of a condition deliberately created by Donald Trump and his campaign in order to avoid public scrutiny.
This article by Liz Spayd, the Public Editor of the New York Times, is strong evidence that those who worry about false balance have good reasons to worry. Honestly, there’s no reason for it, because the charge it seeks to defend the newspaper against is actually a fact. Indeed, it is not a fact exclusive to the New York Times, but something the media as a whole is guilty of in a collective sense. I mean, it’s one thing to think you need to defend the New York Times coverage of the issues in the election (and I for one think their coverage is fairer and more balanced than more than seventy percent of the media), but quite another to think those who express worry about false balance encourage journalists to pull back from their responsibility to hold power accountable. How do those calling out the media on false balance threaten the media when all they are clearly doing is calling on the media to step up, to hold power accountable, to not pull back and to not get lost in the foggy world of false equivalences?
Really, how can anyone honestly following the media coverage of the election not notice that the media is using different standards, consciously or unconsciously, to judge Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton? How many stories do we have to review to reach that conclusion? To me, what the Public Editor and her colleagues at the New York Times ought to be doing is to quietly use the feedback she’s getting from readers to improve on coverage, not return here to tell discerning observers that what they have noticed is actually not true when the evidence is overwhelming. That’s why I said there’s no reason for this article.
The fact is most of the credibility problems the media are facing today over election reportage are products of a condition deliberately created by Donald Trump and his campaign in order to avoid public scrutiny. Trump is a master manipulator who from the moment he decided to contest for the presidency also decided to shape the media environment to his taste. Trump knew the value of his candidacy as a non-traditional politician and a reality TV personality already known to the American public. He knew everyone would be keen to see how much of a success he’d make of politics, even with all the doubts. Trump decided early what his message would be - a concoction of some right-wing, pie-in-the-sky ideas marinated in nativist platitudes masquerading as conservative policies. He then unashamedly frames these with aggressive lies that play mainly to the blue-collar, white, working class constituency without college education. Trump understands that amongst them are the emotionally fragile, loud and uninformed types who’d pound the pavements, happily planting his lies with soldierly and missionary zeal. These are to be his stormtroopers and they are the cynosures of all eyes at his rallies. Of course, Trump did not create the support he has now when he came into politics, activists of the Hard Right conservative movement did over the years mainly through their media. All Trump is doing is legitimizing it and riding on it as some Trojan horse against traditional mainstream politics and politicking.
Trump decided early that he has two core institutional enemies - the political establishment and the media. His enmity with the political establishment is real, not because he’s different from traditional politicians in character, but because most politicians in the political system would be weary of a moneybag who hasn’t paid his dues at any elective level just jumping in to claim the ticket of a major political party. However, as I said, his enmity with the media is deliberately contrived to avoid public scrutiny as much as possible considering the type of message he has and the way he wants to sell it.
To that extent, Trump’s use of nativist populism and lies to fashion the foundational principles of his campaign is primarily aimed at baiting the press. He knows that once he puts out an incredible amount of lies, the press would find it quite difficult to effectively call him out on all or most of them and whenever they do, he himself would effectively use any challenge against him as a victim’s cudgel in a pushback against them, having already created the enmity between his campaign and them. Thus, when Trump puts journalists in pens in his rallies and throws insults at them and encourages his supporters to do the same, when he accuses them of being in the bag with big business and the Clinton campaign, he is not only trying to group them with the political establishment he rails against, the establishment that he and his supporters are supposedly rebelling against, he is also trying to create an atmosphere - the atmosphere of fear.
