Objective Journalism in an Objectively Uneven Contest
What if one of the candidates is Hitler?
Donald Trump was a corrupt President with decidedly authoritarian tendencies. He fomented an insurrection in a failed attempt to steal an election he lost by 8 million votes. He’s under multiple criminal indictments and has already been found liable for rape in a civil trial. And he’s now calling his opponents “vermin” and routinely promising to punish his enemies if he’s returned to office.
Joe Biden is, well, old.
This is an objectively uneven set of circumstances. And, for years now, critics—mostly from the left—have argued that the American elite press has failed to cover the news in a way that reflects that reality. This, even though all of them and most everyone who reads and comments on this blog have somehow come to the same conclusions about Trump as I have.
This critique is not new or infrequent. Some somewhat random examples from a quick Google search:
- Matthew Dickinson, Vox, “Yes, blame the media for Donald Trump. Up to a point.” (July 14, 2016)
- Jim Rutenberg, NYT, “Trump Is Testing the Norms of Objectivity in Journalism” (August 7, 2016)
- Ezra Klein, Vox, “The media vs. Donald Trump: why the press feels so free to criticize the Republican nominee” (August 16, 2016)
- Michael Barthel et al, Pew Research Center, “Trump, Clinton Supporters Differ on How Media Should Cover Controversial Statements” (October 17, 2016)
- Brad Edkins, Forbes, “Study: Trump Benefited From ‘Overwhelmingly Negative’ Tone Of Election News Coverage” (December 13, 2016)
- Amy Mitchell et al, Pew Research Center, “Covering President Trump in a Polarized Media Environment” (October 2, 2017)
- WBUR “Why hasn’t the media learned its lesson about covering Donald Trump?” (May 17, 2023)
- Alvin Powell, Harvard Gazette, “Muting Trump’s ‘megaphone’ easier said than done” (June 21, 2023)
- Jon Allsop, Columbia Journalism Review, “The dualities of Trump coverage” (August 7, 2023)
- Jennifer Rubin, WaPo, “What responsible media coverage in the Trump era would look like” (September 1, 2023)
- Jonathan Chait, New York Intelligencer, “The News Media Is Not Trying to Elect Trump (The mainstream media isn’t, at least.),” October 4, 2023
That’s literally just from the first page. There have been hundreds, if not thousands, of articles on the topic. Perhaps dozens of them here, for that matter. (I’m not going to try to round those up.)
The latest, published yesterday morning but not in direct response to the “vermin” outrage, comes from Salon‘s Areeba Shah (“‘Covering him as a normal candidate’: Extremism scholars say TV news ‘normalizing’ Trump’s threats“).
Trump recently made alarming statements, including advocating for “ideological screening” of migrants, making divisive remarks about “liberal Jews,” and praising Hezbollah, but his inflammatory remarks barely received any news coverage.
Major TV news networks highlighted only about 22 minutes of coverage. Collectively, within the two weeks following each comment, major broadcast and cable news outlets provided less than two hours of coverage for the four comments combined, according to a new report by Media Matters for America.
The trend suggests the networks have become desensitized to Trump’s frequent extreme comments even though they have covered such rhetoric in the past — like when Trump suggested the execution of Joint Chief of Staff head Mark Milley. Networks highlighted the former president’s comments, but their infrequent coverage of his inflammatory statements raise questions about why certain comments are covered and some are not.
“If we don’t call out the rhetoric as extreme, we risk making it normal and acceptable,” Libby Hemphill, a professor at the University of Michigan’s School of Information and the Institute for Social Research, told Salon. “Those are the downstream risks of desensitizing. Again, focusing on the impacts these statements have, like increasing antisemitic behavior generally or raising the temperature in the Middle East conflicts, helps people understand why they’re dangerous, who they impact, and why speech matters.”
Trump’s recent comments about vowing to implement rigorous ideological screening of immigrants to the U.S., particularly suggesting he would turn away anyone who doesn’t like “our religion,” received little coverage. Broadcast news “totally ignored the comments,” Media Matters pointed out. Meanwhile, cable news devoted just under seven minutes of coverage and CNN and MSNBC each devoted about three minutes, with Fox News devoting less than one minute.
Trump also made a statement on “liberal Jews” voting to “destroy America & Israel” during the Rosh Hashanah holiday and received criticism from advocacy groups for its incendiary language and association with antisemitic tropes. Broadcast news outlets, including MSNBC (covering it for 9 minutes), CNN (covering it for just over 3 minutes), and Fox (ignoring it), did not bring attention to the statement in the subsequent two weeks, Media Matters found.
“The coverage is normalizing extreme positions on issues and failing to challenge the dehumanization of migrants and ‘bad’ Jews that Trump paints as enemies,” Donald Haider-Markel, a University of Kansas political science professor who studies domestic extremism, told Salon. “When his dehumanizing comments are not challenged by the news media, viewers go along. If the dehumanization sticks, it makes support of political violence against ‘enemies’ more likely.”
Like others, we see the Catch-22 at work here. Because Trump is so much more rhetorically volatile than normal politicians, he gets constant media attention, often live coverage, which amplifies his remarks and drowns out the campaigns of his opponents. That’s bad! Too much coverage! But, when he says truly outrageous things, the media is supposed to call them out. Otherwise, we normalize the outrageous.
As Steven Taylor noted in his post on the “vermin” speech yesterday, the initial New York Times headline on their coverage of the speech, at least in the online edition, was awful:
“Trump Takes Veterans Day Speech in a Different Direction” makes it sound like he said something whimsical, not outrageous. Most readers would think to themselves, “Well, there he goes again . . .” and chuckle before skipping over the story.
At the same time, I disagree with Norm Ornstein—and perhaps my co-blogger—that “Trump Echoes Hitler, Calls for Removing ‘Vermin’ from the Country” is an appropriate alternative. While I don’t at all disagree that the comments echo fascist rhetoric and should alarm us, saying so is the job of opinion columnists and Trump’s opponents, not the news department. (Although, increasingly, reporters simply find experts to make the Hitler charge for them and quote them prominently in the story.)
As I noted in a comment on that post this morning, WaPo’s Marianne LeVine reported the news under the headline “Trump calls political enemies ‘vermin,’ echoing dictators Hitler, Mussolini” in a story published at 5:45 pm while NYT eventually changed the headline to “In Veterans Day Speech, Trump Promises to ‘Root Out’ the Left.”
To me, the revised NYT headline is quite good but still falls short of conveying the full gravity of Trump’s remarks. The headline absolutely needed the word “vermin.” The original was too cold to the point of being misleading. The WaPo/Ornstein versions are too hot, assuming an editorial stance.
Yes, this is applying rules established more than a hundred years ago to a uniquely bad—I dare say, dangerous—candidate. But, again, I challenge you to find regular readers of NYT and WaPo who are not aware of—and, indeed, don’t have strong opinions about—Trump’s misdeeds and outrages.
Moreover, there’s the real danger—if not certainty—that covering Trump as an American Hitler will simply backfire, putting the likes of the NYT and WaPo into the same camp as Fox News and Newsmax.
From the above-linked Forbes report:
Depending on who you believe, Donald Trump won the election because of Russian hackers, last-minute FBI announcements, fake news, or because Hillary Clinton was a bad candidate. A new study from the Harvard Kennedy School pins the blame on the news media—specifically the “overwhelmingly negative” tone of news coverage and the “extremely light” coverage of policy issues.
