Several months ago, a local TV anchorman in Denver did a very brave thing. He denounced a double standard. He named names.
Commenting about journalists covering politics in his state, Kyle Clark told his audience, “It’s time that we acknowledge something that may be obvious by now. We hold Republican congresswoman Lauren Boebert to a different standard than every other elected official in Colorado.” The standard is “far lower,” he lamented in his 60 second commentary. “If we held her to the same standard as every other elected Republican and Democrat here in Colorado, we would be here near nightly chronicling the cruel, false, and bigoted things that Boebert says for attention and fund-raising.”
His point was, it is the journalist’s job to hold our elected officials accountable. “Our double standard is unfair to all the elected officials in Colorado,” he confessed, “Republican and Democrats, who display human decency.”
It’s unfair to all the elected officials who display human decency coast-to-coast.
It is a theme that is gaining traction in my business, and it applies to politicians on both sides of the aisle. Republicans are the ones these days whose falsehoods and bigotry need to be called out the most, but there are Democrats with dirty hands too. Longtime CNN journalist Christiane Amanpour put it in just seven sharp words: “We have to be truthful, not neutral.” Legendary CBS journalist Dan Rather recently wrote, “We should not confuse a desire for fairness with fairness itself.”
For a long time, our mantra has been to cover both sides of every story. That was the definition of fairness. And reporters still must. But as Rather also wrote, “Enough with Both-sides-ism.” Each side doesn’t always have equal credibility, which means each side doesn’t deserve equal weight. Over the years I interviewed and reported on some of the nation’s and the world’s most odious figures, from American Nazis to ruthless dictators to Islamic terrorists. I couldn’t call them that to their faces— for my very survival I had to walk a fine line— but my job was to tell the audience why these people were odious, not admirable. The journalist’s job is to expose them, not to give them false equivalence.
To be sure, we do see more journalists doing the job they’re supposed to do.
Back on Veterans Day last year, when Donald Trump infamously declared to a crowd in New Hampshire, “We will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country,” The New Republic’s Michael Tomasky did his job: ‘This is straight-up Nazi talk.”
Unhappily though, false equivalence still drives many news reports.
Journalist Margaret Sullivan, who covers media and politics from the U.S. for the British newspaper The Guardian, called out American news organizations for committing that journalistic sin. “US news organizations have turned Biden’s age into a scandal,” she wrote last year, “and continue to cover Trump as an entertaining side show.” She’s right. Biden’s age is concerning to many but it is not a scandal. Trump’s conduct isn’t just entertaining, it is a threat to democracy. Yet many Americans know more about Biden’s age than about his accomplishments. Many know more about Trump’s defiant mugshot when he was booked in Atlanta than about his dire misdeeds.
“The big problem,” Sullivan wrote, “is that the mainstream media wants to be seen as non-partisan — a reasonable goal — and bends over backwards to accomplish this. If this means equalizing an anti-democratic candidate with a pro-democracy candidate, then so be it.”
But it should not be so. Dan Gillmor, founder of the News Co/Lab at Arizona State University, says news organizations have to rethink their whole approach. “Recognize that this is an emergency, and adjust coverage accordingly. Democracy, and by extension freedom of the press, are on the ballot (this) year, but journalism is still doing business as usual.” On the website Presswatchers.org, journalist Dan Froomkin, once an editor at The Washington Post, wrote, “Even as the nation faces another potentially cataclysmic election in 2024 — arguably the most perilous in American history — the mainstream news industry continues to engage in the same business-as-usual that got us here in the first place.”
He also offers an explanation. “None of our newsroom leaders could possibly have imagined 10 years ago that fascist appeals to violence and racial hatred would be so common and effective, that the political discourse would be so awash in misinformation and disinformation, that homophobia and misogyny would make such a dramatic comeback, or that a con man who engineered a failed coup could be a front-runner for the presidency, posing a dire threat to the country’s future as a democracy.”
Today we know better. Today we know what the threats are and where they come from. NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen recommends that coverage reflect “not the odds, but the stakes.” Otherwise, as Dan Rather pointed out, false equivalence “grossly distorts the truth.” If journalists fail to place blame where blame should be placed, then the public can’t fully understand who is undermining the institutions that have long been a fundamental foundation of our democracy.
This November, democracy is on the ballot. And if the public doesn’t understand that, voters might make dangerous choices again as they have before.
So it’s time to name names. It’s time to put an end to false equivalence. The anchorman in Denver made a good start.
Over more than five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He also co-authored a book about the seminal year for baby boomers, called “1969: Are You Still Listening?” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 37-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.
Exactly!!
Bless you Greg! So glad you wrote this piece. For your colleagues still active as journalists it’s not too late, but it’s been too damn long covering this critical election as though we are handicapping a horse race.