Economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman said the news media's tendency to strike balance when covering President Trump is injecting a "pro-Trump bias" in their reporting.

Krugman wrote in a series of Twitter posts that reporters would be more accurate in their White House coverage if they didn't "pretend to take it seriously" when Trump does something controversial.

"It's normal to feel that people you disagree with politically are offering bad solutions to our problems," he wrote in one tweet. "But Trump has brought something new: his policy agenda is almost entirely directed at problems we don't have -- problems that exist only in his warped imagination."



Journalists obviously have a hard time coping with all of this. They're afraid to say that the president is completely out of touch with reality -- that sounds "unbalanced." So, all too often, they pretend that he's talking about something real 3/ — Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) June 10, 2018



Krugman said that the problems that Trump claims to want to fix do not actually exist, like vast crimes committed by immigrants and unfair trade caused by Canadian tariffs.

In another, he said, "Journalists obviously have a hard time coping with all of this" because, "They're afraid to say that the president is completely out of touch with reality -- that sounds 'unbalanced.' So, all too often, they pretend that he's talking about something real."