The use of fear as a messaging or campaigning tool by Trump is as Machiavellian as it is divisive. Trump understands that fear works like a treat with conservatism in a moment of insecurity and uncertainty, so his multiple-tined messages paint a very dark picture of America - the economy is bad and all American institutions charged with the economy are conspiring with the Obama administration not to tell us the truth of how bad it really is; the military is being scandalously weakened and America’s national security is severely compromised; the immigrants are flocking in through America’s open borders and they are coming to rape, drug and kill Americans; political correctness is killing America; “places like Afghanistan are safer than our inner cities”, Islam hates America and ISIS is coming and so on and so forth. His message requires that people first lose confidence in America in order to see the Armageddon he sees. That’s what he expects when he says America is weak, America does not win anymore or America is in a “death spiral”. Of course, you’ll need a level of anger to buy into his message, but his hope is that you’ll channel that anger into supporting him, Donald Trump, the man who has not been part of the mess America is supposedly in today, the man who will make America great again (whatever that means). With his anti-establishment message already sidelining traditional politicians, fear riles his base and makes them do negatively unconventional things that he pledges to defend as a way of further creating that dichotomy between his supporters and the supporters of the supposed failed politicians of the establishment. Fear brings out the worst in people and that’s precisely how Trump likes it.
With this strategy, Trump has succeeded in silencing the scandalized political establishment within the Republican Party, while still dependent on the party machinery to fight the general election on his own terms. While to non-Republicans the phenomenon of a significant section of the party establishment and its flag-bearer marching to different beats might seem funny and unhelpful towards a general election, Trump is happy to keep that facade going till the election, because he understands the general sentiments against Washington and establishment politicians nationally. Even while being one of the vilest politicians and insiders around, he manages to create the false impression that he is an outsider coming to shake up Washington principally because he’s never been in public service. Rather than call him out on some of his claims, a huge section of the press is entranced and immobilized by the brazenness and audacity of some of his utterances and actions, which invariably leads to false balance.
The press even consciously or unconsciously create these false equivalences in how they investigate or report Donald Trump news. For instance, there is the inexplicable view that most of Trump’s corruption stories were done as part of business (which is generally accepted as part of the mystique of this brilliant businessman who wrote The Art of the Deal and so on) which cannot be compared with what happens in politics, as if both have different standards of morality. Trump himself set them this false standard when he brags about buying politicians and getting them to do things for him and on one hand justifies this as a businessman, while he uses it on the other hand as evidence of how well he knows Washington and the psychology of corrupt politicians, which is why he says he is best positioned to bring the necessary change to Washington. With this, he manages to explain away his self-confessed part as an enabler of corruption under an overriding narrative of being in a better position to know how things work in Washington. So, while Hillary Clinton is being questioned to death by the press on the finer points of using a private email server (even after the FBI has clearly stated they won’t bring any charges), the same press gives Trump a pass on virtually every scandal he’s been involved in that would have since buried a traditional politician.
So, when the press call him the outsider or declare his political rise as unique or when they prematurely throw their hands in the air in a precipitate admission that nothing sticks to him despite the vile campaign he’s been running and the viler rhetoric he’s happy to spew at the drop of a hat, it’s all a surrender to the Trump strategy. This anti-establishment posturing ensured he was judged less stridently than others when he contested the Republican primary against seasoned politicians. While his opponents employed restrained traditional campaigning tactics and watched open-mouthed as he perfected his roughhouse tactics against them, by the time they were to make up their minds about how to respond to him, Trump had seized the momentum and moved up inexorably in the polls.
To an extent, the above tactics is still working for Trump now against Hillary Clinton towards the general election. But, even though keen observers believe it’s not going to be enough to take him to the White House because the general election is not a party primary, the way he’s being allowed to get away with murder by the press has called the latter’s role into question. People recognize that as the Fourth Estate, it is their duty to hold Trump to account. Of course, as I stated earlier, Trump knows that only the media can rein him in which is why he started off by deliberately antagonizing them, because he knows that will put them on the defensive. When the media is defensive they go into a self-censorship mode that supposedly errs on the side of caution, but in truth works against public interest because it stops them from investigating or releasing information about a candidate that has attacked them so much in order to avoid the charge of vengeance.