The study, from the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, examined print editions of the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and USA Today, the main newscasts on ABC, CBS and NBC, as well as CNN’s The Situation Room and Fox’s Special Report.
The report should be required reading for political journalists trying to understand Trump’s victory. The study found that 62% of the coverage of Clinton and 56% of the coverage of Trump was negative in tone. These numbers actually overstate the amount of positive press the candidates received. Most of the “positive” stories here were about new poll numbers. Each one of these horse race stories was “good press” for one candidate and “bad press” for the other.
[…]
According to the study’s author, Trump dominated the news because his behavior met the stories’ demands. “The news is not about what’s ordinary or expected,” the study says. “It’s about what’s new and different, better yet when laced with conflict and outrage. Trump delivered that type of material by the cart load.” Trump packaged news into easily digestible and deliciously controversial bites. As a result, his message (“make America great again”) was simply heard more often than Clinton’s (“stronger together”).
The “overwhelmingly negative” tone of campaign coverage also helped normalize Trump. “When everything and everybody is portrayed as deeply flawed, there’s no sense making distinctions on that score, which works to the advantage of those who are more deeply flawed.” Countless voters viewed Clinton and Trump as equally flawed because of the media’s bias towards negativity.
Likewise, the above-linked Harvard Gazette piece reflects the damned-if you-do, damned-if-you-don’t nature of press coverage of Trump:
Over time the media has developed a response to Trump’s penchant for eye-popping statements, and that is to highlight inaccuracies that they feel compelled to repeat. But it’s been ineffective, [Harvard Kennedy School professors Thomas Patterson and Matthew Baum] agree.
Reporters have become more outspoken in directly pointing out untruths and inaccuracies, shifting from a once-widespread practice in journalism of hunting up an expert or other source to make the characterization. Now, reporters often simply say that a statement isn’t true.
Patterson said that change is in some ways positive because it corrects the record. But it also carries a danger of turning the focus of a story to the reporter, fostering an acceptance of reportorial “me-ism” that has the potential to distort professional judgment.
The second danger, Patterson said, is of ordinary misstatements — natural for anyone who is a regular public speaker — being presented in the same category as intentional, damaging lies, like those of the 2020 election being stolen.
“If you talk a lot, you’re going to make those kinds of mistakes. To draw attention to every one of those tells the audience that you can’t trust anything politicians are saying,” Patterson said. “A certain degree of caution about politics is important, but most of those people aren’t lying, most of those are just inadvertent errors in memory. In Biden’s case, they call it out and put it in the context of his age, and I’m sorry, but we all do it. We did it when we were 30, or 60, or 80. And journalists do it — they have errors in their stories — and no one accuses them of losing their minds or doing it maliciously.”
Alas, they have no good answers for the problem.
Similarly, the creation of a separate “fact-check” piece has always been part of the journalistic tool kit, and its use has grown greatly. But Baum said they tend to be ineffective in countering the original statement — and have become increasingly popular with those looking to tar an opponent’s reputation.
“Fact-checking is not a sufficient response,” Baum said. “Journalists don’t have an answer to this question, so they fall back on their routines and norms. But they’re no good here. They don’t work.”
[…]
With everyday coverage, editors and reporters should understand the ordinary rules don’t apply, Baum and Patterson said. They have to think hard and be more deliberate about whether coverage is warranted, and, if so, ensure it doesn’t amplify false or damaging information.
“We’re playing with fire when we cover Donald Trump like a regular political candidate. He carries with him the kinds of dangers to our politics that we haven’t faced since the 19th century, and that are pretty huge and fundamental,” Baum said. “We shouldn’t just pretend this is a normal campaign — we do our job and put the camera up and let the American people decide — because that’s not how human beings reason. If you assume that people are going to make dispassionate, rational judgments about the veracity of what politicians — who are expert communicators — say as they try to manipulate you, you’re misunderstanding how typical people are likely to respond,”
Patterson said stories about Trump’s tweets are a good example. During his presidency, it was routine that he would tweet something outrageous and the media would cover it, making national headlines. But a study of people who had viewed the tweets showed that 95 percent discovered them through media coverage, not Twitter.
“That’s the stuff to avoid. That’s just playing into his hands. They have to be really careful with Trump about not giving him these free opportunities to go off and do his thing,” Patterson said. “This is a matter of judgment, and I think the judgment has been pretty poor, to be honest, about covering Trump.”
But, again, this is highly problematic. Either the outrageous stuff Trump says is news or it’s not. If the press only highlights things they’re sure will hurt him, they’re effectively Democratic operatives.
Ah, but that makes them Defenders of Democracy!
Perhaps. But it won’t be perceived that way by anyone who doesn’t already think a second Trump term would be disastrous.
To be clear: reporters should be more than mere stenographers. They should not simply feed readers the things candidates say and leave it at that. They very much owe readers, most of whom are not news junkies, context.
My preference, however, would be to follow the model used by AP’s Jill Colvin in her report linked in my opening paragraph (“Trump’s plans if he returns to the White House include deportation raids, tariffs and mass firings“).
The headline, which I presume Colvin didn’t write, is alarming—-but it isn’t alarmist. It’s factual and fair.
Ditto the lede:
A mass deportation operation. A new Muslim ban. Tariffs on all imported goods and “freedom cities” built on federal land.
Much of the 2024 presidential campaign has been dominated by the myriad investigations into former President Donald Trump and the subsequent charges against him. But with less than a year until Election Day, Trump is dominating the race for the Republican nomination and has already laid out a sweeping set of policy goals should he win a second term.
His ideas, and even the issues he focuses on most, are wildly different from President Joe Biden’s proposals. If implemented, Trump’s plans would represent a dramatic government overhaul arguably more consequential than that of his first term. His presidency, especially the early days, was marked by chaos, infighting and a wave of hastily written executive orders that were quickly overturned by the courts.
Some of his current ideas would probably end up in court or impeded by Congress. But Trump’s campaign and allied groups are assembling policy books with detailed plans.
This is followed by a deep dive into Trump’s policy proposals, gleaned from weeks, if not months, of speeches. There’s no hyperbole in the report. While it’s obvious to the reader that she would vastly prefer Biden’s policies to Trump’s, there is no editorializing. Not even through the back door by cherry-picking experts to say negative things about him. She simply compiles Trump’s own words into a coherent picture.
Indeed, I suspect Trump, were he a reader, would very much approve of the report!
Note: I’m going to be out of pocket most of the day and unlikely to have time to engage in the discussion here.
Well not Hitler, Göring.
Two thoughts:
First, for clarity’s sake, I wrote my post with ““In Veterans Day Speech, Trump Promises to ‘Root Out’ the Left” as their NYT headline and still had the same objections.
The one Ornstein noted was even worse, but I still think that the second one was bad.
Second,
I have to disagree. To me the Ornstein version (or the one I wrote) is tantamount to “Devastating Category-5 Hurricane to hit Florida Coast, Citizens Should Prepare” as opposed to “Weather to Get Bad This Weekend.” I don’t think it is editorializing if, in fact, a candidate is echoing Hitler.
If it is factually true that he is using fascist rhetoric, that would be a fact, not just an opinion for the editorialist.
Honest question: how extreme does it have to be, in your view, for it to be okay for the headline to reflect the content?
As was pointed out, headline writers are different people from the basic reporters. Also it seems that headline writers for print version are different people than those who write for the online versions. There seems to be a built in system that create differences.
