The problems in covering Trump’s economics proposals

Jem Bartholomew of Columbia Journalism Review writes about the mistakes being made in the media covering former President Donald Trump’s economics proposals.

Bartholomew writes, “So how is the media communicating what Trump’s economic policies would mean for the country? As I see it, it’s going wrong in two ways. First, journalists are ‘sanewashing’ Trump’s senselessness, as Parker Molloy has written in the New Republic and Jon Allsop expanded on in this newsletter. Take his Detroit economic speech. Trump rambled on tariffs, crowd size, Elon Musk’s rockets, North Korea, immigration, the cost of living, and the word ‘grocery,’ of which he said: ‘It’s a sort of simple word; it sort of means, like, everything you eat. The stomach is speaking; it always does. And I have more complaints about that―bacon and things—going up, double, triple, quadruple.’ He spoke for almost ninety minutes before announcing a new policy—making car loan interest fully tax-deductible—which was planned as the speech’s set piece. But here was the Reuters headline about the event: ‘Trump courts auto workers with car loan tax break, China crackdown.’ And the Wall Street Journal’s: ‘Donald Trump Calls for Making Car-Loan Interest Tax Deductible.’ These feel like objectivity as seen through a distorted carnival mirror.

“The second media mistake is wrapping economic issues into the political horse race. The line we hear time and again, much more than policy impact on America’s working and middle classes, is ‘Trump polls better on the economy.’ That’s true—he’s up 54 to 45 percent over Kamala Harris on the perceived ability to handle it, according to a recent Gallup survey—but how much does that tell us? A press corps that focuses solely on perception, not policy, risks floating far away from the kitchen table concerns of families. And then there’s the rather arrogant narrative circulating recently that voters—who are consistently telling pollsters they’re not yet feeling the impact of a steadier economy—should snap out of their ‘vibe-cession’ and thank the Biden administration for delivering low inflation, low unemployment, and healthy growth. Of course, these are all positive trends. But it’s no surprise people aren’t celebrating the GDP rate in the streets when the US has historically high housing costs, the highest health-expenditure-to-GDP ratio in the OECD, average childcare and eldercare costs in the tens of thousands per year, and 1.75 trillion dollars in total student loan debt.”