Worse still, editors get lost in that cocoon of them versus the troublesome candidate totally forgetting that their duty is to their consumers, the reading public and not to the candidate they are trying to protect from their own angst. That is why Liz Spayd can say with a straight face that the problem with false balance doctrine is that it masquerades as rational thinking when she herself evidently isn’t presenting any rational argument against the claims here. Why, because she’s under the hypnotic gaze of Trump who has imposed a false view of what constitutes the professional duty of the journalist by stripping it of any moral responsibility. That is why what we get by way of her rationale for saying the problem with false balance doctrine is that it masquerades as rational thinking is the equally false accusation that what the critics really want is for journalists to apply their own moral and ideological judgments to the candidates when what the critics are actually saying is that journalists should simply do their job. In other words, Spayd starts off on the Trump-induced assumption that the journalist has no moral responsibility professionally and then concludes that anyone calling them to uphold that responsibility must be ideologically driven. Such a leap in logic is puzzling!
Indeed, there is no better evidence of Spayd’s intellectual summersault than when she said she “can’t help wondering about the ideological motives of those crying false balance, given that they are using the argument mostly in support of liberal causes and candidates”. To support this view, she referenced a segment of CNN’s Brian Stelter’s show, “Reliable Sources,” which focused on the issue. In the said show, one of the guests, Jacob Weisberg, in trying to explain the challenge journalists are dealing with now in their coverage of the presidential race, used an analogy. He said before Trump, to journalists it was a case of dealing with apples and oranges; they had no problem of false balance because they were dealing with fruits. But in Trump’s case, they are dealing with “rancid meat”, something entirely different from fruits of any kind. But that was all Liz Spayd needed to conclude that a partisan’s explanation is passed off as a factual judgment.
Now, at what point did Weisberg's opinion become fact? He was part of a panel of four people sharing opinions about false balance. Everyone sitting with him did not declare what he said as fact, even as they accept it as his opinion. In fact, just to indicate how endemic the problem of false balance is, despite a clear explanation of the analogy offered by Weisberg, all Stelter, the moderator could take from the exchange was an insult to Trump. He confronted Weisberg: “So you have already insulted him in the first minute of the show, calling him rancid meat, is that being fair?” I mean, these are just journalists between themselves and that is the conclusion of one journalist (Stelter) who wasn’t even going to contemplate interrogating the truthfulness of Weisberg’s comment, because, subconsciously, like Liz Spayd, he doesn’t see his job as calling out a lie, yet he recognized an insult on behalf of Trump. Poor Weisberg was forced to further explain: “Err…I’m trying…I started my podcast because I think it’s so hard in most media to tell it like it is. Yes, I think Trump is rancid meat. I mean, it’s a metaphor. But I think he’s someone who has injected a kind of toxicity into American politics that doesn’t belong there and that hasn’t been there before. It doesn’t represent what Republicans have stood for in the past”.
So, if Spayd concluded that Weisberg’s view is “passed off as factual judgment”, does that then mean any opinion on this issue by anybody should be passed off as factual judgment? And if we are to begin to question the ideological motives of everyone complaining about false balance, shouldn’t we also be doing the same with everyone on the other side, including Spayd? The truth is there is no ideological explanation for what is going on, because the issue is not ideological. Opinions might have ideological colorations, but truth is plain. What people are talking about now (no matter their ideological inclinations) is what they are seeing; unlike the journalists who see this and keep quiet, people are talking! One might say the problem with the Stelter show was that it actually chose three journalists to analyze the matter, not just three journalists, but three that we can actually consider as liberals - Jacob Weisberg, Chairman, Editor-in-Chief of the Slate Group; Soledad O’Brien, CEO of Starfish Group and Mark Leibovich of the New York Times Magazine. I mean, with such a panel and with one comparing Donald Trump to rancid meat, any surprise Spayd jumped to the conclusion that those complaining are ideologically driven liberals?