Couple quick thoughts:
Quick quibble here: just because rules were established long ago doesn’t mean their interpretation is necessarily stable. Objectivity/impartiality has been one of journalism’s most hotly debated topics for decades. An important figure in that debate just recently died: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/08/business/media/philip-meyer-dead.html
I think the jury is still out on how to handle this in general, let alone with Trump.
BTW, one of the best examples I’ve seen is Jay Rosen’s Truth Sandwich:
https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2020/how-to-serve-up-a-tasty-truth-sandwich/
But that model works better with specific claims. This is a bit more of a unique case–it isn’t so much that Trump is making a statement of “fact,” its the specific words he is using.
I agree with @Steven L. Taylor that it is, in fact, *factual* to call out that fascists of all stripes have historically used this language. I don’t see how pointing that out, especially in the broader context of the current state of American politics. Not doing so feels like a much more serious misreporting of the situation.
@Steven L. Taylor: The hurricane headline strikes me as reasonable, although I’d prefer “Citizens Urged to Prepare.” As to Trump, unless he specifically invokes Hitler, it doesn’t belong in the headline of a news report. Just quote his words. Major papers have editorial pages and op-ed pages to make the Hitler connection.
@Scott:
“There seems to be a built in system that create differences.”
And different logistics — dead tree copy space versus the virtual, SEO and social logic demands on the latter, as well.
@Steven L. Taylor:
“Honest question: how extreme does it have to be, in your view, for it to be okay for the headline to reflect the content?”
That’s a well loaded question.
@Matt Bernius:
“BTW, one of the best examples I’ve seen is Jay Rosen’s Truth Sandwich”
Rosen, who is a thoughtful person on these matters, is this time tilting at horse race stories. “Not the odds, but the stakes,” he says.
That approach would get to some of the rest of this too.
@James Joyner: I can see not using “Hitler” per se because it is specifically inflammatory. But to call it fascist, eliminationist, or similar, strikes me as a factual assessment.
If Biden was calling for the workers of the world to unite because all they have to lose is their chain,s it would be fully accurate to call that Marxist rhetoric.
@James Joyner: “…out of pocket most of the day…”
I assume you mean out of the office. Otherwise I’d lend you some money but what with retirement and my son’s wedding and Christmas coming up, things are a bit tight right now so…
@James Joyner: I would note, too, the hypothetical news about the Cat-5 storm will almost certainly contain context and background to allow news consumers to understand that a Cat-5 is serious because just saying “Cat-5” is insufficient.
I think Hitler’s just a generic substitute for what Trump is suggesting. It sounds almost evasive, in a way. There are plenty of eliminationist politicians aside from Hitler. That said, I do think that Trump’s vermin matches Hitler’s vermin, in that neither are/were subversive.
And that’s the problem with trying to analyze Trump. Not even the baseline is true. It’s all Nixonian resentment and grievance without the 60s even taking place. Trump is just going pure fascism without any plausible facts behind it. The goal of objectivity in this case is to preserve the figleaf of honest intentions for a faction which has none. It’s like anti-trans activists or what Tom Cotton thinks about BLM or being sent an email by a PR firm hired by Taylor Swift’s management team.
Note that in the case of the last, celebrity coverage is actually superior to normal news. Spin for celebrities when they mess-up includes a sensible narrative of rise and fall, learning and unlearning. The ‘objective’ coverage of a celebrity who skids into drugs is they are unhappy but might overcome. No one is arguing that a 3-day coke binge is a sign of good mental health rather than an indication that things going a bit wrong in one’s life.
@Steven L. Taylor: Very much agree. The words chosen by the media imply what Trump plans to do is benign or ordinary. It was my problem with that NYT poll where they asked if respondents favored candidates who “break the rules.” Trying to illegally stay in office or threatening to prosecute your political enemies as a matter of course is not “breaking the rules.” It’s like referring to what happened on January 6th 2021 as “roughhousing.”
@Steven L. Taylor:
Completely agree that dropping references to specific individuals from the headlines and using the analytical category would be a better approach to headline writing. And to Steven’s later point, it’s also critical that the article itself provides the necessary historical or social context.
Expecting a headline to fully stand on its own is a mistake.
@James Joyner: Having read the Forum first I took your comment to be a wry reply to Marked Man. But I see the timing is the other way around. Marked, wrong thread?
@James Joyner: What is the story here? That Trump said certain words in a speech? Or that he’s so far around the bend his language has gone full fascist?
Let me add to your list of links Anne Laurie Sunday Evening Open Thread: It Can’t Happen Here… mostly for Dana Houle’s Tweet with a 1927 front page from Der Sturmer.
@Modulo Myself:
This is a good observation. The ethos of objectivity that the NYT is trying to adhere to here is one that assumes honest (or, at least, acceptable) intentions from Trump. They are assuming that he really doesn’t mean it, which is its own kind of editorializing in my view. Indeed, it is a pernicious form because it is not explicit the way likening his words to Hitler is.
A choice is being made, and the choice both NYT headlines took is to assume that Trump is a normal politician, therefore his hyperbole should be downplayed.
But I think his hyperbole should be taken seriously.
@Steven L. Taylor:
And the issue with that, as many journalists critical of “naive objectivity/impartiality” will point out, is taking that position fails to account for historical context. And in this case, it’s not just the context of the use of that language but of Donald Trump himself (and his behavior throughout his presidency, especially various acts in the lead-up to and after the 2020 election).
There is a saying on liberal blogs, ‘imagine if President Obama had done[X]’.
That gets to the heart of it.
“Trump Calls Human Beings “Vermin” in Public Rally”. Factual, non-editorial, and horrific.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Or if he means it, he actually means it based on his convictions.
I can easily see Trump becoming President in 2024 and then using RICO charges to go after Democrats for having subverted the 2020 election, and the media being forced to contemplate whether to treat this case as if it’s the same as Jan 6 rioters. Trump will obviously make the claim that he believes he was done in by a conspiracy which is no different, they will say, than the belief he had conspired to the overturn the 2020 election, etcetera.
The media has put itself in a position where it’s rendered helpless by this behavior all under the banner of objectivity.
Biden’s campaign is not mincing words:
Link
@gVOR10:
Nope, I just thought that since it was completely tangential to the topic of this thread it was better suited to the Open Forum
@Kathy: Whoa! Good for Biden!
@James Joyner:
Lol to both you and Steven on the hurricane headline.
Steven: Citizens Should Prepare
James: Citizens Urged to Prepare
Steven’s is marginally stronger, but how about
Prepare for the Storm: Category 5 Hurricane Headed Our Way
Much more direct, and everyone in the path should prepare, not just citizens.
Well, if calling Trump “Hitler” is editorializing that doesn’t belong on the front page then so too is calling Biden “old.” I mean, “old” is a subjective term. In geological terms, Biden is damn near a baby! So, if we’re going to push back on editorializing about Trump, let’s do the same thing for Biden. Let the media discuss his age (80) and Trump’s age (77) and people can draw their own conclusions. It’s objective, right?
@Not the IT Dept.: @MarkedMan: “Out of pocket,” with the meaning “absent or unavailable,” was apparently first used in print by O. Henry in 1908. It may be more common in military circles nowadays than in general use. (Regardless, I’m back from my appointment and errands.)
