Bob Mercer charges press with dishonesty

Bob Mercer writes that after reviewing the national press's coverage of Donald Trump,  he finds that it has been dishonest.  He says,  "Trump was, and is, right, in the allegations, the accusations, that some news organizations were, and are, dishonest in their treatment of him."

His basis:  "He brought some of this upon himself, but I’ve carefully read and I’ve carefully listened to some of the news accounts: Some of those some clearly went against him. Opinion from national news outlets replaced news reporting."

And he lights into the process that decides what is to be covered:  "I have often thought we have little objectivity, or none, in news. We as reporters and editors make choices — what we cover, what we don’t cover — and that isn’t objectivity."

That matter of how editors decide what is to be covered is a difficult one.  There are criteria for evaluating what makes an event or person newsworthy.

• Prominence
• Proximity
• Timeliness
• Uniqueness
• Consequence
• Human interest

Editors make decisions on what relates to their particular audience in deciding coverage.  It is true, in many markets editors gear coverage to the desires of their advertisers and the predominant political attitudes of their readers.  But the overall process of deciding what is newsworthy is not all that arbitrary. Cable news sometimes demonstrates a desperation in trying to fill a 24-hour news cycle.  And some networks, such as Fox news,  operate from a particular political stance.  But for most of the major national media,  the coverage is based upon professional evaluations of the significance of what it is covering.

Bob Mercer takes particular issue with the use of the first 100-days of an administration as a gauge of how well it is doing in carrying out its political goals.  Mercer points out that Trump deprecated the hundred-day measure and pushed back against it.  But FactCheck.Org points out the facts behind the application of that 100-day measure to Trump:

As a candidate, Donald Trump issued a “100-day action plan to Make America Great Again.” It contained 28 promises, and Trump says he is “mostly there on most items.” But is he? Our review of his action plan found he has kept some promises, broken a few, and there are many that are still a work in progress. 

Once in office, Trump criticized “the ridiculous standard of the first 100 days.” He even questioned who within his campaign came up with a “100-day action plan.” He recently told the Associated Press “somebody put out the concept of a hundred-day plan,” even though Trump himself unveiled the 100-day plan at a campaign appearance on Oct. 22, 2016, in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

We take no position on the significance or merits of the 100-day milestone, which dates to the days of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. In a fireside chat on July 24, 1933, FDR spoke of “the crowding events” of the first 100 days of a special congressional session called to counter the effects of the Great Depression, as explained by Penn State political science professor Robert Speel.

The question of honesty is troublesome.  Trump constantly proclaimed what he would do his first day in office and during his first hundred days, making threats and accusations against his opponents.  What is dishonest about tracking how he is carrying out his expressed intentions.

But the matter of dishonesty is one that Trump has created for the press to handle.  In the history of the U.S., no person of national prominence has been as blatantly and consistently dishonest as Donald Trump.  The Washington Post Fact Checker has found that during his first 100 days in office,  Trump has issued false or misleading claims 492 times.  

A public interest group is raising funds to hire experienced journalists and analysts to compile a daily list of everything Trump has said and done during his campaign and his presidency.  Trump has changed the U.S., and many people think it needs a documented record of what happened to it so that future generations can understand how a democracy fails.   Why did it adopt malicious dishonesty as a routine aspect of governance?

Some news organizations have opposed Trump,  but they have documented the reasons why.  His record as a "businessman" and a political candidate is consistently one of deceit, incompetence, and abject dishonesty.  Terming the press dishonest for exposing dishonesty is difficult to get the mind around.

But it is a crucial symptom of what happened to America.