At the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee on Thursday, former President Donald Trump gave a rambling speech late into the night in which he demanded Democrats drop criminal investigations against him, pushed 2020 election conspiracy theories and said Democrats are “cheating on elections,” erroneously claimed that immigrants are “coming from mental institutions and insane asylums,” and cracked incoherent jokes about Hannibal Lecter. On Friday morning, many front-page headlines bought the campaign’s preemptive spin that Trump’s speech would be one of “unity” and healing. The speech hit many of the usual notes heard from the former president over the last nine years, but media outlets spent the week previewing the Trump campaign’s spin that his speech would aim to unify and “bring the country together,” suggesting that the attempt on Trump’s life last weekend had turned him into a more “serene” person. Despite the reality of the former president’s remarks Thursday night, many newspaper front pages on Friday morning ran stories highlighting Trump’s recounting of the recent assassination attempt and claiming that his convention speech was “somber,” “unifying,” and “healing.”
The media is desperate for balance. They’re not able to say “this man is a deranged fascist who’s harmful to the country and the world”. They’re fighting decades of professional inertia.
They just can’t do it; their training doesn’t let them. It’s kind of like asking a scientist if they’re certain that burning fossil fuels causes global warming: their training practically insists that they say “there’s strong evidence that it does” instead of “yes, of course it does”.
If they came out and said it, they wouldn’t be “balanced”. When you realize that the media cares more about balance than truth, it helps explain a lot of why we are where we are.