@gVOR10: @Steven L. Taylor: My discomfort isn’t so much with calling a spade a spade as in exercising editorial judgment. And, yes, neutrality is a judgment as well. But the fact of the matter is that, horrific s Trump’s language was, he didn’t literally call for people to be murdered. It’s not really clear what the hell he meant. Now, if reporters had asked him a follow-up along the lines of “You mean like the Holocaust?” and he said “You bet! Round them all up and send them to the gas chambers!” drawing said conclusion would be warranted. Again, see my Colvin exemplar for how I think these things should be handled.
@Cheryl Rofer: I don’t really have any problem with that, given that there’s zero controversy about whether people should prepare for hurricanes. My preference, though, is for news articles to simply report the news. Thus the “Urged” vice “Should”—authorities will have urged action; should sounds like it’s the reporter/news outlet issuing a call for action.
@Kathy: @MarkedMan: Which buttresses my point: It’s absolutely the role of Biden, the Democratic Party, and others who oppose Trump to make that allegation and force him to either walk back his remarks or own them. I just don’t think opposing Trump is a legitimate role for the news side of a press organization.
I think the Jill Colvin article is excellent in terms of journalistic standards.
And I reject the notion that the press has some obligation to set aside journalistic standards to “call out” certain things to avoid the “risk” of normalizing those things. That is a bunch of poppycock.
The press isn’t the arbiter of what is normal vs extreme – nor should it be – and it’s foolish to believe that a lack of editorializing in news coverage will “normalize” anything. This is especially true considering we no longer live in a world where news comes from a small handful of professional organizations. This general view of the press as a kind of paternalistic enterprise that should be focused on getting the rubes to hold the correct views is ultimately counterproductive for a whole host of reasons.
I would analogize it to the CDC and related agencies during Covid. They threw out all their guidance about public communication best practices in favor of a different strategy that included deception, which ultimately failed to convince many Americans to accept and follow their guidance and damaged their institutional credibility.
Now some want the press to do basically the same thing with Trump coverage. The people who want the press to abandon journalistic standards because Trump is supposedly bad enough to justify doing that are wrong in every way possible. They are wrong on principle, and they are wrong in their assessments of how well that will actually work out at achieving their goal.
As I’ve been saying for years now, Trump is bad enough that there should not be any need to exaggerate, make stuff up, or present the most uncharitable interpretation as if it were fact. We’ve been down this road before – does anyone not remember how the effort to catastrophize absolutely everything worked out? And ironically, that arguably did more to normalize Trump’s behavior and words in the eyes of many than straight and quality reporting, with Jill Coven’s piece in the OP as the most recent example.
@Matt Bernius:
Sure…but the average American couldn’t describe fascism, socialism, or communism, accurately, and also couldn’t tell you what ideology Hitler or Mussolini adhered to.
Hitler = bad. That’s the gross simplification most Americans make.
(MAGAt’s may not agree that’s Hitler is bad.)
Are vermin better or worse than a basket of deplorable? (And yes, I know there was only mention of exterminating one of those categories.)
@Daryl:
And therein lies the rub–the lurkers around the perimeter who are the target of the message may not either.
@Andy:
Except that it is, whether they want to be (or you want them to be) or not.
What they choose to cover and how all helps us form views of the world, full stop. There is no avoiding that fact.
@Andy:
All I asked was the following: “Trump Calls Political Rivals “Vermin” and Seeks to “Root Out” the “Threat from Within””–which is pretty much a direct quote. All I asked for was that the appropriate attention be called to what I would argue is objectively problematic rhetoric that is newsworthy because of what was said.
To me, that’s reporting the news.
@Steven L. Taylor: As opposed to “In Veterans Day Speech, Trump Promises to ‘Root Out’ the Left” which sounds standard. How many times have politicians promised, for example, “to root out corruption”?
My suggested headline is accurate reporting. The NYT headline is normalizing rhetoric that could easily have come out of Hitler’s mouth. (Their first version even moreso).
I’m pretty sure a newspaper in Nazi Germany would have quoted Hitler directly about needing to root out vermin, with no “editorializing”.
And if a Rwandan newspaper just repeated the words used on the radio about Tutsis, they would be complicit.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Quite obviously, the major role of the press is to inform, and quite obviously, that “helps us form our views of the world.”
That is not the same thing as being the arbiter of what is and isn’t extreme, which is a subjective value judgment.
@Andy:
Where’s the exaggeration here?
… Trump said he would “root out the Communists, Marxists, Fascists, and Radical Left Thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our Country, lie, steal, and cheat on Elections, and will do anything possible, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America, and the American Dream.”
… Trump said that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,”
This is straight out of the Mussolini and Hitler playbook. Trump is, to put it plainly, a brutal and cruel person. He has shown that to us repeatedly since 2015. Why not tell it like it is?
@Andy:
I’m a little curious about what you think “journalistic standards” are. That’s not a trick question btw, I’m just curious about your personal definition or if you are thinking about a specific professional definition.
This is a topic that is really important to me as I did a lot of work studying journalists in the past. As part of this, I got to observe a number of discussions around that topic and I just don’t think these things are particularly settled (or at least as much as people outside the industry seem to think they are).
For example, you can look at the American Press Association principles (set in the early 2000’s) of reporting and you won’t find anything there that contradicts this form of reporting:
https://americanpressassociation.com/principles-of-journalism/
Likewise, if we dive into an agency’s reporting principles (the AP) there isn’t necessarily anything under there that would suggest this is against their journalistic practices:
https://www.ap.org/about/news-values-and-principles/introduction
@Steven L. Taylor:
I don’t have any problem with that headline.
No one is saying the press shouldn’t report on what Trump said. It’s newsworthy! My view is the press doesn’t need to editorialize or infantilize the audience by explaining why it’s problematic. It speaks for itself!
@Steven L. Taylor:
You seem to be confusing me for someone who is defending the NYT headline.
@Franklin:
And that’s a major driver of the not-James side of this. Setting aside discussion of the finer points of journalistic ethics, simple fairness would require treating Trump’s vermin comment like the MSM did Hillary’s deplorables remark. Or Biden’s age.
Also too, Hillary may have stretched by saying half of Republicans, or not, but subsequent events have pretty much shown she was completely correct about a lot of deplorables. Just as she was about there being a vast right-wing conspiracy. For which see Kochtopus.
@James Joyner: James, your version of neutrality seems to assume that average readers will recognize that Trump’s comments echo fascist dictators from 70-80 years ago. I think it is incumbent upon a newspaper to provide that context.
I’m reminded of a column a some years back inked by Patrick Buchanan (I think in the American Conservative). He was making very thinly veiled racist comments by talking about genetics and referring to minorities using the same specialized language cattle breeders used. The language struck me as quite odd and a little further exploration revealed that this had been popular for a while amongst racists so deep down the well that they didn’t even view non-whites as completely human. I’m talking “Mud People” level of racists here. If any news outlet had bothered covering this diatribe from a former serious Republican Presidential primary contender it would have been journalistic malpractice NOT to call attention to it, preferably in the headline. If he denied his intent, print the denial, but given his long racist history accepting that denial is to become a parody of a legitimate news source.
@Steven L. Taylor: To be clear, I think yout post title (Trump Calls Political Rivals “Vermin” and Seeks to “Root Out” the “Threat from Within”) was better than either of the NYT or WaPo attempts. Were I editing it for use as a news headline, I would change “Seeks” to “Vows,” as the former requires mind-reading whereas the second is literally true.
