Americans’ calamitous loss of trust is also fuelled by the extreme partisanship that has made their politics and related institutions so dysfunctional
help he got from fake news reports, Donald Trump probably owes his presidency more to the traditional kind. Only a small minority of voters absorbed made-up accounts of Hillary Clinton’s endorsement by Islamic State, lesbianism and links to a child-sex ring.
In a multi-part study of the media’s role in the election, Thomas Patterson of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government found that Mrs Clinton’s use of a private email account at the State Department, among lesser supposed scandals, received four times as much coverage as Mr Trump’s alleged record of harassing women. That unrelenting focus opened the gates for Mr Trump’s wilder attacks on his opponent.
Yet that is what many left-wing commentators, and perhaps a good few in Mr Baquet’s newsroom, want. Some consider the risk of becoming aligned with the Democratic Party worth running in an effort to give the most accurate measure of Mr Trump’s failings.
Without wishing to minimise the challenges of covering American politics—with which this newspaper also grapples, not always successfully—these arguments should be dismissed as the attempted left-wing power-grab they are. The media has much less potential to give Mr Trump an unwarranted advantage over his opponent next year than it had in 2016.
. The fact that a dwindling number of mainstream outlets have retained readers and viewers from both sides of the divide makes them, despite their imperfections, the closest thing to a neutral arbiter going. This was underlined by a study suggesting Mr Trump performed best in 2016 in areas with the lowest levels of subscription to newspapers, whether of the centre-left or centre-right. A more partisan media environment is the last thing America needs.
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