Can the Media Take Sides on Who Should Be President?

If any journalistic principle was truly broken in this US presidential election, it was probably "balance."

On October 18, the day before the third presidential debate, even Anna Wintour — fashion's so-called devil, and the editor-in-chief of Vogue — could not resist taking a position.

The magazine has profiled Hillary Clinton six times over the years and has covered each of Trump's three wives in turn, though only in connection with their lavish weddings. Now it decided to endorse Clinton publicly.

If you have been following the US election, and following it through a paper like The New York Times, you will have noticed that for months almost every day brought bad news about one of the two candidates, Donald Trump.

Yes, only bad news.

As election day drew nearer, the pattern grew sharper. The paper began exposing one Trump scandal after another, in volume and at force — like an extended version of the "tape scandal" that broke before the second debate.

Even The New York Times, which has always billed itself as liberal, went a little far this time. With only weeks left before the result, it plainly wanted to use its power to set the agenda and to steer how people think and act. Keeping too much judgment out of the coverage and staying as balanced as possible is a principle The Times and a range of other mainstream American outlets have long championed. This obvious break with that norm leaves people somewhat uneasy.

According to a Gallup poll, the American public's trust in the mass media reached its lowest point this September. If Aaron Sorkin once mourned the state of television news in his HBO series The Newsroom, what would he make of the way the news media are covering this presidential race?

In this slightly strange atmosphere, Mark Burnett, the producer of The Apprentice, made a rational choice. The show that made Trump a household name in the United States and abroad may hold more material damaging to the candidate. Burnett did not deny that the footage might contain some improper remarks, but he refused to release any more tapes.

Jim Rutenberg, a media columnist at The New York Times, noticed the same abnormality. His explanation: "It may not always be fair to Trump or his supporters. But journalism shouldn't measure itself against one campaign's definition of fairness."

Put simply, if any journalistic principle was truly broken in this election, it was probably "balance." Many people have taken to answering for that with the phrase "an extraordinary moment," and they argue that at a moment like this the media's traditional principles can give way a little.

This is certainly not the moment journalism hoped for. Ezra Klein, who runs Vox's politics coverage, has attacked many of Trump's positions fiercely, but on the coverage itself he offers a clear-eyed view: people often criticize political reporting for a kind of false fairness — one person says the sky is blue, another says it is orange, and the headline becomes "They disagree on the color of the sky." This year is different. In describing just how dangerous Trump is, the media have taken too many liberties. "Coverage of Trump has become more and more biased. In the whole history of political candidates, he has been treated very differently, and very harshly."

Attacking this Republican candidate's stains and misdeeds over and over has handed his opponent, Clinton, some advantage — particularly when The New York Times should have put more effort into investigating other problems Clinton may have. A few American outlets, such as Fusion, have already found that the Clinton Foundation's funding in Colombia over 30 years, as much as $2 billion, did great harm to the local environment, and that the country's main resources, oil and natural gas, turned out to belong to a large company with close ties to the foundation. Truths like these may take people much longer to notice.

It must be admitted that so many of Trump's outlandish positions have left some journalists unable to hold their emotions in check. Brian Stelter, a host at CNN, even raised the question of "whether you challenge Trump's dangerous rhetoric" to the level of "whether you are patriotic."

But few people talk about "truth." Perhaps that is because in politics the line between truth and fiction is forever blurred.

Four years ago Kevin M. Kruse, a history professor at Princeton University, published an article in The New York Times titled Truth: The Loser of the American Election. In it he quoted a line Lincoln once used to describe American politics: "You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time."

Kruse, for his part, thinks the odds of a candidate lying have dropped sharply today. He told me: "The last campaign showed that even the most diligent fact-checkers had little effect. Win or lose, the Romney campaign placed a historic, enormous bet on one proposition — that you could more or less ignore the facts and go unpunished. Neil Newhouse, one of Romney's pollsters, said outright that they would not let fact-checkers dictate the campaign."

Fact-checking has returned to the media on a broad scale; you can find a fact-checking team at most outlets covering the election. "Fact-checking matters more than ever, especially since the things Trump says keep turning out to be wrong," Kruse said. "For decades news organizations have disliked calling something a 'lie,' and have always used 'he said, she said' to keep up a surface balance. But the degree and frequency of Trump's errors have so far exceeded 2012 and before that even the cable news networks have started calling them lies."

American newspapers have a long tradition of political comment, and endorsing and recommending candidates in an election year is part of that tradition. Even "media endorsement," so deeply rooted in American political custom, looks different this year.

The New York Times was probably one of the first outlets to back the Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton, in public: it ran an editorial on the eve of the January 30 primaries, then restated and underlined that position eight months later. This is hardly surprising. As of eight years ago, The Times had not endorsed a Republican since Eisenhower in 1956. For The Atlantic, which has always declared itself "the organ of no party or clique," this was the third time in its long history that it endorsed a presidential candidate. The previous two were Abraham Lincoln in 1860 and Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964.

