Former President Donald Trump is facing 34 felony charges, doesn’t acknowledge that he lost the 2020 election and has openly said he’s going to terminate the constitution. Despite all of this and more, mainstream media sources such as The New York Times, CNN and The Washington Post are writing articles that treat Trump like an ordinary candidate.
Following the debate, in which Trump told many blatant lies, The New York Times published an article titled “Harris Had Stronger Debate, Polls Find, but the Race Remains Deadlocked.” In this article, none of the lies Trump told are mentioned, with only one quote that talks about his incoherent rambling.
The authors didn’t fail, however, to pull quotes from people expressing their concerns about Vice President Kamala Harris as if she was the one making claims that Haitian migrants are eating dogs and babies are being executed after they’re born.
The New York Times isn’t the only news source guilty of this. CNN recently published an article titled “3 charts that help explain how Trump’s tariffs would work,” but he still hasn’t accurately explained what a tariff does and even went as far as proposing 200% tariffs on John Deere imports.
It’s remarkable that CNN thinks this “policy position” merits consideration when multiple independent economic studies have shown consumers will bear the cost of these tariffs. For this reason, 23 Nobel Prize-winning economists have endorsed Harris and agree that Trump’s tariff plan is absurd.
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It’s even more absurd that CNN is trying to shift this election back to policy despite numerous people in Trump’s previous administration openly discussing the threat he poses to the country.
How can you even listen to Trump’s tariff plan when he still thinks he won the last election?
Things get even worse when you look at The Washington Post’s newest decision not to endorse a candidate for the first time in 36 years. By opting out of an endorsement, The Washington Post remains neutral in an election where the stakes are higher than ever, and the choice is clear.
It’s incredibly disheartening to hear this since The Washington Post has a history of endorsing mostly Democratic candidates. Readers were so shocked by this decision that The Washington Post lost 250,000 subscribers over the past few days.
With all this being said, it’s understandable that mainstream media sources are having a difficult time handling Trump’s campaign. If they cover Trump honestly, they’re seen as biased, but if they try to appear impartial, they concede ground to the MAGA movement.
It’s become increasingly easier to give Trump a pass since the standard for him is effectively non-existent. Hillary Clinton said perfectly in an MSNBC interview that people are getting “desensitized” to his erratic behavior. Whether he’s issuing a nuclear threat to North Korea on Twitter or declaring that transgender people should be banned from the military, he’s constantly turning up the temperature on his rhetoric.
It’s impossible to know if Trump is serious or if he’s begging for attention, given that he walks back on nearly everything he says, be it his shifting stance on Obamacare or his position on abortion.
Despite this, mainstream media companies have essentially graded Trump on a curve while Harris and other politicians to a much higher standard.
Attempting to appear unbiased to appeal more to Trump’s base is unacceptable in this election. It’s these articles and decisions from news networks that contribute to sane-washing Trump’s campaign and drawing more people into his vortex.
William Hawrylak is a junior in LAS.
