Political journalism trends toward equivalence. There is the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, and while they diverge in ideas, the media assumes they share their foibles and flaws, their minor and major corruptions, their grasping and opportunistic politicians. This is the foundational premise upon which political coverage rests: The policies of the two parties are different, but the institutions and personnel are broadly similar.

We can argue whether that’s true in any year (Matt Grossmann and David Hopkins’s Asymmetric Politics marshals considerable evidence that it isn’t, I think), but it’s definitely not true in this year. And that’s throwing media coverage of the campaign into chaos — with example A being last night’s candidate forum on NBC.

The problem, as I have written and as has been proven out again and again, is this election pits a normal political party and a normal presidential nominee against an abnormal political party and an abnormal presidential nominee. To put it in the simplest possible terms, one party chose a candidate who believes Vladimir Putin is praiseworthy, who thinks Ted Cruz’s father possibly participated in the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and who is clearly feared and mistrusted by virtually all of the party’s top officials. The other party didn’t.

Some journalists have responded by tossing out the conventions of automatic equivalence, a phenomenon I wrote about here. But other journalists have tried to bring the candidates into rough alignment, no matter how absurd the result. On Wednesday, NBC’s Matt Lauer showed how that’s done — by recasting Clinton's tawdry, but fundamentally normal, behaviors as shocking while recasting Trump’s shocking behaviors as normal.
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