The Media Can’t Handle the Absence of Truth

And their diffidence empowers pathological liars

We have guests for the next couple of days, and it would be rude to spend the whole time chained to the computer. So this post and maybe the next will be short and somewhat meta.

On Tuesday I talked to Greg Sargent of the New Republic; transcript here. I highly recommend subscribing to Greg’s podcast!

It was a good if depressing discussion, in part about Trump’s trade “deals” but also about how they are being (mis)reported. The question is how something like the agreement with the European Union, in which the U.S. imposed taxes on its own population while Europe made meaningless promises on investment and energy purchases, leads to headlines like this:

Long ago the economist Joan Robinson arguably pre-butted Trump’s argument for protectionism because, he claims, other nations are treating us unfairly:

The popular view that free trade is all very well so long as all nations are free-traders, but that when other nations erect tariffs we must erect tariffs too, is countered by the argument that it would be just as sensible to drop rocks into our harbours because other nations have rocky coasts.

But it’s even worse when a president mines our harbors based on the false claim that other nations have rocky coasts — and the media declare that he’s winning.

I’ve talked about the media’s problem with calling a lie a lie for many years — in fact, since my first year writing for the Times. Back then, faced with George W. Bush’s lies about taxes and Social Security, I suggested that if a candidate said the earth was flat, the headlines would read “Views differ on shape of planet.” Yet media organizations still haven’t figured out how to deal with it. I told Greg,

[T]o say that the president of the U.S. is making drastic policy changes in order to cure a problem that only exists in his imagination, that’s a very difficult … that sounds unbalanced. That sounds like you’re shilling for the Democrats, when it’s in fact just reporting the flat truth.

And so I think the media organizations have still not figured out how to deal with that. The fact of the matter is that Trump’s whole trade war is based upon a deluded version of how the world economy works. But aside from the fact that the Trump administration may try to punish your organization if you report that, it also just runs very counter to the “people want to sound objective.” And unfortunately, again, it’s the old Stephen Colbert line, “Reality has a well-known liberal bias.” If you report what’s really happening, it sounds liberal.

What I should have said is that this problem is a lot bigger than trade. International economics is my home turf, so I tend to focus on how Trump has destroyed the international trading system and brought back Smoot-Hawley-level tariffs based on the assertion that other countries are taking advantage of us and blocking our exports, which is pure fantasy. But there are worse things than tariffs, and they are also being justified with completely false claims.

What’s worse than tariffs? Mass deportation, with masked men claiming to be government agents — who can tell? — seizing people off the street, in some cases sending them to overseas gulags. All of this is being justified with claims that Americans are being terrorized by immigrant criminals. Trump:

You can't walk across the street to get a loaf of bread. You get shot, you get mugged, you get raped, you get whatever it may be.

In fact, crime has plunged:

Source: Jeff Asher

But how many headlines have you seen pointing out that Trump is destroying basic civil liberties in the name of fighting a nonexistent crime wave? There have been a few — my sense is that the media are a little more willing to call out lies about crime than lies about economics. But Trump’s hyping of a fake crime wave should be central to all reporting about his anti-immigrant policies, and it isn’t.

And then there are the attacks on universities. Not my field of expertise, but as far as I can tell the idea that universities have been taken over by wokeness, DEI, and all that is completely at odds with the evidence. Can you find antisemitism on college campuses? Of course, because you can find antisemitism everywhere. But I’m a lot more afraid of MAGA, which is infested with actual Nazis, than I am of a few leftist college students.

Anyway, no, Trump isn’t winning his trade war — except, possibly, in the media, which have apparently decided that shooting yourself in the foot and not facing retaliation is a victory.

MUSICAL CODA

Nothing to do with topic. Just a feel-good video, and a reminder that some good things come out of Atlanta: