Conservatives are complaining about media bias, as is their wont, especially when Republicans are losing. They are correct that Kamala Harris has enjoyed fairly positive coverage to date. But their conviction that the media are employing a “double standard” is actually backward. It is Donald Trump who is being held to a lower standard than Harris.
The main indictment of the mainstream media (conservatives always pretend “the media” excludes the large share of Republican-controlled outlets like Fox News) is that Harris has been allowed to skate by without specifying her policy platform. That is true, so far. Reporters are probably extending the fair assumption that any new candidate will take a bit of time to settle on a platform. If Harris avoids any substantive commitments by September and the media aren’t making a big issue out of it, I’d be surprised.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump very much is skating by without serious policy commitments. He floated the idea of repealing Obamacare, then backed away, and is continuing to vaguely promise to make health care better for everybody without anybody paying for it. He has made positive noises about cutting retirement programs without specifying how. He is secretly promising huge tax cuts to wealthy donors, while saying he would “be okay” with setting the corporate tax rate just one point lower.
Trump worked closely with the Heritage Foundation to develop a detailed policy agenda, traveling with the group’s president, Kevin Roberts, and telling an audience, “They’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do.” He now disclaims any relationship to the plan and insists, “Have no idea who is in charge of it.”
The media are reporting on some of these questions, especially about Project 2025. But most of Trump’s issue evasions have disappeared from the news, and the press has had almost no ability to force him to take a stand on any issue he prefers not to talk about. Harris, at least, is supposed to be working on an agenda. Trump won’t get more specific until he wins.
The most important way Trump benefits from a double standard is simply that his violations of democratic and civic norms are so widespread that the media have given up on holding him to anything resembling a customary standard of behavior for a presidential candidate.
A recent example will suffice: Imagine if Harris published a statement alleging that a recent Trump rally attended by thousands of people was actually empty, that the crowd at the rally was faked through artificial intelligence, and that the news media helped perpetuate this gigantic fraud. Suppose she proceeded to argue that this alleged fakery was a form of “election interference” that disqualified Trump from the ballot.
This would be an existential crisis for Harris. Cable news would break into its programming to cover this and wouldn’t stop until she was driven from the race. Newspapers would print multiple Watergate-level front-page stories about Harris going stark raving mad and threatening democracy.
Trump did this, of course, and it was a minor story.
The reason isn’t that reporters like Trump or want him to win. The reason is that they haven’t figured out a structural solution to the problem of a candidate whose misconduct, dishonesty, bigotry, and general pathological behavior lie so far beyond the norm. Trump is a yearslong out-of-sample event that blows up every instrument used to measure him. The media have tried, and failed, to capture his abnormality, but no workable solution has presented itself.
The current conventional wisdom holds that, after years on end, stern warnings about Trump’s lying, his authoritarian tendencies, and so on have lost all effect on the public. That may well be correct.
But the upshot of this wearing off is that Trump has succeeded in getting the media to lower the bar to the floor. Indeed, on those rare occasions he manages to sound even somewhat like a regular American politician rather than a scenery-chewing movie villain, at least some reporters will lavish him with praise and speculate that Trump has “changed.”
I won’t claim the media have covered Harris perfectly. Nor would I argue the media have no liberal bias. (I think that bias exists and has gotten more pronounced, though it can mostly be found in cultural coverage and siloed beats devoted to social issues and subjects outside of political reporting.)
But reporting on politics and campaigns still generally follows traditional norms of objectivity. That’s why conservatives work the refs so hard — if the refs were genuinely in the pocket of the opposing side, there would be no point to it.
And those norms happen to work in favor of a candidate who has trained his supporters to ignore all evidence of his corruption and lying.
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