To me, anyone interested in getting the real facts about how people feel on this issue need not look beyond the responses in the comment section of the New York Times or the various other newspapers and social media outlets giving voice to ordinary citizens. They are the news consumers and they are the ones complaining, not journalists. So, journalists are not the ones to make the judgment, but ordinary people. Therefore, if Stelter really wanted to get the true facts of how the media is faring on the issue of false balance, the right people to ask are not journalists, but viewers and ordinary news consumers. Those are the people he should have brought to the studio or go out there and meet in the street to make their point to fellow citizens. The journalists of course will moderate this, but the debate’s authenticity is in the fact that ordinary people on both sides of the debate are expressing their views on the matter. Journalists interviewing journalists about complaints readers and viewers are making about journalists isn’t journalism, it’s professional self-indulgence. In the case of television, Trump helps their ratings, so they wouldn’t raise a finger to keep him off this path, even when they can see the huge sociopolitical problems he’s creating for America long-term whether he wins or loses. For them, it’s new, it’s riveting and it’s drawing in the viewers, so why bother with a little matter of patriotism or professional duty?
Nonetheless, it’s worth pointing out that the reason Stelter chose to talk with these three journalists who are all liberal in their political views is because, unlike Spayd, he does not see it as an ideological thing. He did say he’s been hearing the complaints all year long and most of these coming from Clinton supporters, but he never framed it as an ideological battle, which is why he was comfortable with the panel’s composition, which he actually described as an “all-star panel”. More crucially, this panel of journalists all actually admitted the problem; not only did they admit it, they pinpointed it as emanating from the nature of the candidacy of Donald Trump, even though they offered different reasons for it.
To Weisberg, it was, as hinted above, a problem arising from the media being unaccustomed to a presidential candidate like Trump who is against the norm in a very negative and very challenging ways. In defending his analogy, Weisberg said Trump is rancid meat is in all sorts of ways. “I mean his conspiracy thinking and racism and all sorts of things that are outside the norm of what we have accepted in American politics and I think what the press is struggling with is how do you not normalise him and at the same time be fair and do your job as a journalist”.
To Soledad O’Brien, “it’s more the contortions of trying to make things equal all the time”. She cited the example of how Hillary Clinton has successfully stated factually how Trump has normalized white supremacy and how Donald Trump responded by saying she’s a bigot. She said the journalists’ response has been to say: “They trade barbs. He says she’s a bigot and she says he might be appealing to racists”. It becomes “she said, he said” when in actuality they are not, as there is a long list of evidence on Hillary Clinton’s side. “They are treated as if they’re equal. ‘Well, she might be a bigot, he might be a racist; they are actually equal’ when in reality they are not equal”.
Mark Leibovich got a little lost in an initial fence-sitting, but he eventually reached the same conclusion about timid journalism. Asked whether he was being more optimistic or pessimistic on how the press has been trying to treat Trump, after a poor mathematical analogy, he indicated that “there is absolutely nothing objective about the agreed-upon, em, you know, whatever, I mean, the agreed upon argument in our culture that there is one arbiter, whether it’s Walter Cronkite or Tim Russert or whoever that can decide. So, I think, the notion here of sort of false equivalency or whatever you call it is not so much to strain to compare the candidates to one another, but to compare them basically to the truth, to actually use your platform as a journalist to say look, I mean, what Donald Trump just said has no basis in fact or Hillary Clinton has said this in fact she has not given a press conference in two hundred however many days. I mean, I do think it is incumbent upon reporters to when a blatant falsehood is spoken to actually or parenthetically or just state explicitly that this is just not true”.
Paradoxically, it was Weisberg who stood up for reporters and the New York Times when he said he’s seen a lot of good examples of the press doing its job of calling Trump out. He gave the example of the New York Times saying in a first page lead: “Trump Presents a Threat to the Rule of Law and the Constitution”. He emphasized that this is “not on editorial page, but as a news story because that’s fact, not opinion”. So, Mr. Weisberg, who Spayd had sneakily stigmatized as an agenda-driven liberal did more for the reputation of the New York Times than the paper’s Public Editor.
