Double Standard | It’s Not Your Imagination. The Rules Really Are Different for Trump.

Exposing the media bias that’s breaking our democracy.

Remember when political fact-checking was all the rage a couple decades ago? We had Politifact, FactCheck.org, and dozens of mainstream outlets dutifully calling out politicians for fudging the trade deficit in speeches or twisting the words of their opponent in campaign ads.

In 2010, I helped found one such effort for a nonprofit publication, the Michigan Truth Squad (there was even a cringey referee motif). It definitely didn’t endear me to, well, any of the candidates running that year, but that was nothing new for me as a longtime journalist. And like many of my colleagues, I truly believed that this project would make our leaders more honest. After all, who would want to be labeled a liar? Politicos would have to do better, if for no other reason that annoying reporters like me would shame them into it.

Ah, shame. Remember that? That disappeared a decade ago. I’d put the time of death on November 8, 2016, when Donald Trump won the election just a month after the infamous Access Hollywood tape was released with him musing about his “grab ‘em by the pussy” philosophy for dealing with women.

Now Trump’s first term didn’t kill off the fact-checking trend — quite the opposite. The Washington Post painstakingly chronicled his mendacity and identified 30,573 false or misleading claims over four years. It’s almost impressive that Trump had time to get impeached twice, work to overturn the 2020 election, and oversee a pandemic that killed hundreds of thousands of Americans.

But, as we all know, the Post’s motto of “Democracy Dies in Darkness” has become a sick joke during Trump’s second term. Its billionaire owner, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, has fallen over himself to curry favor with the administration and has slashed over a third of the paper’s staff.

Many other mainstream outlets aren’t exactly covering themselves in glory, with ABC and CBS settling lawsuits with Trump over news coverage. The Tiffany Network has now MAGA-fied its news department under the Free Press’ Bari Weiss, complete with a revival-style town hall with Professional Widow Erika Kirk and a censorship plan for Stephen Colbert.

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That’s bad news for accountability journalism. And bad news for democracy. As a result of this cowardice from corporate media, Donald Trump gets precious little scrutiny for things that would take down other presidents. Since he lies with impunity, that’s become the playbook for other Republicans and far-right figures. And it’s warping more than our politics. It’s breaking our country.

I’m sick of it — and I think a lot of Americans are. We should demand certain things from our leaders, starting with honesty, integrity, and humility. That shouldn’t change based on who’s in power. We don’t need to lower our standards just because our president has none.

That’s the inspiration behind my new column, Double Standard, for Lincoln Square. I’ll expose the ways that corporate media allows Trump and Republicans to play by different rules than Democrats. Sometimes it’s blatant; sometimes it’s more insidious. But the result is the same: It corrodes our democratic institutions.

We can’t shame corporate media into doing better. But we can put them on notice.

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