The refs worked

Late last week, during an event that was loosely described as a “news conference,” Donald Trump did what he often does: say something accidentally revealing in the middle of a rambling and incoherent rant. Trump accused his political opponents of “playing the ref” by criticizing the judge who threw out one of the criminal cases against him, but then appeared to praise Bobby Knight—the late college basketball coach, who once endorsed Trump—for his skill in doing just that. “Nobody did it better than the late, great Bobby Knight,” Trump said. “He would scream at those refs and everything and said—they say, ‘Bobby, you’re not going to get the decision,’ and he’d say, ‘Yep, but the next one, I will.’ And he was right.”

Trump and his allies, of course, have themselves spent years playing—or, in more common parlance, working—the refs, not least in the media, screaming at and about any coverage they deem to be unfair. I’m not a big fan of applying sporting analogies to media coverage and discussions thereof; they can occasionally be insightful, but too often cheapen political journalism, in particular, by treating serious matters like a game. Still, if such analogies are to be used, the closest thing that political journalism has to “refs” is, perhaps, the moderators of presidential debates. These moderators don’t always see their role in terms of calling balls and strikes: when Trump debated Joe Biden in June, the host network, CNN, suggested ahead of time that it would not fact-check the pair in real time, and stuck to that promise; media critics (myself included) complained, but this approach was at least consistent with debates past. In the (apologies) “pregame” coverage of yesterday’s debate between Trump and Kamala Harris on ABC, however, Rick Klein, that network’s political director, did not rule it out. “I don’t think it’s a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ proposition,” he told the New York Times. “We’re not making a commitment to fact-check everything, or fact-check nothing, in either direction.”

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