The latest Washington Week with The Atlantic on PBS was most notable for National Public Radio’s senior political editor Domenico Montanaro's ludicrously imbalanced fact-checking of Trump vs. Harris and host Jeffrey Goldberg’s accusations of double standards in media coverage of the campaign -- in favor of Trump!
JEFFREY GOLDBERG, moderator: I want to talk about, I'll call it plainly, a double standard that we have in this campaign. We`re sitting here, parsing, as we should, what the Democratic nominee for president says in an interview, how she answers questions about a whole range of subjects. Meanwhile, this is what Donald Trump had to say this week.
TRUMP clip: Groceries, food has gone up at levels that nobody's ever seen before. But we've never seen anything like it, 50, 60, 70 percent. You take a look at bacon and some of these products, and some people don`t eat bacon anymore. And we are going to get the energy prices down. When we get energy down, you know, this was caused by their horrible energy, wind. They want wind all over the place. But when it doesn't blow, we have a little problem.
This snippet was hot in the leftist media, and the article highlighting it in The Atlantic was titled "Six Degrees of Trump and Bacon." It's a rhetorical ramble, but the point was surely clear enough, especially for journalists – that expensive liberal environmental policies, like generating energy through wind turbines, can contribute to food price increases at the store. But Goldberg said it would disqualify anyone in the Intelligent Party:
GOLDBERG: Here’s the thing, I’ll make this observation. I’ll own it. If Kamala Harris went from bacon to wind in her interview with Dana Bash, she would, this morning, not be -- the next morning, she would not be the nominee of the Democratic Party. That would have been a very, very strange -- people would have been like, what is going on? Do we just have an absurdly low standard now for the things that Donald Trump says and does?
NPR’s Montanaro agreed with Goldberg, then actually attention to his partisanship by citing his own wacky fact-check compiling 162 (!) Trump distortions and lies within an hour-long speech.
MONTANARO: I think that there is definitely a double standard, and I think part of it is how each side`s voters interpret their candidate....I think that from reporter`s standpoint, we do have to be careful about how we -- what level we hold both of them to. When I fact-checked Donald Trump’s hour press conference, he told 162 lies and distortions within that time period, 2.5 a minute, compared to Kamala Harris’s DNC acceptance speech, where she had 12 statements that I found were contextually misleading or needed more.
Indeed, Montanaro fact-checked Trump last month in a ridiculously nit-picking fashion that would likely be seen as a waste of time even by the average Trump-loathing NPR listener.
Here are just two of the 162 of Trump’s alleged “misstatements, exaggerations and outright lies,” some of which deal with standard partisan campaign trail insults from Trump against Harris, or speculation or predictions that by definition aren't falsifiable.
17. “Rasmussen came out today. We're substantially leading.”
Montanaro’s rebuttal: "Trump is not substantially leading, and Rasmussen is viewed as one of the least credible pollsters in the country."
Stat-based poll guru-prognosticator Nate Silver would have a lot to say about that liberally biased judgement above, besides noting Rasmussen’s track record was “average” and that if Rasmussen had a Republican bias, “other polls have had a Democratic bias.” Or:
25. “She can't do an interview. She's barely competent and she can't do an interview.”
In reply, Montanaro plucked the race card: "Harris hasn’t done interviews since getting into the campaign, but she has done them in the past, so saying “she can’t do” one or that she is “barely competent” are just insults. Trump tends to revert to questioning the intelligence of Black women who challenge him."
There’s much more on Montanaro’s partisan piece in Tim Graham’s column.
By contrast, Montanaro sounded achingly apologetic in the third paragraph of his far shorter fact-check of Kamala Harris’s nomination acceptance speech:
It’s the role of the press to try and hold politicians to account for the accuracy of their statements in a good-faith way. The dozen Harris statements lacking in context are far less in comparison to 162 misstatements, exaggerations and outright lies that NPR found from Trump’s hour-long news conference Aug. 8.
