The more that candidates can get away with hiding information from the press, the more they will do it.
As Rich writes in his column today, while John Fetterman deserves empathy for his struggle to overcome his stroke, given that he is running for U.S. Senate, it is fair to ask questions about his health and fitness for office, especially as he avoids debates, minimizes public appearances, and clearly struggles to get through the few speeches his campaign does schedule.
My former colleague Salena Zito, who has been covering Pennsylvania politics for decades, writes what it has been like for reporters to cover Fetterman:
The few speeches he has given have been short — he visibly struggled in giving them — no direct questions from the press have been taken outside of two closed-captioned interviews, and he is surrounded by a circle of staff who do not allow people or the press to interact with him, including during the Labor Day parade where he marched encircled by dozens of staff and volunteers.
Last week, he refused to debate his Republican rival Oz in the first debate in Pittsburgh that was scheduled to happen Sept. 6 on KDKA; it remains again very unclear if he will do any debates at all.
On Tuesday, I asked Fetterman press secretary Joe Calvello whether the candidate would be releasing an update on his medical condition. I received no answer.
While there has always been a double standard among political journalists when it comes to covering Democrats vs. Republicans, social media has made things much worse, especially in the post–Donald Trump era. Twitter is a forum for outrage mobs to hammer any journalist who attempts to cover a Democrat critically. Liberals have challenged the very idea of a “both sides” approach to political coverage, arguing that the pursuit of objectivity prevents reporters from telling the truth about how much worse Republicans are than Democrats. As I have written previously, liberals have, for several years now, deliberately worked the refs with taunts of “but her emails,” a reference to the narrative that coverage of Hillary Clinton’s private server by the media created a false equivalence by muddying the waters in 2016 over the unique threat posed by Trump. In the new world, if you are a reporter who wants to cover Democrats critically, you have to be prepared to endure the criticism that you are enabling fascism. Most reporters are not willing to take that risk.
In this framework, even raising fair questions when it comes to somebody like Fetterman is treated as off-limits by virtue of the fact that it could benefit the Trumpy quack TV doctor Mehmet Oz.
So, while it’s no surprise that they are giving Fetterman special treatment, ceding this much ground when it comes to candidate transparency is a long-run disaster. The more often candidates can get away with hiding information from the press, the more they will do it. Fetterman’s campaign should be honest about his medical condition, and the media should be pressing him to be more forthcoming — regardless of what they think of Oz.