Recently, we witnessed this problem play out before our very eyes at the Commander-in-Chief Forum by the NBC. When concerned citizens complained that not only did Matt Lauer not give Clinton a fair amount of time to address the issues for which the forum was organized, but that he didn’t also call out Trump on some of his lies while he seemed to have unduly focused on the Clinton emails issue at a forum supposedly meant to address military and veteran affairs, his journalist friends were the ones we saw falling over themselves to defend him. Most notable amongst them was Chris Matthews who grandly declared that Matt Lauer calling out Trump on his lies would have meant he was expressing an opinion.
So, why would a very experienced journalist like Chris Matthews think this? He does, because, like Liz Spayd, he is being blindsided by the popular participation in political discourses that nowadays comes to us instantly through the electronic media. Yes, the political press has unconsciously grown lazy, because of the growing influence of blogs, Twitter, Facebook, online newspapers’ message boards and other instant messaging news mediums, which instantly publish ideas and discussions around them. A lot of journalists think this excuses them from the responsibility of professionally investigating stories to the logical end or calling out a politician on his lies. Just because they instantly see ordinary people actually doing what journalists should be doing as part of expressing opinions, they forget that it is also the duty of journalists to do the same, but to do it professionally - not as part of expressing opinions, but as service to journalism.
However, the real danger here is that it is in that environment of the self-diminution of the journalistic role that political opportunists like Trump thrive at the expense of the public right to know. Trump is all about intimidating journalists to be off their game. We saw it with the deferential way he was treated by Lauer as he perched there spewing lies after lies as Lauer sat like a starstruck kid, listening with rapt attention. Yet, when it was Clinton’s turn, after spending over half the time grilling her over emails, when a substantive question came that had to do with the purpose of the forum (which was about how she would determine when to deploy troops to combat ISIS), it was the same Matt Lauer who was seen jumping in to hurry her up with the instruction to answer “as briefly as you can”. We’ve had reports indicating that the whole Lauer show was coordinated and controlled from behind-the-scenes by NBC News and MSNBC Chairman, Andrew Lack; but, whether this is true or not, all it goes to show is how the media is allowing itself to become a Trump plaything. News consumers see these things, even if the professionals in the coalface of the business don’t.
Without any shadow of a doubt, it was the journalistic duty of Matt Lauer to challenge Trump’s lies by pointing out, for instance, that contrary to his claims, he actually supported the invasions of Libya and Iraq. It does not matter that he was not a politician or public official at the time he showed the support, because once he’s put himself forward for a political office, he must own all he’s said in public. More crucially, he shouldn’t have been allowed to get away with lies over a public issue he’s commented on in the past, especially when using such lies to thrash his opponent. To put it simply, it is the responsibility of journalists to call out candidates when they are being dishonest. Doing so is not expressing an opinion, but helping viewers, listeners and readers understand what the issues really are.
When you abdicate your responsibility as a journalist and try to make it look like ‘objectivity’, it gives agenda-driven journalists like Chris Wallace of Fox News the temerity to tell us upfront (before the third debate where he’s expected to be a moderator) that he wouldn’t be fact-checking the candidates, because it is the responsibility of candidates to fact-check themselves! Here is a man his fellow journalists should have been calling on to be removed as a debate moderator, but when you have colleagues like Chris Matthews telling us fact-checking candidates is expressing opinion and Liz Spayd saying the problem with false balance is that it masquerades as rational thinking, what are the chances of that happening? How can they now refute the charge that they are enabling Trump when the man’s whole campaign is based on lies and doubling down on lies and when he is now saying he would prefer not to have moderators at the debates because “they’re gaming the system”? Why would he be calling for a one-on-one debate with Clinton without moderators if not to have the freedom to spew his lies unchallenged? In fact, he has already started a campaign calling for Anderson Cooper of the CNN not to be part of the debate, because he knows he’s one of the few that isn’t intimidated by him.
