By The Herald Editorial Board
Before President-elect Trump chums the waters with more outrage bait — renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America? — those who rely upon the independence and courage of the news media ought not to ignore Donald Trump’s latest attacks against the freedom of the press.
Just before the Christmas and New Year’s holidays, Trump’s lawyers filed suit against an Iowa pollster and the Des Moines, Iowa, newspaper that sponsored the poll because the poll showed just days before the Nov. 5 election that Democrat Kamala Harris held a 3-point lead over the Republican nominee, 47-44, in Iowa. The poll buoyed hopes of Democrats who told themselves it might show hidden support among women voters for Harris, support that other polls might have missed, especially since it came from a reliably deep-red state.
Instead, even in the words of the pollster, J. Anne Selzer, the survey was a “spectacular miss”; Iowa went to Trump by a 13-point margin. Selzer —who had already announced her retirement from her polling firm prior to the lawsuit’s filing — and her Iowa Poll had been a staple of election campaign reporting over the years. 538, the polling aggregator, rates the poll at 2.8 stars out of 3, ranked among the top pollsters for accuracy and transparency.
While reliable, Selzer’s survey — like all polls — had missed its share of snapshots of where voters stood; her final poll in 2004, The New York Times noted, showed Democrat John Kerry with a 5-point lead in Iowa, which went to Republican George W. Bush by less than 1 point.
“Polling is a science of estimation, and science has a way of periodically humbling the scientist,” she wrote in a final column for the Des Moines Register. “So, I’m humbled.”
Unfamiliar with the word, Trump latched onto the admission of error and sought to turn it to his favor, filing a lawsuit that took a different tack than he has previously used against the news media. Instead of claiming defamation or libel, as he had in winning a $15 million settlement from ABC News and its parent, Disney, just days before, the lawsuit sought to turn the state’s consumer fraud act against pollster and paper, alleging that the poll defrauded voters to “create a false narrative of inevitability for Harris” and was “brazen election interference.”
The legal argument, assuming it gets its day in court, would have to convince juries, judges and justices that Selzer and the Register purposely misled voters about Harris and was intentionally deceptive. As with having to prove malice in a defamation lawsuit, Trump would have to show that the poll knew its findings were wrong and that the paper published them with the intent to benefit the Harris campaign.
Granted, many voters put too much faith in the findings of such polls, often ignoring the warnings that there are significant margins of error for each and that they provide only a snapshot of the current levels of support for one candidate or the other.
Yet mistakes — even one of 16 percentage points — are not proof of fraud.
What Trump may be seeking, more than a win in court or a settlement — and Selzer and the Register should not settle — is a broader salvo aimed at the news media at large, a reminder to think twice before reporting even the mildest of bad news or criticism of Trump for the next four years.
Other pollsters have apparently gotten the message; The New York Times noted that several prominent Republican pollsters, who might have otherwise defended a fellow political canvasser, declined comment. One could only offer: “Know you gotta do the story, but count me as a pass.”
And even before the election, there were a few examples of media owners feeling a chill, in particular the pulling of prepared editorials endorsing Harris by the ownership of the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post.
That iciness may now be spreading from the owners to the editors of leading newspapers. This weekend, Pulitzer-prize winning editorial cartoonist Ann Telnaes resigned after some 16 years at the Post — Motto: Democracy Dies in Darkness — after one of her cartoons was rejected by its opinions editor, David Shipley.
The cartoon, noting the recent trend of media and tech owners showing fealty to Trump, portrayed the Post’s owner Jeff Bezos, the L.A. Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI’s chief executive Sam Altman, joined by ABC/Disney’s Mickey Mouse, kneeling in supplication to a figure of Trump.
Not subtle, but point made.
And the point apparently made Shipley uncomfortable, with Trump days away from a second term.
(Not unrelated, Meta announced Monday that it will end its practice of having posts on Facebook and Instagram subject to independent fact-checking.)
“Not every editorial judgment is a reflection of a malign force,” Shipley said in response to Telnaes’ departure. “My decision was guided by the fact that we had just published a column on the same topic as the cartoon and had already scheduled another column — this one a satire — for publication. The only bias was against repetition.”
If most opinion editors hold a bias against repetition, two seems a low bar.
Regardless, the Post has lost a talented and entertaining editorial cartoonist, and the room is darker for it.
Those who rely on the reporting and commentary of the media may want to show their displeasure with publications and their support for journalists by canceling subscriptions. But that, as Trump and many in his incoming administration would hope for, would be a move to kill the messenger.
As readers of The Herald of all political persuasions have done over the years, letters to the editor and phone calls can be corrective and encouraging — rather than chilling — to the journalism provided.
The trustworthiness and fearlessness of that journalism must stand and must be valued.
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