Michael Wolff, a columnist for USA Today, weighed in on the debate about media coverage of the presidential election. I and others have framed this as a debate of “false equivalence:” how can the media give even-handed coverage to two candidates of such dramatically different records and temperments?
Wolff took great delight in how Times public editor Liz Spayd defended the New York Times Sunday for the way it treats the two candidates and then how columnist Nick Kristoff weighed on Tuesday in saying, in effect, she was all wrong. It wasn’t a question of journalistic objectivity, Kristoff argued. The media should call out the fact that Trump has never served the public interest for a day in his life and probably does not understand the concept. I described all that here.
Wolff appears to come down on the side of saying the media if filled with liberals, which it isn’t, and that all liberals are looking for something they define as “normal.” Trump is clearly “abnormal.” Wolff says liberal elites cannot understand how Americans could possibly be choosing to vote for someone who is clearly incapable of governing. That may be true but something deeper is happening.
I agree with him on this point: “In this campaign, there is one visceral candidate and the remote one.” Americans seem to respond to someone who is visceral even if he is categorically wrong, even if he does not understand the democratic process. To finish first across the finish line, Clinton needs to reveal more viscera.
