Journalists are studying their navels again. As they’re hammered—by readers, partisans, and the candidates’ own camps—for their coverage of the race between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, they’re asking themselves fundamental questions: Are we being fair? And fair to whom—the candidates, our readers, the needs of the nation, our own principles? And are we even supposed to be fair?
Spayd showed some sympathy for this critique, but in the main she believes reporters should simply dig into their stories and let the chips fall where they may. Let a lot of minor failings slide and the result—once they’ve accumulated—might be a blind eye turned on someone who doesn’t belong in the White House. “If Trump is unequivocally more flawed than his opponent, that should be plenty evident to the voting public come November,” she wrote. “But it should be evident from the kinds of facts that bold and dogged reporting unearths, not from journalists being encouraged to impose their own values to tip the scales.”
On Facebook, right below the link to Shafer’s story, somebody had posted her two cents’ worth: “IMHO the journalist’s job is to ferret out the truth . . . the REAL truth . . . not what they believe to be the truth.”
But arguably, there’s no unknown truth about Trump worth ferreting. True enough, we know too little about his taxes, his health, and his financial entanglements; the Washington Post just called him “the least transparent major presidential nominee in modern history.” And possibly the most hypocritical, as Trump demands total accountability from everyone else.
