There’s a common argument around that claims something like this: If Bernie Sanders had been the Democratic candidate, he’d have faced a terrible monstering from the press, and would therefore have lost the election. I think it is seriously misleading.
Let’s unpack the argument a bit. The point about the terrible monstering from the press should really be expanded to say he’d have faced it for being Bernie Sanders, and that someone lacking in irreducible Sandersness wouldn’t have had to deal with the monstering. Someone like Hillary Clinton. As a general principle, it’s an assertion that only unrespectable candidates get monstered and monstering can be avoided by only choosing respectable ones.
The problem here is first of all that the Democrats chose Hillary Clinton, not Bernie Sanders, and the situation developed in a manner not necessarily to their advantage. Not only did she lose the election, she collected a pretty comprehensive media monstering on the way, from e-mails to secretly controlling the world’s paedophiles through pizza. The second problem, which is much more important, is that the argument assumes that only bad people get monstered. People who use the argument often say that the Republicans managed to smear John Kerry over his war record, and therefore you can’t take any chances. But if they can smear John Kerry over his war record and Hillary Clinton over pizza, what is there that you can either do, or abstain from doing, in order to avoid being smeared? I imagine Milly Dowler’s mum probably thought there was no way the News of the World could do anything horrible to her, and look how that turned out.
Part of the problem here is the distinction between the truth, lies, and bullshit. Famously, lies have a necessary relation to the truth but bullshit does not. If you’re worried about what the truth about your candidate might be, or what lies the other lot might tell about them, it makes sense to try to pick someone dull enough to deny them an attack surface. But bullshitters don’t care; you can bullshit about anyone and anything, and all you need is front. In the classic setting of bullshit, the playground or the pub, the constraint that keeps it down to levels society can cope with isn’t that someone will point out it’s not true – it’s that someone will punch the bullshitter in the face, shout them down, or else say something funny enough that the audience turns to them instead for their entertainment.
The third problem is that sometimes bad people get monstered and it doesn’t do a damn thing. There was another guy in the 2016 presidential election, and if anyone collected a hammering from the papers, it was Donald J. Trump. In politics, you tend to believe that your side exposes the awful truth about the other lot and demands that journalists live up to their pretensions of fairness and inform the public, while the other lot egg the irresponsible and corrupt press barons on to defame your cat’s honour. This is what William James would have called an operationally true belief – we hold it to be true because it is useful, in that it helps us to keep scrapping. In reality, well, who are we trying to kid? Us. Trump’s defalcations, defamations, and depravity were widely reported and scorn was heaped on him. He deserved every drop. And he won.
The conclusion from this is surely that if you go up on the auction block of the presidency, a press monstering is the absolute least you should expect. It’s going to happen to you whoever you are and however pure your past. It is a permanently-operating factor as the Russians say, a feature of the political environment. Although. A few years ago it was fashionable for politicians to contrast the “air war” of TV and big media with the “ground war” of street campaigning, and perhaps this is better.
The air forces on both sides are enormously destructive and only roughly accurate, and from the candidate’s worm’s eye view, barely distinguishable. Suddenly, perhaps summoned by making the right 140-character incantation or perhaps just by chance, they break from the cloudbase. Huge media bombs erupt, leaving the countryside blitzed with sensationalism, stinking of bullshit, littered with inconsistencies waiting to go off, and subtly radiating dangerous levels of cynicism that sap your energy and damage your immunity to the infectious nonsense that suddenly seems to be everywhere. Who started it, or whose bomb it was, shrinks to utter irrelevance for the isolated candidates picking their way into the post-truth environment as they advance to contact.
The question, of course, is which of them can survive to fight in these extreme circumstances.