Somewhat strange is USA Today, the big national paper. To draw as many readers as possible, it has never stated a position. But for the first time in its 34-year history it made an exception, declaring: "This year is no longer a choice between two highly capable candidates who merely differ in their views. The editorial board agrees unanimously that one of the candidates is unfit to be president."

More unusual still, many conservative local papers that had backed Republicans for years endorsed a Democrat for the first time in decades. The Arizona Republic, a local paper published since 1890, endorsed a Democrat in public for the first time. The Dallas Morning News had last endorsed a Democrat in Franklin Roosevelt's day, before the Second World War. The Cincinnati Enquirer, which opposed Roosevelt, had last endorsed a Democrat in 1916. The Cincinnati Enquirer also sits in a swing state, which means its endorsement may really carry some weight.

The Duluth News Tribune decided early on to send its readers a clear message: "We wanted to lead the conversation about the candidates and the issues, even to inspire it, rather than be a last-minute watchdog that can only bark a few helpless times."

These local papers may be little known nationally, but they are closely tied to the lives of the people around them. That was Warren Buffett's thinking, too, when he bought up a string of local papers. Kruse said: "For a news organization's editorial board and editorial writers, endorsing a candidate is quite common. Reporters would not do it, and so far they have not."

Very unlike other years, Gary Johnson, the third-party liberal leader, also won the backing of outlets such as The Chicago Tribune, breaking the usual standoff between the two parties. You can see a continuously updated list of the positions American outlets have taken here.

But is a media endorsement really worth that much?

A 2008 survey by the Pew Research Center found that seven out of ten people thought their local paper's endorsement had little to do with their own final choice, and would not affect whom they voted for. Of the rest, half said it would push them closer to the paper's choice and half said it had a slight effect. Another study, from 2011, found that when a paper changes the position it has held all along, it has a large effect on voters — which is exactly what is happening this year.

More than 100 papers with circulations above 20,000 have publicly backed Clinton, and yet on social media, Trump's important ground, the picture may be quite different. Look at the wide gulf after each debate between the various traditional-media surveys and the counts on social media, and the difference becomes clear.

A survey after the first debate showed there was some reason behind all the people saying "Trump won": the main participants in social-media polls were Trump supporters, who may not care much about the voices in the traditional press. Pro-Trump groups on online communities like Reddit and 4chan would post links to around 70 online poll sites, and supporters would rush to vote.

Trump, who loathes the traditional media and for a time ran no television ads, saw exactly this and spent a large share of his campaign money on social media. At the Republican National Convention in July, his team spent $200,000 on a promoted hashtag that every American user could see on Twitter. He wanted to dominate the ground he could dominate; every tweet he posted was as if he had sent it straight to his supporters.

Among those supporters on Twitter, there is indeed not much genteel, town-hall-style discussion. Much of it reads like the material of a third-rate comedy club — venting without restraint, and shouting in the hope of being heard. It may have a sweeping effect, but does it really help anyone reach the truth?

Facebook, another social platform, has already shown some of its influence this election season. It launched a "support" button for the purpose, letting people visit a candidate's page and share their position publicly or only with friends. On October 18, the day before the third debate, Facebook released its latest figures: in the previous week, likes, comments, shares and posts supporting Trump outnumbered those supporting Clinton, 307 million to 260 million.

Technology companies are no longer merely platforms where people share opinions. They also shape how people get information, and by that route they even mount a challenge to the traditional media. After Clinton fainted at a September 11 memorial event, according to a report by Morning News America, Google's autocomplete offered, for "Hillary Clinton he-," the options "Hillary Clinton's headquarters," "Hillary Clinton's health plan" and "Hillary Clinton's healthcare plan." Search the same thing on Bing at the time and you got "Hillary Clinton's health" and "Hillary Clinton's health issues."

After replacing the human-edited summaries in its "Trending Stories" column with nothing but a few keywords, Facebook laid off several of its curators and relied purely on algorithms. The result: a false item on endingthefed.com, "Fox Anchor Fired for Backing Hillary," drew 200,000 likes and rose to the top. Ironically, Gizmodo reported earlier this year that the staff running Facebook's trending topics were biased, and tended to pick stories unfavorable to conservatives. The accusations included that the editorial team would not let stories from the right-wing site Breitbart trend, and that any news they could not confirm had to come from a reliable source such as the AP, The New York Times or The Washington Post. But once Facebook discarded that editorial team altogether, fake news took the top spot.

Twitter's approach is rather different. It, too, has trending topics produced by an algorithm, but it never says this is the truth; what it conveys is only "this is what people are talking about most right now" — which is also the shrewder way to put it.

Social-media content that depends on click rates, shares and quick skimming means the cost of correcting an error is high to begin with, and that may make the pursuit of truth harder still.

Adam Sharp, who runs news, government and elections at Twitter, told me: "How something spreads on Twitter depends entirely on who can drive the conversation. We don't fact-check. We're just a microphone."

Cover image credits: Wikipedia, Pinterest