http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/08/opinion/balance-elections-and-lies.html 2016-10-07 12:40:52 Balance, Elections and Lies The media must provide voters with as accurate and probing a portrait of Clinton and Trump as possible. === This is an atypical election. Donald Trump has moved the needle. As Eugene Robinson Here’s a sampler of what Trump has trumped-up: The so-called Confronted by this, the basic questions for the press have been: If covering Trump is also providing free advertising — In other words, is any equivalence of treatment of the candidates “false” because they are not compatible, any more than, say, harassment and murder are compatible crimes? First, not covering Trump is not the answer. It is the media’s actual responsibility to provide voters with as accurate and probing a portrait of the two candidates as possible. Second, the media reacted too slowly to cover Trump. There were fast responses. Since January, The Huffington Post has appended an editors’ note to every story about Trump But there was also hesitation. My newspaper, The New York Times, spoke of Trump’s misrepresentations, but it was not until a few weeks ago that we called Trump a liar. Since that breakthrough in a front-page story, the word has appeared regularly in relation in Trump, as if the Gray Lady has experienced a kind of catharsis: Goddammit, I can curse now! I don’t see what alternative to the word “lie” existed. Trump “ Overall, the press has been aggressive in reporting Trump’s failings. The Times’s terrific scoop on Trump’s The question is whether such stories impact Trump supporters or amount to “preaching to the choir” in tribal America. I believe perseverance counts. The Times has also published critical pieces about Hillary Clinton, a candidate mistrusted by many voters. This has aroused plenty of ire, including from the prominent political scientist Norman Ornstein, who sees an anti-Hillary pattern, or a sexist pattern, or glaring “false equivalence.” I had a vigorous Twitter exchange with Ornstein over a recent page one Times story that chronicled how Clinton spent much of the summer at fund-raisers with the rich. At one, children were permitted to ask a question if their parents would pony up Cover the hell out of the story without fear or favor: That must still be our byword. Clinton is a candidate who made the grave misjudgment, as secretary of state, of using a private email server; and then said, untruthfully, that the F.B.I. had declared her to be truthful in her answers. At a moment when Americans want change, the Clintons feel like old news. That is why millennials galvanized by Sanders are not galvanized by her. These are all essential areas of coverage. Giving Clinton a pass is not the answer to Trump. Of course, the press makes mistakes. NBC’s Matt Lauer pressed Clinton and went lightly on Trump. We missed the important It is tempting, but wrong, to seize on every error as proof of “false equivalence.” It’s proof, rather, that the press is human. Nor, however, can fairness or balance preclude making it plain through rigorous reporting that while Clinton is imperfect, Trump is awful; that while she has trafficked in the evasiveness that is the stuff of politics, he has lied; and that while America would be in safe hands with Clinton, it would be in clear and present danger with the irascible, insecure, Putin-friendly,