@MarkedMan:
My preference would be for that context to be made in the editorial and op-ed pages and by Trump’s political opponents. Given how often Trump makes those sort of comments, I’m even on board with quoting academics making that argument in the report—although it’s definitely fraught, allowing reporters to bring their editorial opinions in through the back door. I just don’t think that opinion belongs in the headlines of straight news reports.
@James Joyner:
If the op-ed pages of major newspapers had any measurable effect on public perceptions, this might be a relevant rebuttal. In terms of information dissemination, they are the equivalent of the ultra-fine print at the bottom of the car commercial that says “Professional driver on closed course. Do not attempt.” Or a correction of last Tuesday’s story, at the bottom of page 7…
@James Joyner:
Great! Another pundit in the pocket of Big Hurricane!
@Andy:
When Ronald Reagan kicked off his presidential campaign in Neshoba County, Mississippi what fraction of American newspaper readers were aware of the message he was sending? Is it editorializing and infantilizing to point out what had happened there in the past, and what that might imply about Reagan’s intent?
@James Joyner:
I’m on such a totally different page, I don’t understand how you got here, and this is from someone who agrees with the statement that straight news shouldn’t contain editorializing.
I assume you agree that a straight news report that says, “The resevoir is filling at the rate of 82,000 gallons per hour and at this rate will overtop in less than three days. The last time we were in this situation it continued filling at nearly that rate for 24 hours after it stopped raining and the level didn’t start going down for four days. If it continues raining at this rate for 12 more hours we can expect flooding.”, is better than “The reservoir is filling at 82,000 gallons per hour. See the editorial page for what that might mean.”
Just as I don’t consider that context editorializing, I don’t consider it so if an article states, “Trump said (blah, blah, blah). Given his association with and praise for White Nationalist groups in the past, it’s worth noting that his branding of political opponents as vermin and talking about the purity of the blood is similar to rallying points in Fascist ideology prior to WWII, especially by Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, and more lately promoted by modern day White Supremacist groups in the US and abroad. When asked if his words were a deliberate call out to the WS groups, Trump responded with various negative remarks about the NY Times but did not deny it. When asked if he condemned the WS groups he again did not answer the question.”
I consider the above straight news that provides adequate context for the readership to understand what is going on. For the life of my I don’t understand why hiding the context is better journalism.
@DrDaveT: Excellent example. Providing context is not editorializing!
@James Joyner:
This sounds reasonable — except that you then draw the line between “opinion” and “reporting” so far to one side that there’s no room left on the “reporting” side.
By your standard, today’s WaPo headline
is utterly inadmissible — it is clearly mere opinion that this is a test, or that a shutdown looms.
The subheading is even worse:
I see at least four mere opinions in there. This story should have been relegated to the op-ed page, eh?
ETA — MarkedMan said it better while I was typing.
The argument that we should not compare Trump to Hitler seems predicated on the idea that such comparisons are only valid if we consider Hitler in his final form. Hitler didn’t rise to power on the back of his plans to execute the Holocaust. He started with less extreme rhetoric and as he found footholds of support there and gained power, became more explicit and direct about his ambitions. Comparing Trump to Hitler is particularly apt because he is pulling directly from the playbook.
@MarkedMan: I don’t think reporting of natural disasters and political candidates are similar enough to be useful.
@MarkedMan and DrDaveT: I agree that context is reporting. I just think Colvin’s AP report is the way to do that.
DrDaveT: I don’t have any heartburn with the Johnson head/subjhed, which is cast in traditional horserace/conflict terms. Nor would I object to a story under the headline “Biden Calls Out Trump ‘Vermin’ Remarks as Akin to Hitler.”
@Kazzy: But where Hitler ended up is how we all think of him. (And the notion that he was elected through democratic means and then seized total control is largely mythological.)
@James Joyner:
Hmm. I’m still on a completely different page. Putting relevant context in a straight news article strikes me as good journalism regardless of the subject.
@James Joyner:
I guessed that. I’m pointing out that you’re being inconsistent — you are applying a very different standard of what counts as “mere opinion” to the two cases. I’m trying to figure out why that is.
The degree of analysis and inference needed on the reporter’s part to describe Johnson’s situation as a “test”, the shutdown as “looming”, the GOP caucus as “fractious”, or Congress as “trying to reach a short-term spending deal” is more than sufficient to justify describing Donald Trump’s speech as echoing fascist rhetoric and espousing wholly unprecedented fascist and antidemocratic policies familiar from banana republics and Axis powers, but not in US politics.
I get the impression that, if the NYT or WaPo were to break a story about how China had funded a massive disinformation campaign aimed at electing Trump, you would be OK with that — but if the perpetrators were the GOP or Rupert Murdoch instead of China, you would not be OK with that. Am I wrong?
@Matt Bernius:
With regard to journalistic standards, I’m mainly mentioning that in response to people who say that this isn’t a “normal” election and that the press should not treat it as a “normal” election. This isn’t a new idea and is specifically a call to change journalistic standards regarding Trump. I think that’s a mistake regardless of what the standards are.
Getting on my soapbox again, I think the principled method is to have a standard for reporting that can be objectively examined and to apply that standard generally. What I object to is the idea that the press should have one standard for Trump, and another for Biden or other politicians.
As far as my personal view, I think news organizations should concentrate on the 5 W’s and leave editorializing for, as James notes, the editorial pages, pundits, and the political opposition.
@al Ameda:
Uh, yes, my point is that Trump’s words speak for themselves. No editorializing or attempting to divine a deeper meaning is required.
@DrDaveT:
Is that actually true? My understanding is that opinion content gets many more clicks than straight news. It’s certainly the case for cable news, as the opinion shows get far higher viewership than the news shows.
I looked up the NYT reporting on the speech, and it mentioned that he talked about “states rights” in the subhead and the body, but it didn’t spell out the “message” or “intent” that some saw and continue to see. It seems the NYT either understood that its readers were smart or able enough to reach their own conclusions about what he might or might not have meant, or they did not desire to provide that kind of mind-reading in a straight news piece.
@Kazzy:
Except you don’t know whether he’s pulling directly from the playbook, that’s just your opinion, and your opinion is not a fact and should not be reported as a fact in a news story.
And if one wants to be honest about Hitler comparisons to Trump, then that would require looking at the whole picture to include the ways Trump is not like Hitler and not just selectively highlight whenever Trump does or says something that can be associated with him.
@Andy: “With regard to journalistic standards, I’m mainly mentioning that in response to people who say that this isn’t a “normal” election and that the press should not treat it as a “normal” election. This isn’t a new idea and is specifically a call to change journalistic standards regarding Trump. I think that’s a mistake regardless of what the standards are.”
How about this? Equality of treatment.
If the press looks at Biden’s speech patterns or level of demonstrated energy, they should apply the exact same standards to Trump. And vice versa.
If Biden does something unusual as president, the media should apply the exact same standards to what Trump did.
The entire thing that every right-winger here works hard to not understand is that Dems merely want the same frikkin’ standards applied.
@MarkedMan:
Yeah, it’d probably better if he was out of pocket 😉
@Andy:
Andy, man, we are so far apart on this one. If the NYT newsroom understood the significance of the choice of this otherwise obscure town in the middle of nowhere that Reagan (or Reagan’s people) chose for his frickin’ campaign kickoff and kept it from the readers well, to me, that’s just about the perfect definition of journalistic malpractice. The idea that only people that knew the significance ahead of time deserve to be clued in is just mind boggling to me. That the NYTimes should assume that their readers should either have known that context regarding something that happened a couple of decades before or they didn’t deserve to know it?! Sheesh.
