The next false-equivalence epidemic
James Fallows
National correspondent at The Atlantic
... The problem with Trump is that he is not like anyone else who has ever held the office. He lies with abandon; he uses public office for private gain on a scale never before witnessed; and he seems to have no respect for, or even interest in, the institutions of self-government to which all of his predecessors have at least paid lip service.
Thus any of the “normal” procedural rules, applied to such an abnormal figure, can lead to destructive results. To be “fair” in covering him is to be unfair—to the truth, to history, to the readers, to any concept of journalistic purpose ...
... Journalism is hard; criticizing journalism is easy. In this business we’re all doing our best, and we all make mistakes in real time. But the very difficulty of these calls is why it’s worth noting a similar, as-if-we’d-learned-nothing-from-2016 case of false equivalence, which is unfolding before our eyes. This is “the Ukraine problem.”
Specifically, this is the idea that whatever Donald Trump may be guilty of, involving that country, is journalistically and historically comparable to whatever Joe Biden’s son Hunter may have done there. Already leading media outlets have begun lumping these stories together. “Scrutiny over Trump’s Ukraine scandal may also complicate Biden’s campaign” was the headline on a big story in The Washington Post on Saturday. The day before that, a New York Times investigative reporter, Ken Vogel, went on MSNBC to argue that Ukraine complications were “a significant liability for Joe Biden.” Guests on talk shows have, reflexively, wanted to “balance” what they are saying about Trump-and-Ukraine, with observations about what Ukraine might mean for the Biden campaign ...
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/09/patient-zero-of-the-next-false-equivalence-epidemic/598573/
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