Liz Spayd seems not to appreciate that in politics, perception is reality. In defending the New York Times coverage of the Clinton Foundation stories, she said that the paper turned up so many potential conflicts that the foundation decided it wouldn’t be accepting foreign government funding if Hillary Clinton becomes president. In the same breath, she admits that “some foundation stories revealed relatively little bad behavior, yet were written as if they did”. If as she admits, this is not good journalism, why is she offering a judgment on the reason for this that undermines such an admission? She says she suspects the explanation for such bad journalism “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, what difference does it make, whatever the explanation, when the impression is already created in the minds of readers through unnecessary aggressive reporting and editorializing that what are potential conflicts have become interpreted as actual conflicts and what is not bad behavior is now considered bad behavior in popular consciousness all as a result of bad journalism?
Or does the New York Times think it is just an academic issue with the reader who is looking for a reason to vote one candidate instead of the other and whose decision may be determined by bad journalism? Is she saying every reader seeing the headline: “Emails Raise New Questions About Clinton Foundation Ties to State Dept.” would immediately know that there’s nothing in the news report itself by Eric Lichtblau that raises any question of a conflict of interest of any sort or suggests any attempt to seek personal gain? Would they all realize that President Bill Clinton’s great crime on behalf of the Clinton Foundation was agreeing to help secure the release of two Americans held in North Korea? Would they know that the only connection of the Clinton Foundation to the State Department was an inquiry by a Clinton staffer going on the trip with Mr. Clinton about the possibility of him and some other Clinton Foundation staffers having diplomatic passports for the trip and that he was actually told straightaway that only State Department employees are issued such passports? Can Liz Spayd tell how many Americans really read that story beyond the headlines to see that there was nothing in it? Can she tell how many never read it, but went away believing that some wrong must have been committed just by looking at that headline?
Of course, no one is against the press following up on any line of reporting they are invested in, but in doing so, they cannot lose perspective and expect that the discerning reader would be happy to let it pass for fear of the Public Editor of New York Times declaring them irrational. The basic foundation of journalistic training is how to handle and disseminate information. You cannot be invested in one line of reporting about one candidate while giving the other a pass over the same issue. Why is the New York Times not aggressively pursuing questions of actual conflicts of interest raised over the Trump Foundation the same way they’ve been doing over Clinton Foundation’s potential conflicts? Why are they not investigating Trump’s business dealings with several countries around the world the same way they investigated the Clinton Foundation’s dealings with many countries? Why are they celebrating Clinton Foundation’s decision to stop accepting foreign government funding once Clinton becomes president and yet accept without question Mr. Trump’s declaration that he will put his business interests under a blind trust to be run by his children when he becomes president? Making matchy-matchy comparisons of the two candidates’ records and investing heavily in a line of reporting without losing focus are not mutually exclusive ideas.
Liz Spayd also needs to understand that while it is the journalist’s prerogative to choose what story to cover, it is not his or her place to decide which is minor or major offence with a view to determining which to focus on. Whether Clinton’s use of private email servers is a minor offence or Trump inciting Russia to influence an American election is a major off-putting conduct is a decision that should be left to the electorate. All the media is required to do is report on both equally, investigate thoroughly, ask all the relevant questions without fear or favor and leave the judgment as to which is major or minor to the people. It would be a slippery slope when journalists begin to make the decision as to what qualifies as minor or major infraction for the purposes of reporting and informing the public.
At this juncture, let me state that as much as this issue is being discussed, the Clinton campaign should not wait for the press to correct themselves, because, if it’s going to happen at all, it’s not likely to be in this election cycle. I think at this point, it’s obvious that most media houses are already committed to a position from which they aren’t likely to be dislodged. Thus, Clinton will have to go for self-help starting immediately with the debates. From now on, she has to understand she’s making her case to Americans directly. She has to seize the momentum, whatever happens with the press. In fact, on this issue, let me talk in a little more detail, even if it seems somewhat a diversion.