Whether you believe, against all odds, that Georgia born Lee Atwater had no clue about what happened in that miserable little town and just out of the blue picked this Southern version of Podunk to kick off a Presidential campaign, or instead believe it was deliberate, is beside the point. The readers deserve to know. It could be evidence of Reagan’s (or his campaign staffs) enthusiastically calling out to the racists. Or, if Reagan was actually the wonderful jovial father figure that so many see him as, then his campaign made a horrible gaffe, which is also news. Either way, to know the significance and not report it is to become a partisan by helping this particular candidate out of a jam.
@James Joyner:
Except that isn’t actually true, as there are people who want to ride these things out, even when they shouldn’t. (Not to mention the folks who don’t like evacuation orders, etc.).
And I picked Cat-5 hurricanes on purpose because I first learned about them from the news, and not from the op/ed page. In my view the destructive capacity of Trump’s politics is newsworthy and not just the domain of the op/ed page.
There really isn’t an objective philosophy to Dr Joyners and Andy’s pining for “Straight News”.
It’s clear after you scratch the surface that these are men with a conservative slant whose formative years of news digestion occurred during the early days of news polarization.
Remember those days? “Fair & Balanced” “Only the Facts…”. Non lefty men of that day were seeded with the idea that CNN and the Big 3 snookered the American people by reporting Opinion as facts….leading to social upheaval. The truth is, if those outlets reported news aligned with the conservative narrative, that demographic of men would have no problem with opinion-based news. And indeed, Faux News has fed conservative-leaning men a guilt-free diet of opinion for 30+ years—they can’t get enough of it.
I find it to be subconscious projection, outcome and not principle based. You don’t find non or barely right men making similar comments about the medias role. They target Fox… but not ‘Da Nooz’.
I also find it laughable that Trump all but has to say, “If elected, I want to do some Holocaust stuff” To be compared to Hitler and labeled a fascist under the Joyner ruler of objective reporting. That’s not how politicians work. This in effect allows bad faith actors to defraud people who otherwise barely pay attention to politics. But Vote
@Andy: “Trump uses rhetoric very similar to Hitler in his push for power.” Any qualms with that?
@Andy: “that would require looking at the whole picture to include the ways Trump is not like Hitler and not just selectively highlight whenever Trump does or says something that can be associated with him.”
Right. For instance, on the plus side Trump has called for building concentration camps for people he finds undesirable. But then we have to take into account the fact that Trump eats meat and Hitler was a vegetarian, so there’s no comparison at all.
@wr: On that point (which I had overlooked), that simply isn’t the standard of newsworthiness. (edit: I mean the one from Andy).
If a candidate blatantly lies about something, we do not expect the press to counterbalance that fact with instances of them telling the truth.
If they are found to have engaged in domestic violence, we don’t expect a balancing story about how they treat their ailing mother well.
Etc.
@Barry:
As I’ve told you repeatedly, I’m not a right-winger, though I may appear to be compared to you! I think it’s fair to say the commetariate here is to the left of the median American which can make people like me appear to be “right-wing.”
Ok, so you want the same standards applied to both sides? Then I hope you and others will end all the “bothsides” complaints that are endlessly deployed to dodge any criticism of Democrats or when the same standards are – in fact – applied to both sides.
@MarkedMan:
The problem I have with your position is there is no evidence linking the historical event that took place near the fairgrounds with the Reagan campaign’s decision to speak there.
You’re speculating that there is some linkage there and IMO it wouldn’t be appropriate for the NYT to speculate in a news story.
Looking at the Wikipedia entry, it says this:
So yeah, we are far apart on this, and the reason is that the actual facts do not support the significance and imputed motives you claim. And it’s been 42 years and as far as I can tell, there’s been no evidence to come out supporting the linkage you claim.
@Jim Brown 32:
On the contrary, I think focusing on the 5 W’s is the objective philosophy. And what is the alternative? No standards? If you or others have an objective philosophy, then let’s hear it.
I think it’s rather obvious that what many here actually want is biased reporting that leans in their direction. It would be nice if people would just admit that and quit claiming the pretense of any objectivity.
Secondly, I come at this as a former intelligence analyst, and what I did in my former profession is very similar to journalism. My current job as a tech analyst is about half journalism. The notion that it’s appropriate to inject subjective “context” to steer readers in a particular direction is bad both in my old profession and my current one. That’s partly how we got Iraqi intelligence WMD debacle. And while journalism in my current professional area is pretty niche, there isn’t much tolerance for the kinds of “context” that many want to see in political reporting.
@Kazzy:
No problems with that except maybe I’d use something other than “push for power.”
@Steven L. Taylor:
I’m not saying everything has to be counterbalanced. But if one is going to claim that Trump is – in fact – a fascist or is basically just like Hitler or is slated to become just like Hitler – then there needs to be a deeper examination of this claim.
Putting things on the other foot, if some far-right progressive says things that promote or mirror Hugo Chavez, or Hamas or whatever, one can’t claim they are a terroris or socialist dicator without deeper examination.
And let’s be real here. Trump’s opponents are going to highlight and amplify anything that looks remotely Hitler-like or fascist-like – or any other negative characterization that can be made. And that’s fine, that’s how politics works! My point is that news organizations should not be doing that. If anyone thinks that news organizations should be doing that, then those people should just admit that they want biased reporting and quit trying to have it both ways.
@Andy:
Apologies for my not being clear here.
So you object on 2 levels:
(1) to any comment beyond pointing out exactly what Trump wors were, and
(2) ‘editorializing’ that compares what Trump said to Hitler or Mussolini, or say, his use of the word ‘vermin’ that echoes how Hitler used that exact term to dehumanize Jews?
Thanks.
@Andy:
Okay. So you want to believe this wasn’t a dog whistle. And I agree that the NY Times shouldn’t have assumed that it was, at least not in print. But they should have pointed out that the campaign had chosen a site associated with the Klan and the civil rights murders and at least asked campaign officials why they chose it and if they were aware of the connection.
Come on, Andy. The reason that it became a site for political speech making is precisely because it was the site of the murders. Southern politicians could send a message of solidity with the Klan without ever mentioning them. The farmers that dwelt in the area didn’t coincidentally become an incredibly important voting block after the murders, it was the murders themselves that made the site important.
But let me ask you another question. Suppose Biden gives a speech on combating right wing extremism in Waco, Texas or Ruby Ridge, Idaho but doesn’t mention the events there. Are you saying that journalistic ethics would prevent reporters from asking questions about whether there was a connection, and reporting on the answers? And let’s say that somehow it was deemed believable that no one in the campaign including Biden remembered what happened there and it was completely unintentional. Wouldn’t that be news in and of itself? And Waco and Ruby ridge happened 30 years ago. The murders in Mississippi were just 16 years in the past.
But if one is going to claim that Trump is – in fact – a fascist or is basically just like Hitler or is slated to become just like Hitler – then there needs to be a deeper examination of this claim.
The media’s job is not to whitewash candidates and decontextualize what they are saying until everything is empty stenography. It’s not to write ‘Pearl Harbor was attacked but these other 400 harbors were not’. Their job is to report the news, which requires subjectivity at the most basic level, because how else do you know what news is? So a candidate saying he will use the state to go after enemies who are vermin is news which should be amplified. What Trump said was Pearl Harbor and not the other 400 harbors the Japanese did not attack.
