Who Fact-Checks the Fact Checkers?

The American media's anxiety to cover 'both sides' of the Presidential race is helping to normalise Trump's most outrageous falsehoods, reports Matt Bernardini

Donald Trump gestures during a campaign event at Central Wisconsin Airport, Saturday 7 September 2024.Photo: Alex Brandon/Associated Press/Alamy

After 2016, much of the mainstream media ostensibly engaged in a mea culpa for their coverage of the presidential election. News organizations ran dozens of columns dedicated to trying to understand what went wrong. Academic institutions conducted a plethora of studies to understand the failings of “bothsiderism” and quantify its effect on the election. Many promised to be better, and to shift away from the philosophy that clicks are better than accurately contextualizing an issue. 

Yet after nearly 10 long years of Trump being in the spotlight, his torrent of lies, his attempts at insurrection, his decades of crimes having finally begun to catch up with him, the media is no better than in 2016. This time Joe Biden’s age substituted Hillary Clinton’s emails so the media could satisfy its thirst for Democratic scandal. Any objective coverage would illustrate that Trump, who is also very old and out of shape, is not mentally, emotionally, or intellectually qualified to be president. Yet, once again we’re getting a rehash of the personality over policy coverage that dominated prior election cycles, all while Trump continues to attack the same media that often covers for him. 

However, while Trump’s fascistic attacks on the press have never been based in reality, the reality is that the press’s constant focus on the horse-race of the campaign, instead of on actual policy issues, helped Trump in 2016 and it’s helping him again this time. 

According to the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy, the press benefited from the waterfall of content coming from the Trump campaign. They dutifully re-ran his words without placing them in the proper context and they helped to normalize him. 

“Trump’s dominant presence in the news stemmed from the fact that his words and actions were ideally suited to journalists’ story needs,” the Shorenstein Center concluded. “The news is not about what’s ordinary or expected. It’s about what’s new and different, better yet when laced with conflict and outrage.”