For a start, whichever Donald Trump shows up at the debate, Clinton should simply be herself. That means she should not bother too much on how she has been technically prepared by her team, she should rather show her heart more. She has to understand that her biggest minus is that people see her as too scripted, too cautious and too deliberative and somewhat robotic. She does not have to go on full-frontal attack against Trump, but she should be ready to hold her own if he attacks. She must never leave people thinking she’s the wimp. The ‘lady card’ will not take her far if she isn’t using it like a good headmistress teaching a wayward pupil a lesson or two. She needs to pick her moments to employ this tactics. But in the main, her job is to call out his lies, challenge him and educate him on policies, differentiate with style why what people are watching isn’t a reality television show and why a preening, empty-headed moneybag cannot buy America with the currency of con and fear. Hillary Clinton must effectively prosecute Mr. Trump on that stage, no matter what the moderators do. She has to use Trump as a projector of her policies in the way she makes him react to her scrutiny. She must do it without being tense, she must do it without feeling or acting irritable and she must do it with panache and female warmth and whip.
I did make one suggestion a few days ago. I suggested that Hillary Clinton needs to bring Trump down a rung or two and she needs to do so with these simple words or any variety of them: “Mr. Trump, Vladimir Putin is YOUR BOSS!” I believe that would work a treat on the debate stage, because Trump is a megalomaniac who thinks the world breathes through his arse. He carries himself as if he rules the world already and his whole life show is to play the boss. His narcissism leaves no room for anyone to be on top of him. Everyone working for him is a minion who has to sound like a mini-Trump or an agent of some Communist demagogue. So, the last thing he’d expect anyone to say is that he has a boss. But considering how he’s turned into a plaything in the hands of Putin, considering how he’s now acting like a Putin agent against America, what else should we call him but a Putin minion? He’d hate that on live television! He’d shriek to high heavens, he’d fight with all he’s got to prove he’s not a minion of anyone, that no one is his boss, that he is the boss, the boss, the boss! He’d fight this like he fought Marco Rubio when the latter claimed he has small hands, only that this time, against Hillary Clinton calling Vladimir Putin his boss and telling him that the American election will not be determined by a Russian spy or a Wikileaks fugitive, it wouldn’t lead to the same outcome. It’s the easiest way to see Mr. Trump implode!
When Hillary Clinton goes out there on that stage, she should go out there with one group in mind - the millennials. They are actually the only ones she needs to win over and if she does, this race is over! Sure they are more with her than with Trump, but not enough, because most are swarming around Gary Johnson and Jill Stein. A lot of them are moralizing their stance on lost causes, not because they believe in these third party candidates, but because they see nothing to believe in the two leading candidates.
I know that those preparing Hillary Clinton for the debate must have worked on some things to get the attention of the millennials, but whatever these are they should not traffic in scare tactics. For instance, there should be no attempt to repeat why the millennials don’t like her or why they’re cynical about her candidacy, there should be no reference to the fact that the self-absorption of these young voters with their own idea of political morality is not leading them to make the right choices politically, and there should be no reference to how voting a third party candidate will be a wasted vote. And, yes, no reference to Ralph Nader and how he gave us George Bush and how benign the latter’s leadership tenure will look compared to a Trump tenure. Hillary Clinton must not make reference to their historical ignorance making them not to appreciate that their present position can lead to a Trump presidency, which would be infinitely worse for them and the world they so much think they want to protect from the likes of her.
But then she should educate them as a loving mother would educate her children without making it look like an imposition to set off their rebellious instincts. She must tell them what she admires about them - their free-spiritedness, the fact that they are more supportive of international cooperation than the older generation, their reasonable skepticism about America’s role in the world and their technological savviness and courage to open up new frontiers. Then she should tell them what they missed out and blame this on the older generation. What they’ve missed out is the true history of how we got here, because if they really know, then there will be no question every one of them would have understood what this election is about. She should tell them that they are the first generation to come of age after the Cold War. The generations before them knew about the Second World War or heard their parents talk about it, but this information they never passed on clearly to the millennials. Of course, the inadequacy of the school curricula nationally has a lot to do with this; but, really, it’s something that should have been part of popular civic education.
