The coverage of the first presidential debate just isn’t going to cut it

At about 5pm this afternoon, I decided to gloss over a few major news sites just to see how the debate was being covered. After last night, I genuinely could not fathom a Trump-won spin, as much as I believe many journalists wanted to write it. It just simply could not withstand even the slightest bit of scrutiny.

Still, I’m shocked at the legnths a variety of organizations are going to suck-out every possibly positive for Trump, some of which just don’t exist. Again, this was as clear a win for Clinton as I believe a modern debate can possibly be––but the coverage just doesn’t reflect that.

First, the good news. Almost nobody is calling this a win for Trump, a fairly significant fact in today’s political climate. There is significant attention being given to the Alishia Machado story, and a lot of headlines were unequivocal in stating Clinton’s victory (but again, this is nothing more than accurate coverage).

Disclaimer: For this review, I looked at ABC News, CBS News, CNN, Fox News, the LA Times, the New York Times, Politico, NBC News, and the Washington Post.

But these headlines were the exception. It became clear almost immediately after the debate that journalists were going to do whatever was possible to keep this race interesting. Take this tweet from Nate Silver:

This logic just collapses in on itself. It is correct that it was really hard to see how the debate helped Trump; the greatest possible accomplishment in a debate. If that were true, there cannot be any bad news, almost by definition. But Silver decides to suggest “well, it can’t be good for Trump, but maybe it can, in which case Clinton is in trouble.” That’s a contortion, not analysis.

Some other headlines declared what is factually correct––that Clinton won the debate––but went out of their way to remind everyone “but it’s not over!” Again, no one suggested it is (it’s completely irrelevant to coverage of the debate), but it’s a helpful tidbit to add if you want to maintain the close status of the race.

Some excerpts, such as this one from the New York Times, just chose a conclusion and rewrote the facts to get there:

Trump was not in control during this debate, at all, but the piece is able to dampen that reality by arbitrarily choosing Trump’s craziness as the standard for judging Trump’s craziness. It does the same thing when it says he created no “new controversies.” So in other words, Trump has been so crazy and created so many controversies that this was nothing new, so he actually did well. That’s not how it works…

The most unfortunate finding for me, however, was the enormous lack of stories dealing with any of the outlandish, newsworthy things that came out of Trump’s mouth. The most glaring case deals with Trump’s tax returns. At the debate, Trump responded to Clinton’s speculation the he pays no federal income tax by stating, “That makes me smart.”

Grammatically, that cannot mean anything but he pays no income tax. Maybe he misspoke, but given the enormity of the issue of Trump’s tax returns––the overwhelming desire of voters to see them and the constant criticism of his lack of disclosure––this strikes me as a fairly large story. But the few outlets that did cover it either buried it deep on their webpages, reported it as a he-said-she-said issue, or outright speculated that “eh, maybe, but it wouldn’t even be that bad”. No one offered the “Trump suggests he pays no income tax” headline that I think the story demanded.

These, from the Washington Post, was the closest to an objective, non-muddled-with story, but still fails to deal with the issue directly:

This one from the New York Times tackles the issue, but does so as if nothing newsworthy just happened (this is also burried on the Times front page):

It doesn’t end there. Trump said a number of things last night that are deserving of their own stories. He suggested China should invade North Korea. He argued stop-and-frisk is a good policy that Chicago should adopt. He smugly asked if he can refer to “Secretary Clinton,” in a way that was almost overtly sexist. He further delegitimized President Obama by referring to him as “your president.” These all strike me as major stories coming from a presidential nominee. But this is all I found, and it was not easy (these were so buried on their respective sites that I had to do a command-F search to find them):

Given how blatantly bad Trump’s performance was, I’m not sure these outlets could have gone much further without outright undermining their legitimacy. And of course, this is nothing new, just a fresh attempt to undermine Clinton’s enduring lead and perhaps the most significant moment of her campaign.