Will The New York Times Kill What's Left of Americans' Faith in The New York Times?
Yes, they will.
"Will the Coronavirus Kill What's Left of Americans' Faith in Washington?" from Sabrina Tavernise manages to squeeze in a multitude of the grievous errors of political reporting typical of the Times.
As a matter of interest, the URL link tells us the theme "coronavirus-government-trust". That's the warning this will be a carefully crafted both sides story.
To begin, take the false premise - the Times pretends they are in no way part of the story, Even with a focus on the theme of trust, trust is just something that deveops between politicians and constituents without the influence of information sources like the Times. In this fantasy world, the Newspaper of Record has no impact.
Now take the logical fallacy. The Times has been feeding these "man on the street" pieces on politicians and "trust" for years now, bolstered by poll results showing a decline in trust in government. These articles, slotted under the hard news banner rather than opinion pieces, purport to be the result of an exploratory process. Yet a true exploration might yield a surprise here or there. But that never happens. We always know the result of the interviews with "just folks" out there in the country (the real America?) will be a balance and a contrived one at that. We hear from a 62 year old in whose experience "Vietnam happened, then Watergate." Really? Vietnam just happened? Wasn't that the result of conscious decisions by politicians? And Watergate just happened? That was a conscious decision by political operatives to burglarize the HQ of the Democratic Party and by the Republican president to conspire to conceal evidence of crimes. Things don't just happen, unless you are the NYT afraid to seem to point fingers.
If we know what is going to be reported before the interviews happen, what is the value of the interviews other than as false support for a preconceived narrative. And isn't that just a different form of propaganda?
Another fallacy that serves as a fundamental premise of the trust theme is that there is this thing called "Washington". This false premise co-exists with the fallacy that Republicans and Democrats exist in a rivalry between two equal and opposite sides which can only be symmetric, never assymmetric. What if some interesting asymmetry emerged. Sorry, that can not exist because if we observed that and reported its significance, and it made one side look bad, we would appear to be taking sides and could no longer be trusted as reporters. What if one side noticed we, the NYT, always gave our reporting a tilt toward nominal balance and decided to skew their behavior to take advantage of that reporting weakness (such as lying)? Nope. We would still bend over backwards in support of balance and call that "fairness". It's up to the other side to get the truth out there.
The rules of false balance require the reporter to avoid pinning blame on politicians which might make the reporter appear biased or would inevitably tilt a reasonable person to conclude that maybe in this one case one "side" is really bad after all. Can't let that happen.
So in this narrative, you would never know that Trump was impeached by the House a few months ago and acquitted by the Senate. You would not know that a factor in whether or not to trust Trump could be his recommendations to use hydroxychloriquine for coronavirus or that he was excited about getting UV rays inside the body and bleach. You would never know that there just might be more reasons to mistrust Trump than any other government official and certainly any other president. You would not know because of paragraphs like this:
"The disillusionment has become a facet of national political campaigning. Mr. Trump pitched himself as an outsider fighting for those left behind by Washington’s policies. Joe Biden, the Democratic front-runner, talks that way, too. But for Americans who no longer trust government, the promises, even from their own party, sound hollow."
Paragraphs like that normalize Trump. He has been president for three years, yet the article goes back to favorable claims Trump make about himself while campaigning in 2016. Yet another lame, but standard straight reporting approach is to avoid making statements, far less judgments, about Trump based on ordinary standards of objective facts and instead, to take his claims about himself as a starting point.
That throw-in line "Joe Biden, the Democratic front-runner, talks that way, too." reads like a last minute desperate attempt to both sides the comment about Trump with a "Biden just like Trump" line.
The saddest fact about the NYT standard "real people" mistrust Washington articles is that they perpetuate the perception that "Washington" is the problem, thus avoiding accountability of top politicians for their actions and inactions. The NYT could take a stronger stand to force accountability rather than desperately reaching to both sides all of the articles related to politics. When one "side" maintains such control over the federal government, which they continue to expand in the judiciary with lifetime appointments of young judges, the NYT could shift their tone to a speaking truth to power mode. Instead, the NYT has chosen to strain credulity by doubling down on bothsidesism.
