Once again, media are outraged by Trump. They’re obsessingover the stupid things he’s said. Their headlines are dominated by his claim that Haitian immigrants eat Americans’ pets.
Horror at Trump’s comments have drowned out the fact Kamala Harris won the debate. In the media coverage since, she has become a footnote to the Trump performance.
It’s almost unbelievable the media are doing this again. In the 2016 election their obsession with Trump gave him at least $3 billion of free coverage. It’s part of the reason he won the election.
And once again, they’re also unable to hide their bias.
The ABC debate moderators fact-checked only twice in that debate. Both times it was Trump they fact-checked. Harris wasn’t fact-checked at all.
Yet one online fact-checker subsequently busted her lying or half-lying 25 times.
The difference is her porkies were boring. She claimed wrongly that Trump had left them the worst unemployment rate since the Great Depression, when unemployment hit 24.9%. Actually, he left them an unemployment high of 6.4%.
But that’s not fun. That’s the usual kind of stuff politicians lie and exaggerate about. It’s not nearly as wild as Trump claiming migrants eat pets. So Harris got away with it.
Donald Trump speaks to media in the Spin Room after the presidential debate against Kamala Harris. Photo / NY Times
That nuance doesn’t matter to Trump supporters, though. What they see is a double standard.
Again, this is part of why he won in 2016: because the media sneered at him. And when he claimed the scrum was rigged against him and people — who had themselves grown tired of the political elite’s attitude — watched the news, they saw evidence he was right and believed him.
What the media and commentators seem unable to understand is that no amount of fact-checking and coverage of stupid comments will change the minds of true Trump supporters.
It is not a shock that Trump says stupid things. His voters know it. They’ve known it for years. They’ve already baked that in and they vote for him anyway. Telling them another stupid thing he’s said will not change their minds.
His voters are also not dissuaded by exposing his lies. For every conspiracy theory or lie that comes out of his mouth, there is something on the internet that supports what he says. However spurious.
Take the “migrants eating pets” claim. A resident of Springfield posted on Facebook one time that his daughter’s friend’s cat was killed, strung up and eaten by the Haitian neighbours. That the account was third hand and unverified by anyone else doesn’t matter.
There is bodycam footage of police arresting a woman for killing and eating a cat. That the woman was American — not Haitian — and that she was in Canton, not Springfield — doesn’t matter.
People don’t trust legacy media like they used to, so when they find some dodgy internet evidence they sometimes choose to believe that over the “biased” media.
Frankly, the American media are in a pickle. It’s hard to look away from the Trump Show. It’s unbelievable, entertaining, infuriating and unpredictable. It gets clicks. It’s why they keep serving Trump up to their audience.
The media obsession with talking about Trump might not help propel him to victory this time like it did in 2016. Odds are this is Kamala Harris’ election. But the polls are tight and the country is polarised, so it’s not a risk worth taking.
And it’s hard to believe the same media are falling for the same tricks from the same guy eight years on.