Clinton must tell them that those before them are aware of how that war shaped the values of the present domestic and international political environment, while as millennials they have no idea what it is like to live under constant fear of nuclear war nor do they know how much America, despite her many failings as a superpower, have fought to spread freedom around the world and protect the weak from totalitarianism. They grew up in a world where information has become democratized through the internet, where conspiracy theories, celebrity news and reality television compete with serious news for validation in the minds of the impressionable, which is why many of them still think that the US did something to provoke 9/11. Clinton must emphasize that the point is not that we wouldn’t find things in US foreign policy over the years that certain affected or concerned groups can legitimately interpret as provoking some of these terrorist attacks, but it is the kind of conclusions some of the millennials reach from their analyses that we need to reexamine, because, no matter how much America tries to run from it, the world needs America to be a viable democracy and, for that to happen, the world needs to believe in America’s young. She must remind them that America’s young did it before. In 2008, at a time the world had lost all hope in America’s leadership and direction following the regrettable war in Iraq based on questionable intelligence and against global condemnation, it was the young people of America that hit the reset button politically. They championed the election of the first Black President who won on an anti-war platform and ushered in what we all thought was going to be a post-racial America until the right scuppered it with their total and sometimes racist opposition to President Barack Obama.
Clinton must understand that she is not looking to win over those millennials who actively want to vote for Donald Trump, a racist, fascist demagogue intent on destroying the most valuable democratic institutions in America in his quest for power, but she must tell the millennials that they hold the key to solving the problem of racism that has become normalized today by Donald Trump. Clinton must tell young people that they are not the kind of Americans Trump was talking about when he told the world they will still support him even if he stands in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoots somebody. She must urge them not only to guard their freedom, which they have showed they can fiercely do, but, more importantly, to use their vote to guard America’s freedom and protect her from creeping fascism. She must tell them the power of their voice is in their vote.
I’m saying the above, because Hillary Clinton need not just hope that as the days draw nearer millennials would see the futility of wasted votes on third party candidates and the threat that Trump actually posse to their future and then begin to troop back to her. No, she needs to give them strong reasons to actively come aboard, because she needs them not only to vote, but to help get out the vote too. She should not be ashamed to adopt some things from Bernie Sanders’ platform that attracted them to him, because their energy is what she needs to close the deal. A lot of them are not just feeling rebellious, they are feeling lost in the bipartisan politics of ideological insularity and cultural deafness. Anything different and anything new will attract them; but Clinton has a chance to show them that she is the answer to the revolution they crave. That is why if she prosecutes Trump properly on that stage, show she isn’t a wimp and speak directly to young people with her policies, she would have pulled the rug from under the feet of Johnson and Stein, wrapped it all around Trump and dumped him in the dustbin of history, never to resurrect again. With that, November 8 will just be a formality.
In conclusion, I would urge the Public Editor and her colleagues to begin to appreciate those who complain about false equivalences. What they need to be doing is to be following whatever leads readers send them, because the fact that readers take the trouble pointing their lapses out to them indicates the success of journalism that reaches out to people. Of course, as I stated earlier, there is no ideological reason for these complaints; but when journalists begin to stigmatize readers the way Liz Spayd is doing, then it simply makes the problem more. Clinton’s supporters alone should not have the monopoly of complaining. If Trump’s supporters feel the same way, let them complain and show their evidence and once proven, let the media act on those complaint as well. That way we would know that there is fair coverage and we would see that the media is actually doing its duty, rather than shirking from it. The fact that most of those complaining now are Clinton’s supporters does not make their complaints invalid. Not calling a lie a lie when it is obviously a lie is an over-constipated view of journalism. If there’s anyone duty-bound to call out a liar in the public domain, it is the journalist. However, the challenge for him is to be sure that he has the proof to back it up. It is not the journalist’s duty to be diplomatic or to use body language to express himself. Journalists are the primary public intellectuals, because they are those entitled to educate the public and express their values everyday in real time. That is why if you want to know the character of a nation, look at its journalism. The American press has come a long way as leader to lose it all to a Trump gimmick. They need to wake up now, but Hillary Clinton shouldn’t be holding her breath.