To put it in different terms, if Biden was promising to commit NATO troops to Ukraine to fight the Russian invasion, that would be news that needed to be amplified. Not only that, nobody here would be worrying about objectivity and making sure that editorial lines are not being crossed. We would not be wasting everyone’s time.
Incidentally, there’s a great avant-garde French novel by Alain Robbe-Grillet translated as Jealousy. It’s about a man on a banana plantation who suspects his wife is having an affair with a friend. The prose is all facts. Not even metaphors. Just facts and no interiority. The man counts and recounts banana trees, he narrates and renarrates events with his wife and his friend where he’s a silent observer. Things happen and are regulated by specific details which are all of equal importance. The prose creeps slowly to a scene where he seems to have murdered his wife or his friend, but there’s no action, no presence on the main character’s part.
The trick is that it’s disorienting and weird to have only objective facts in place without any interiority or subjectivity. And not only that–it’s far more of a psychological endeavor to do this than to have a normal novel filled with thoughts. Robbe-Grillet wrote all of his novels like this–they get really Eurotrash porn at a certain point in the 60s, and maybe they are too much for most audiences but the early ones are good. They are also very short.
@MarkedMan:
So, Andy can certainly speak for himself. But this gets at exactly what I think the press should do (and, indeed, seems to be doing) with the Trump ‘vermin’ bit: do more reporting.
It’s all well and good for politicians and pundits to pounce on the words and make allusions to Hitler. Not only do I think it’s a perfectly reasonable stance to take given what we know about Trump but that’s the way politics and punditry work.
But for the straight news side of the house all we have are the words, the Trumpian context, and the historical record. Connecting those three is very much within the domain of reporters. But doing so requires actual reporting. Demand that Trump and his team explain the words. What exact policies does he have in mind? Make him either own up to the remarks or walk them back.
Additionally, of course, they can report on the back and forth. Trump said this. Biden and company have charged that this is reminiscent of fascism. A handful of Republicans have also expressed concern. Etc, etc.
@MarkedMan:
No, my position is that there is no evidence one way or another. I was 13 then and don’t have a dog in that fight either way. I don’t “believe” anything about this one way or another. You’ve chosen to believe it’s a dog whistle – which is fine – but that is a belief and not a fact that should be reported as news. Now, if you or someone can present evidence of the direct link you believe in, then I would go from being neutral to agreeing with you.
If that’s actually true, then I think that would strengthen your position somewhat. So, is that actually true or just another assertion?
Well, your scenario is quite a bit different from Reagan’s. Reagan’s speech, which you can read a transcript of, was a standard stump speech except for the mention of states rights. And, again, it was given at a county fair – an event not organized by or planned by the Reagan campaign. Campaigning at county fairs was very common in rural areas at that time.
Biden giving a speech specifically on the topic of right-wing extremism is a different context than a campaign stump speech. Specifically going to locations where right-wing terrorism occurred and giving a speech specifically about right wing terrorism should definitely lead to reporters to ask questions about the reason for holding an event at certain locations, and report what they discover. Reporters should not ask rhetorical questions in a news piece itself, and make unsupported insinuations.
@Modulo Myself:
What do you mean by amplified?
As I’ve continually said, Trump’s comments are very newsworthy and deserve lots of coverage, including on the front page. What I don’t think is necessary is for the press to editorialize in a straight news report. Hence why I think Colvin’s piece is good.
Again, it’s not clear what you mean by amplify. I agree that news would be a very big deal and should be reported on extensively! What I disagree with is the notion that no one would worry about objectivity – quite the contrary, we would want and need to understand the facts of what Biden was proposing without editorializing.
Let’s consider the Iraq war. The press reporting in the run-up to that war was bad because so much of it was editorializing, or making assertions that weren’t in evidence. The public would have been much better served if the press had stuck to the 5 W’s.
It’s a delusion to think that the press will always editorialize in a good way or in the way that you want. That’s another reason why I think editorializing should be left to opinion writers, pundits and others.
@James Joyner:
Yes, James explained it much better than I did. I agree with his answer.
@Andy: There are two issues we are arguing about and they are independent. We are in agreement if you are simply stating that it is not in bounds to declare Reagan’s motive despite his denial, BUT it is legitimate to provide the historical context of the site and the topic of his speech, query the campaign and Reagan himself as to whether they were aware of that history and, if so, was that somehow related. I think we would disagree on the following: that is within bounds to run a headline that says “Reagan Campaign Kicks Off near Site of Civil Rights Murders”.
And that brings us to the second area of disagreement. I think that given the historical context and the facts that were known to every politically aware person at the time, to believe the Reagan Campaign DIDN’T deliberately kick off its campaign there because they wanted to signal to the racists goes beyond credulity and into gullibility:
– That the South was waging a political war against Federal enforcement of civil rights by promoting the concept of states’ rights. Just 12 years before, George Wallace had run his presidential campaign on exactly that, explicitly. States’ Rights means we can keep segregation, full stop.
– The Governor of California decides to kick off his campaign at this location in a rural location in the deep South and talk about states’ rights. There was nothing in his speech reaching out to the Black folks terrorized by the Ku Klux Klan.
– Officials on the campaign were aware of the message and feared the backlash.
And now there is even less doubt, as in later years Reagan’s campaign manager admitted that appealing to the racists was an important part of the campaign strategy, and he regretted it
As a reporter, when you know someone is lying to your face but you can’t prove it, you can’t simply report they are lying. But it is imperative that you provide the context that demonstrates the lie. That is the difference between journalism and stenography.
@James Joyner: I understand why you prefer what you prefer, but if Trump is, in fact, using fascist language, I don’t expect him to fess up to it.
At some point there has to be an interpretation of what is said.
I linked a piece in today’s tabs post that clearly illustrates how the language connects.
@Andy:
What do I mean by amplify? What do you mean by amplify?
And let’s be real here. Trump’s opponents are going to highlight and amplify anything that looks remotely Hitler-like or fascist-like – or any other negative characterization that can be made. And that’s fine, that’s how politics works! My point is that news organizations should not be doing that. If anyone thinks that news organizations should be doing that, then those people should just admit that they want biased reporting and quit trying to have it both ways.
What should and shouldn’t news organizations be doing in an unbiased way? We are not missing facts in the case of Trump, and it’s not like a denial from Trump that he won’t be rounding up his enemies means anything. Your argument seems to be that reporters owe existential benefit of doubt to a statement in which none is available; otherwise they are biased. It’s one step away from wondering if it’s biased to assume the people he intends to lock up would find it unfair to be arrested. And dragging in Iraq is meaningless. It has nothing to do with this situation. And with my case, nobody would be arguing that Biden didn’t mean what he said or that why it is news shouldn’t be amplified, as you put it, by the objective news media.
I have started a post to explore this question, but to me, it boils down to this: at some point we have to take seriously what is said by those who seek power. That includes press coverage.
The man is saying things that could be right out of Main Kampf. I know this because I taught political theory for years. But the main way the broader public is going to know that is if the media lets them know.
And yes, contra James, I think it is just like bad weather. People need to be warned about what might be coming. They do in the local news every time there is a tornado warning.
@MarkedMan:
My view is that there needs to be some evidence of a connection as well as relevance. It’s simply too easy to make an assumption that a connection exists, which is what I think you’ve done in the case of Reagan, and what many did in the case of Jason Aldean’s music video.
