But thanks to Fox News, that’s not always true.

Fox was specifically created to treat right-wing pseudo-scandals as major news stories. Whether it’s President Obama saluting a Marine while holding a latte or Hillary Clinton coughing during a campaign speech, Fox News looks for opportunities to smear Democratic politicians and mobilize its audience to vote Republican.

But that partisan mentality has an important secondary effect: influencing the coverage of mainstream news networks. One of the ways mainstream journalists try to avoid accusations of “liberal bias” is by paying attention to what happens in conservative media. Which means that pseudo-scandals that get a lot of attention on Fox — Benghazi, Clinton’s email server, Rep. Ilhan Omar’s mention of 9/11 — end up getting taken seriously by mainstream news outlets.

That creates an imbalance that my colleague Matt Yglesias has dubbed the “hack gap”: where right-wing bullshit dominates the news cycle and Democrats are continually forced to play defense.

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So far, news coverage of the proposal has been defined by a focus on political questions: Will the proposal divide centrist and progressive Democrats? Will House Speaker Nancy Pelosi throw her support behind it? Does it give Republicans an opening to attack Democrats as radical in 2020?

Those questions represent “tactical framing” — an approach to news coverage that focuses on strategy and polling rather than a policy’s substantive benefits. And while the political viability of a policy proposal is important, research shows that a fixation on strategy can undermine people’s ability to make informed choices.

In their book Spiral of Cynicism, researchers Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Joseph Cappella found that tactical framing in news coverage increases audiences’ cynicism, making it more likely that audiences will believe politicians won’t keep their promises or are only acting out of their own self-interest.

As a result, audiences exposed to tactical framing are less likely to remember basic details about the policies they hear about. Once their cynicism is activated, they mentally check out.

Those findings have major implications for the way news networks cover big policy ideas like the Green New Deal. The goal of political journalism should be to give people the information they need to be good voters. That means analyzing policy proposals on their merit and resisting the urge to treat all policy debates like a partisan game.

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Whether it’s the daily press briefing or a formal press conference with the president, news networks have become fixated on the image of the Trump White House publicly brawling with journalists who challenge them in front of TV cameras. Major cable news networks often air these press conferences live, treating them like title fights in the middle of the day and analyzing them endlessly once they’re over.

These public confrontations have captured the media’s attention over the past few years — not because the disputes themselves are that interesting, but because they carry tremendous symbolic value. The White House press conference is supposed to represent a fundamental democratic ideal: that the government should be willing to answer to the public in good faith. Watching Trump attack and demonize reporters challenges that ideal. It represents a breakdown in a basic democratic norm, and that itself feels newsworthy.

But it’s worth asking how valuable it is to air these confrontations on national TV. Trump has made demonizing the press a central part of his political strategy. His political identity revolves around the idea that he’s being attacked by a biased and unruly press. And these press conferences give him the visual aids he needs to reinforce that identity with his supporters — a chance to publicly present himself as a victim standing up to an unruly mob.

For Trump, staging big, dramatic confrontations is the point. And that should give pause to news networks that readily air these press conferences in the name of accountability.

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October is a tense month in American politics. The closer a political campaign gets to Election Day, the more vulnerable it is to an “October Surprise” — a late-breaking scandal or controversy that influences voters in the final days of an election.

An “October surprise” is typically thought of as an unexpected event that surprises both sides of an election: natural disasters, terrorist attacks, etc. But more recently, it’s come to describe an intentional campaign strategy, wherein political operatives intentionally exploit late-breaking news stories to try to damage their opponents at the last minute.

President Donald Trump’s fixation on the migrant caravan traveling to the United States is a clear example of that strategy — it’s an attempt to shift the media’s attention away from issues like health care with fearmongering about immigrants.

It’s a cheap political ploy, and many news networks have recognized it as such. The problem is, there’s no great way to fight it.

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That asymmetry poses a major obstacle in American politics. As Republicans have become more ideological, they’ve also become less willing to work with Democrats: filibustering Democratic legislation, refusing to consider Democratic appointees, and even shutting down the government in order to force Democrats to give in to their demands.

Democrats have responded in turn, becoming more obstructionist as Republican demands become more extreme.

And that’s made it really easy for media outlets to blame “both sides” for political gridlock. As political scientists Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein explain in their book It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, journalists feel a pressure to remain neutral when covering big political fights. So politics coverage has been dominated by the myth that both parties are equally to blame for the gridlock in Washington.

But they’re not. And the only way to stop Republicans in Congress from continuing their drift toward the extreme is to be brutally honest about who’s responsible for breaking our politics.

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Those gaps in her memory have led many of her critics to argue that Ford isn’t credible. Fox News in particular has seized on holes in Ford’s account to raise doubts about her allegations, even floating the theory that Ford may be confusing Kavanaugh for a doppelganger.

But forgetting nonessential details is not unusual for trauma survivors. As my colleague Brian Resnick has explained, human memory is notoriously faulty. We often forget or misremember details about our experiences, even if we initially perceived them clearly.

That’s especially true for trauma survivors — like victims of sexual assault. When humans experience intense trauma, our brains have a tendency to hyper-focus on certain pieces of information while ignoring nonessential details. A victim of sexual assault might vividly remember her attacker’s cologne but struggle to remember the layout of the room she was in or what happened in the hours after the attack. Ford, for example, claims to vividly remember the “uproarious laughter” that she heard between Kavanaugh and his friend Mark Judge while she was being assaulted.

As researchers James Hopper and David Lisak explain, intense fear also alters the functioning of the hippocampus — the part of the brain that turns experiences into memory. “It is not reasonable to expect a trauma survivor,” they conclude, “to recall traumatic events the way they would recall their wedding day.”

In other words, critics who fixate on gaps in Ford’s memory are likely holding trauma survivors to a standard they won’t be able to meet. And that standard could have a chilling effect on other trauma survivors who are considering whether to come forward with allegations. Deborah Ramirez, the woman who has accused Kavanaugh of thrusting his penis in her face in college, told the New Yorker she was hesitant to go public with her story because “she knew [it] would be attacked due to the gaps in her memory.”

If we want more victims of sexual mistreatment to come forward with their stories, we can start by making sure those stories are held to a standard that reflects what we know about the brain after trauma.

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