In defending their recent coverage of this year’s presidential race, reporters and representatives of major media organizations have frequently suggested—in various ways, implicitly, and explicitly—that their liberal critics are motivated by crude partisanship rather than any neutral or high-minded concerns.

The most irony-rich example came earlier this week from New York Times reporter Trip Gabriel, who compared growing alarm among liberal critics about the normalization of Donald Trump to a much-mocked form of conservative media criticism: that polls sponsored by mainstream outlets are skewed in favor of Democratic candidates.

'False equivalence' is a legit issue, but mainly it's a barometer of the left's anxiety. Just as 'unskewed polls' was for the right in 2012 — Trip Gabriel (@tripgabriel) September 14, 2016

It didn’t go unnoticed that Gabriel had used false equivalence against a critique of false equivalence. But as insight into how reporters and editors interpret their critics, it was a valuable observation because it suggested that perhaps the current crop of critics, including myself, aren’t hitting the right points of emphasis. Perhaps there has been too much focus on individual cases, like the Times’ dud on a Clinton Foundation non-scandal. There has been plenty of flawed reporting this election cycle, just as there is flawed reporting every cycle, but the deeper, more troubling failure is collective. Any singleQ story can only underline the broader phenomenon.

Gabriel’s comparison is misleading in almost every particular. The current line of criticism—that major media outlets like the Times are failing to portray the stakes of this election, and each candidates’ respective shortcomings, in proper proportion—did gain purchase when liberals started worrying that campaign coverage had fallen out of whack. Beyond that, there are no similarities.



The unskewed polls movement in 2012 was born of delusion and propaganda. It was a direct outgrowth of a decades-long conservative project to discredit mainstream sources of information as populated by liberal partisans. The idea that the polls were skewed was corollary to the refrain that the mass media is liberal—biased by design against conservatives, built to help liberals maintain dominance over the culture at large. Some poll-unskewers surely believed the polls were skewed; others were simply desperate to give dispirited Republicans something to hold on to. The great irony of the poll-unskewers is that they posited the existence of a liberal misinformation bubble from the safe confines of a conservative one.