Again, I have no problem with individuals making these connections and arguments. And I think it’s perfectly reasonable for people to criticize Reagan for having a speech that mentions state rights at that particular location. At the very least it’s a bad look. My only issue is that those subjective judgments and conclusions should not be made in a news story that is supposed to focus on facts and not conjecture.
The world isn’t lacking – at all – in the amount of that kind of subjective analysis and tries to provide context, often in a purposely biased way.
What the world is lacking is factual reporting without that, and so I want to see more of it. Hence why I think that the original NYT report on the speech was entirely appropriate and fact-based, and it was also entirely appropriate for many others to criticize Reagan at the time and now for the subjective context that they see.
Similarly, I much prefer Colvin’s AP take on Trump’s statements and goals than I do with reports that engage in much more editorializing.
@Modulo Myself:
I’m not sure how to explain it to you other than I have already. I would say to you the same thing I wrote immediately above this to MM.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Yes, that’s what op-eds, columnists, and all of us do and are doing. We don’t need news reports to do that, and I think we should not want that for all the reasons I’ve cited. I think you an many others are failing to consider all the cases where the added “context” is wrong or bad and leads the public away from an accurate assessment of the truth rather than toward it.
Who is saying we shouldn’t take it seriously?
And the media is letting people know by accurately quoting Trump’s words, as Colvin’s AP report does very well.
And the much larger number of media pundits, columnists, bloggers, and commentators can and are adding the subjective comparisons they want to add.
Just in my own case, I think Trump’s words much more align with Stalin than Hitler. Opinions vary on that, and we can all debate about what the best historical analog, but that debate should happen here and by opinion makers and not be predetermined in what is supposed to be factual reporting.
Weather is about science, not subjective opinions about an individual’s statements and comparisons to statements made by historical figures. Weather can be quantified and calculated. Weather has standards by which we can measure effects, and we experts to explain what those effects mean to the non-expert audience. A Cat-5 hurricane has a specific, technical definition. The greater meaning of the word “vermin” and the context in which it is used does not. Recommendations to evacuate are not the subjective opinions by reporters, but are factual reports of statements from government spokespeople and experts relayed to the audience.
@Andy:
I will note that using the 5th “W” (who, what, when, where, why) axiomatically shifts the discourse to a subjective plane because, as you have noted about people drawing conclusions based on what you have said, no one has the definitive ability to determine what anyone else intends. Discourse becomes inferential at that point. Inferential=/=objective.
@Modulo Myself: Indeed! I’ve read some Robbe-Grillet in translation. Very eerie. I also found it difficult to ferret out what “the point” in writing them was, but I’ve always assumed that’s because I’m a cracker. (And ignint at that.)
@MarkedMan:
I’d have no problem with that headline at all, but then again, I see the “journalists should only report (what I want them to say)” argument as pretty fatuous to begin with.
@Andy:
I agree with your comments completely – except for the “those”. What I outlined wasn’t subjective at all. They were simply facts. Read them again. I’m not sure what criteria you are using for stating that inclusion of these particular facts would transform and news report into an editorial.
@Andy:
TY for sharing this. I appreciate you providing some more insight.
@MarkedMan:
There are tons of facts in the world. That county in Mississippi probably has thousands of facts throughout its history. They can’t all be included for obvious reasons. Therefore, the included facts must be relevant to what’s being reported.
It seems to me you are claiming that the fact these murders occurred near the fairgrounds (actually ~ 20 miles away) is a relevant fact for Reagan’s stump speech. My view is that it’s only relevant based on your opinion about the intentions and subtext of Reagan’s speech, which is subjective.
Let’s take your earlier example and say Biden gives a stump speech in Waco Texas, and in one part of that speech, he mentions the importance of opposing right-wing extremism. I would not think it’s appropriate in a news report to imply that Biden is making some link between his speech and the Branch Davidians – at least without a lot more investigation and reporting that would actually show such a link. After all, the Branch Davidians weren’t actually in Waco, their compound was also about 20 miles away.
The fact that historical events can be somewhat geographically nearby to a current event doesn’t automatically make the historic and current event linked or relevant to each other.
@Andy: … and there you have our fundamental disagreement. My view of what you are saying (and I acknowledge that you most likely disagree) is that a reporter must be able to prove a link beyond the shadow of a doubt or else they should not publish any context at all. I disagree, and in fact think it’s a dereliction of journalistic duty not to report this.
I’m curious about your thoughts on the following: someone is arrested for a specific and unusual crime, say dropping bricks on cars from an overpass. Do you think it is out of bounds to report that this has happened seven other times in a 20 mile radius if the police had not charged the individual with those other crimes?
@MarkedMan:
I don’t think a reporter has to prove a link, but I do think there needs to be some evidence that a link exists beyond speculation about motives. Again, if you had any evidence – not proof – that the historic murders near there had anything to do with Reagan’s speech or his decision to give a speech there, then my position would be different. The problem is you don’t have any evidence. You just very strongly believe they are linked.
If these crimes have all happened recently and are part of a pattern, especially if it’s the case the earlier instances have not been solved, then yes, it would be important to report them as long as the reporter went to the effort to interrogate the police first to try to discover if the police think the perpetrator also committed the other crimes. It would be bad, in contrast, for the reporter to just assume they are linked and insert or imply their own conclusions in the report without bothering to do any due diligence with the polics.
If we analogize what I think you’re getting at with this example to the NYT in 1981, the reporter back then could have asked the Reagan campaign to comment on the optics of giving a speech that mentions states rights near the location of those murders 16 years prior and mention how some would construe that as a racist dog whistle or whatever. In that case, the reporter could then legitimately report that the question was asked and provide the answer that was given, leaving readers to draw their own conclusions. It would, by contrast, be a mistake for the reporter to simply make the claim of linkage without giving the campaign the opportunity to respond to that claim.
@Andy: I didn’t say the reporter should make that linkage, in fact I said the opposite several times. I said they should report the context.
The Reagan thing is just absurd. Since Republican Senator and Party leader Jacob Javits in 1964 denounced the Southern Strategy of bring the racists into the Republican fold, the the entire Wallace governorship and presidential run hammering home to the nation on the news every night that States Rights = No Civil Rights, to Republican officials openly discussing the need to attract the Wallace voter, to, well there’s no point in going on. In your eyes context that might lead to suspicion of racial dog whistling must be withheld from a news article because there is no immediate evidence this particular Republican would dog whistle. It’s absurd.
@Andy:
People are warned about hurricanes because of physical danger, not because of science or how quantifiable hurricanes are versus politicians. Similarly, if someone sent an email to a synagogue or a mosque saying ‘attention we are going to root out of all of the vermin who are destroying and undermining America’ it would be a considered a threat (however credible) on innocent people by the media and treated as such.
And there’s no invisible step that reporters need to take to warn you about a hurricane or tell a story on how some crank sent a threat to wherever.
Similarly, the media should be reporting on the Trump campaign as if his presidency is going to be a physical threat, because it’s no different except for the minor and small fact that powerful people are cheering Trump on.
Also I suspect that many people in this country hate the left to such a degree they don’t think that leftists have the right to feel threatened by a conservative political program without an extreme and an unreasonable amount of proof.
@Steven L. Taylor: I’m fine with labeled Analysis pieces if the type you linked. In a perfect world, they would be written by different people than those who do straight news reporting but I don’t mind it much when the reporters are very seasoned and have actual perspective to offer.