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The Weakness of an ‘Impartial’ Press when Democracy is at Stake

Vote as if your life depended on it

By Frank Van Riper

Photography Columnist

I view Donald Trump as sui generis—one of a kind. We simply have not seen in this country one politician who, by himself, is so off-the-charts narcissistic, ignorant, lazy, venal, dishonest and cruel.

Add to that his designs for destroying our democracy—he tried and failed once on Jan 6^th, 2021, and hopes to do it again—bigly—in 2025, and Houston, we have a problem.

That, in turn, raises a problem for me, a former White House correspondent and national political correspondent, who tried over 20 years with the New York Daily News—through Democratic and Republican administrations--to be as objective as possible in his political reporting from Washington:

Four months ago, I posed the question: “How can one be objective in reporting on Donald Trump?”

My answer today, especially after the most recent presidential debate, is unchanged: “One cannot be.”

With Donald Trump, all bets are off in terms of objectivity. In fact, I would argue today as I did then that slavish “on the one hand this; on the other hand that” objectivity when reporting about Trump, his increasingly bizarre meanderings and his lies performs a disservice to this country and our democracy by effectively legitimizing what he says as acceptable political discourse.

So many things had to go wrong for us to have elected this fool as president: a gullible electorate fed on lies, both from Trump as well as the internet, a compliant press and complacent Democrats. © Frank Van Riper

“The old constraints on what one could say (or get away with)” when running for office,” I noted then, “have been shattered by an obese, short-fingered vulgarian (thank you Graydon Carter) whose mendacity comes seasoned with a rancid mix of racism, xenophobia, greed and stupidity…”

Add to this now increasing dementia.

If there ever were any doubt that Trump has jumped the rails mentally and emotionally, one only had to watch his presidential debate performance with Kamala Harris in Pennsylvania.

At least I can breathe a little bit now.

In terms of specifics, policy and simple humanity, Kamala Harris oratorically destroyed an incoherent, apoplectic Donald Trump.

All she had to do was keep her cool and let Trump vent. She did that--but also baited the former president multiple times, prompting him to foment and fume, becoming almost a parody of himself. (Many times I could swear I was listening to Stephen Colbert.)

She also was lucid on her proposals and passionate about her beliefs. She even got in an unsubtle dig at Trump's apparently diminishing mental capacity.

By any measure, this was an important Harris win as this truncated presidential campaign enters its final eight weeks. Her job was to appeal to undecided independent voters and, in the days afterward anyway, she seemed to be doing just that.

Were he not so pathetic and dangerous, it would have been comical to watch Trump jump at every provocation that Kamala Harris threw at him, growing red-faced and more and more incoherent as the evening progressed. (“they’re eating the dogs…”)

But this is not new.

For more than a year now, I and others like me (often ex-newsies not bound by the niceties of a newspaper, magazine or regular paycheck) have been shouting that Donald Trump is batshit crazy and getting worse.

Don’t just take my word for it: scientists and medical folks have for some time warned that Trump’s chaotic rambling is not his masterly “weaving” of many narrative threads, but in fact near-certain evidence of increasing dementia—the same dementia that brought down his racist, antisemitic father, Fred C. Trump.

[And let me note here: this is way worse than an enfeebled Joe Biden being forgetful or frail. Neither man should be president, but Trump is the one who could, with his ultra-rightwing Project 2025 helpers in and out of government, destroy our democracy once and for all.]

By any reasonable measure, Donald Trump did himself no good at all during the debate. Presumably, most (though perhaps not all) his hardcore supporters loved his ranting, but these people probably would love him if he dropped his pants and peed on the podium.

Still, and with that being the case, I’d be very surprised if Trump picked up any additional support after Sept. 10^th.

By contrast, Harris probably did appeal to the independents she so needs (especially in key electoral states) to win. Her job now is to convince these shrinking violets to man up (and woman up) and vote Blue.

Four years ago the worst president in our hstory was thrown out of office after one term, but Trump refused to accept the results of a free and fair election. We reaped the whirlwind when this traitor tried to foment insurrection on Jan. 6th of the following year.

What I do take serious issue with is the way this last 'debate' was run--and also with how Trump has been covered by the press over many years.

The debate moderators were terrible. They repeatedly let Trump scream at will when he simply should have been matched decibel for decibel and told to shut the hell up.

This is how you deal with bullies--but neither David Muir nor Linsey Davis had the cojones to cut Trump off as he shouted. (In fairness, Davis was slightly more aggressive with Trump, but not by much.)

For way too long Trump has been enabled by a compliant mainstream press, accustomed to covering politicians for whom lying is not simply the default mode. People who do not weigh everything (not merely many things) on a ‘what’s-in-it-for-me’ basis.

Most national political journalists are unwilling to be bastards, especially when dealing with other bastards. Or more realistically: they too often are concerned more about losing access to their bastards than actually ticking them off with tough questions that show them up to be stooges, fools or liars.

Up until, say, 25 years ago, the mainstream press held sway in this equation: pols needed the press more than the press needed the pols.

But no more. Enter the bitch-goddess; the Internet.

Now any politicians—be they saints or sinners—can bypass the mainstream press and project their message unfiltered through the savvy use of social media.

But it’s even worse than that.

As I noted once before: “The formation of public opinion is out of control because of the way the internet is forming groups and dispersing information freely,” Robert C. Post, a Yale law professor and former dean, said in an interview three years ago with my former colleague Tom Edsall, now a columnist for the NY Times.”

Quoting Post, Edsall said: “Before the advent of the internet people were always crazy, but they couldn’t find each other, they couldn’t talk and disperse their craziness. Now we are confronting a new phenomenon and we have to think about how we regulate that in a way which is compatible with people’s freedom to form public opinion.”

Or put another way: years ago, people spouting views about, say, Mexican rapists overwhelming our southern border or about Clorox enemas to fight Covid, would have largely been ignored with eye rolls, not allowed to sprout, cancer-like, via thousands of internet eyeballs.

The ignorant, the foolish, the downright stupid (read: Hillary Clinton’s ‘basket of deplorables’) always will be tools of the demagogue. But there is just so much slack I will grant these people, based on their poverty or poor education. [My mother’s people were dirt-poor Italian immigrants. They didn’t come here in 1905 looking for handouts; they wanted work in order to make a new life in America—just like the thousands of dog- and cat-eating immigrant “criminals” that Trump so despises today.]

Finally, I am reminded of two groups of people I admire greatly for their courage: World War 2 resistance fighters in Europe and 1960s civil rights workers in America.

Neither group would say, as Trump did of the Charlottesville rioters: there are good people on both sides.

The resisters and the civil rights workers knew then—as we should know now—that they were in an existential battle over the very soul of democracy and freedom.

For them there simply was no middle ground.

To journalists of today, I would suggest, as both a friend and former colleague, that in this year especially evenhandedness enables evil.

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Frank Van Riper is a Washington, DC-based documentary photographer, journalist, author and lecturer. During 20 years with the New York Daily News, he served as White House correspondent, national political correspondent and Washington Bureau news editor. Afterwards he served 19 years as the Washington Post’s photography columnist. He was a 1979 Nieman Fellow at Harvard and jointly holds (with the late Lars-Erik Nelson) the 1980 Merriman Smith Memorial Award from the White house Correspondents Association.

Van Riper Named to Communications Hall of Fame

Frank Van Riper addresses CCNY Communications Alumni at National Arts Club in Manhattan after induction into Communications Alumni Hall of Fame, May 2011. (c) Judith Goodman