How The New York Times’ coverage of Alaska’s Senate race failed the test of proportionality

I wasn’t planning to write yet another post about The New York Times’ coverage of Mary Peltola and the two Dan Sullivans. But the Times keeps running follow-ups, so here I am.

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On Sunday, the paper published a remarkably calm page-one story headlined “Will Spoilers Actually Matter in Midterms?” The digital headline: “Third-Party Spoilers, Long Fueled by Both Parties, Could Matter This Year.” Here’s how it opens:

Sly maneuvering around third-party candidates is a time-honored, bipartisan tradition in politics.

Democrats and Republicans alike have long stealthily tried to help little-known names on the ballot who might siphon votes away from the opposing party’s nominees.

My first thought was that this would have made a good lead for last Wednesday’s story, by Kellen Browning, on how the Peltola campaign recruited a ringer in an attempt to siphon votes away from incumbent Republican senator Dan Sullivan. Instead, the Times went DEFCON 1, portraying the story as a significant scandal and burying the context. You have to read more than 30 paragarphs before you come to this:

Republicans have also taken advantage of this system. When Ms. Peltola ran for re-election to the House two years ago, the state Republican Party backed an effort to help a Democrat — an inmate who ran his campaign from a New York prison — stay on the ballot.

Peltola, a Democrat, has denied having anything to do with recruiting the other Dan Sullivan. Whether that’s true or not, the Times’ reporting shows convincingly that her campaign did. It’s kind of slimy, but it’s hardly  unusual. It’s also not a crime unless money changed hands, something that absolutely no one has alleged.

In a summary of “The Elements of Journalism,” a classic work on ethics by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel, we encounter this:

[Journalism] must keep the news comprehensive and proportional…. Keeping news in proportion is a cornerstone of truthfulness. Inflating events for sensation, neglecting others, stereotyping, or being disproportionately negative all make a less reliable map.

The Times failed to do that with the initial report by Browning, and it’s been softening its tone in several follow-ups since then, culminating with Epstein’s eminently rational take on the entire affair. You might surmise that the paper’s editors have been having second thoughts about how the story was played. But the damage had already been done.

The polls this morning show Peltola clinging to a narrow lead, with both her and Sullivan (that is, the Republican incumbent, not the ringer) ticking down in the last couple of days. If she loses, it might well be because of the Times.

It’s not journalism’s role to cover up for a candidate just because we’re in the final days of a campaign. But neither is it to take a routine instance of political gamesmanship and play it up like a major scandal, either.