A new poll finding voters think Donald Trump is a centrist should be a wake-up call for the news media

The news media isn't doing its job

There’s a new New York Times/Siena College poll out and I’m not going to write about it because I generally don’t write about polls because the thing 99.999 percent of Americans should be thinking about is not “who is winning” but rather “who should win.” But I do want to briefly address one of the Trump advantages in the poll highlighted by Times chief political analyst Nate Cohn:

He occupies the center. A near majority of voters say Mr. Trump is “not too far” to the left or right on the issues, while only around one-third say he’s “too far to the right.” Nearly half of voters, in contrast, say Ms. Harris is too far to the left; only 41 percent say she’s “not too far either way.”

Of course, Donald Trump does not actually “occupy the center” — what Cohn meant is that Trump is perceived as occupying the center. (At least according to this measure.) This is not an insignificant difference!

So where does that perception come from? It comes, in part, from news companies like the New York Times.

When former Vice President Dick Cheney endorsed Kamala Harris last week, the New York Times didn’t even bother to print an article about the endorsement in the newspaper. This is a Republican former Vice President, a fixture at the highest levels of the Republican Party for literally my entire life — he was White House chief of staff in the 1970s, House Republican Conference Chair in the 1980s, Secretary of Defense in the 1990s, and Vice President in the 2000s — endorsing the Democratic nominee for president:

“In our nation’s 248-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” Cheney said in a statement. “He tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him. He can never be trusted with power again.”

“As citizens, we each have a duty to put country above partisanship to defend our Constitution. That is why I will be casting my vote for Vice President Kamala Harris,” he concluded.

That’s as stark a demonstration of Trump’s extremism as you could ask for, and a cross-party endorsement pretty much unprecedented in modern American history, but the New York Times couldn’t be bothered to print its article about the endorsement in the newspaper, running it online only. Contrast that with the front-page above-the-fold treatment the New York Times gave RFK Jr.’s endorsement of Trump two weeks earlier — and as you do so, keep in mind that RFK Jr. has never held any meaningful position in government;¹ he’s just a crackpot anti-vaccine activist trading on a famous name:

The Times hyped the RFK Jr endorsement as “a remarkable twist for the scion of a Democratic political dynasty,” adding “A longtime Democrat, Mr. Kennedy renounced his party.”

The Times also ran (yes, in the print edition) a separate article focusing on how other news outlets covered the RFK Jr. endorsement:

Seems like it’s a time for an update, focusing on the Times itself — and the contrast to how the paper covered Cheney’s endorsement of Harris. I won’t hold my breath.

News companies like the New York Times doing things like hyping cross-partisan endorsements for Trump while downplaying far more significant cross-partisan endorsements for Harris is one reason the public perceives Trump, the most extremist major-party presidential nominee of any of our lifetimes, as closer to the center than he actually is.

Another reason people see Trump as closer to the center than he is: newspapers like the Times portray Trump and his allies as being obsessed with centrist-friendly things like cutting wasteful spending and increasing government efficiency, instead of exploring their actual extremist views, as I explained yesterday.

Then there’s the way the New York Times downplays Trump’s fondness for foreign authoritarians like Viktor Orban and Kim Jong Un. And downplays Trump’s ongoing incitement of political violence and portrays a majority of Americans thinking Trump committed serious crimes as good news for Trump and helps Trump pass himself off as an abortion moderate even after he promised to appoint Supreme Court justices who would end Roe v Wade’s guarantee of abortion rights, did so, and bragged about it.

On Twitter yesterday, The New Republic’s Greg Sargent noted more examples of Trump’s recent authoritarian moves that have gotten far less media attention than they deserve:

That was a reference, in part, to this threatening rant Trump posted on Saturday:

The New York Times’ article about that threat didn’t make it into the print edition Sunday or Monday. Compare the front page of today’s Orlando Sentinel with the front page of today’s New York Times:

And the Times has never even mentioned Trump’s abhorrent statement at a campaign event on Saturday that his plan to deport immigrants would be “bloody.”

The New York Times devoted five paragraphs to Trump’s efforts at the campaign event to stoke fear about immigrants, but didn’t find his promise of bloody mass deportations worth even mentioning.²

(Earlier last week, New York Times publisher AG Sulzberger wrote an essay for The Washington Post about the authoritarian threat Donald Trump poses. As I explained in response, Sulzberger’s own newspaper should behave quite differently if he takes that threat seriously.)

Donald Trump is a virulent racist who openly expresses admiration for foreign dictators and telegraphs his intention to mimic their tactics and routinely threatens to jail his political adversaries and incites violence against political opponents and journalists and brags about his responsibility for abortion bans and makes up vicious lies about transgender people and promises “bloody” mass deportations and is such a threat to the survival of American democracy that even Dick Cheney won’t vote for him. If voters see Trump as some kind of centrist, that is in no small part because news companies like The New York Times persist in cleaning up his incoherent ramblings, downplaying the threat he poses, and helping him pose as an abortion moderate who just wants to reduce wasteful spending and make government more efficient.

1. RFK Jr. was briefly employed in the Manhattan District Attorney’s office in the early 1980s; he resigned a few months into his tenure after failing the bar exam; two months after his resignation, he was arrested for heroin possession. That’s the extent of his government service.

2. As usual, the Times is a symbol of broader media failures. In this case, even many news companies that did mention Trump’s “bloody” threat downplayed it. Reuters, for example, included the quote as the last line in an article headlined “Trump revs up small-town base in Wisconsin.”