The New York Times Normalizes Trump's Cruelty and Derangement
December 26, 2019
The headquarters of The New York Times in Manhattan. (samchills)
MARK KARLIN, BUZZFLASH EDITOR’S COMMENTARY
The New York Times closes out the decade still under siege by many media critics that its DC bureau often fails to apply the most basic standards of ferreting out the truth when it comes to covering Trump. Yes, the NYT has a liberal editorial board. Yes, it backs important investigative reporting. Yes, it has an international staff that provides important on-the-ground coverage. Yes, it has many insightful columnists.
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Yet, to many journalistic watch dogs, the NYT generally has failed to hold Trump accountable to the most basic standards of factual accountability in covering the master media manipulator and to an accountable code of behavior. This comes out in a variety of ways, far too many for a single commentary. Certainly, the Times is often guilty of what has become a frequent journalistic standard: in reporting: “false equivalences.” This is the most common technique of reporting nowadays in the mainstream corporate press, in which a reporter writes or broadcasts about two sides to every story — without journalistic clarification — even if one is factual and one is obviously lies or fictional.
Gone are the days when journalists knew that the role of the reporter is to establish the truth and pursue it relentlessly Maybe they are still taught journalistic integrity in colleges and grad schools. But then they meet the real world of corporate journalism and learn that much of political reporting is more like transcription when two sides are given equal value, without the reporter discerning which one is true.
BuzzFlash has written about some failures of the Times in its Trump coverage before. After the August 3 racist massacre in El Paso, BuzzFlash wrote two commentaries. One, on August 5 was entitled, “Mainstream Media Should Not Let Trump Off the Hook for His Incitement of White Christian Nationalist Violence and Massacres, But It Will.” It had the following paragraph in it:
The New York Times headlined its Monday morning email alert: “Trump’s Words Are Scrutinized by Candidates in Wake of Shootings.” Although the Times has articles that document Trump’s incitements, it balances those [with a] neutrality of [offering] the statements of several Democratic candidates for president holding Trump accountable with counter-propaganda from the White House that amounts to outright lies [although the NYT presents them as a credible counter-argument]. The NYT has a headline at the top of its homepage (at the time of the writing of this commentary on Monday morning): “Trump Calls for Gun Checks and Immigration Laws.” Say what?
The Times leaves it to Democratic presidential candidates to accuse Trump of racism, without the Times taking a position. It uses the rather tame phrasing that his words were “scrutinized.” This is due to both reporting by “false equivalencies” and the infamous position of NYT Executive Editor Dean Baquet that the paper’s reporting cannot call Trump a racist because no one can read his mind. (Baquet prefers such euphemistic phrases as Trump’s “racially-tinged” remarks, etc.)
Baquet’s rather craven and specious perspective resulted in a catastrophically “state propaganda” three column above-the-fold headline on the Tuesday following the El Paso anti-immigration bloodletting and a transparently duplicitous Trump news conference: “TRUMP URGES UNITY VS. RACISM.” A high school sports editor could have done a better job, and the NYT was forced to change the headline three times due to a fiery backlash:
BuzzFlash wrote a rebuke of the Times and other media reporting that appeared to absolve Trump of his “racial-priming” (a form of stochastic terrorism) that incited the El Paso carnage. The BuzzFlash commentary was entitled, “Message to the Mainstream Media: Stop Normalizing Trump's Behavior. He Is a Racist, Liar and Instigator of Violence. Full Stop.” Obviously, Dean Baquet and The New York Times’s DC bureau has still not gotten the message that their journalistic obligation is to inform readers of the truth, not transcribe White House propaganda.
Baquet has also justified the NYT’s often other wordly normalization of Trump’s deranged demagogic behavior as worthy of being written up relatively uncritically because, as he disdainfully told the Columbia Journalism Review, The New York Times is not part of “the opposition.”
This is a rather odd position for the executive editor of the New York Times to take, since the issue is not the NYT being part of “the opposition,” it is to be the “Paper of Record” on what is true, not the “Paper of False Equivalencies” and state propaganda. On August 6, the Columbia Journalism review included an interview with Baquet in its account of the NYT epic and inexcusable fail on covering the El Paso shooting and Trump’s follow-up gaslighting:
Baquet doesn’t see himself as the vanguard of the resistance. He takes a much more traditional view of journalists as objective chroniclers of the news, leaving it to readers and pundits to decide what the facts mean. “I don’t believe our role is to be the leaders of the opposition party,” he says.
Yes, readers should be offered the facts via credible reporting, but they shouldn’t, as NYT DC bureau reporters often do, be offered stories that lay out facts and lies as if they bear equal weight.
The Columbia Journalism Review ran another article on August 6 entitled, “Letting Trump off the Hook”:
But the premise of Trump’s healing address was a lie, and coverage of it—assuming that it merited attention at all—should have made fact its focus. Trump is culpable for hate in America; journalists should not give the impression that he is invested in working to fix it. Saying so isn’t the same as blaming Trump for individual atrocities without evidence, it holds him accountable for creating a climate that nurtures bigotry and violence. When Trump rails against an individual or group, commentators stress that his words have real-world consequences. When something that looks like a real-world consequence comes to pass, adopting Trump’s narrative defies logic.
Maybe Baquet should take a sabbatical and get a degree from the Columbia School of Journalism.
The Times is such an influential paper domestically and nationally, and, along with The Washington Post, it sets the journalistic tone and content for many a story. There are a multitude of reasons to suspect why its coverage of Trump is so compromised, including the DC bureau’s need to cultivate good relations within the White House as “anonymous” sources. There are other reasons for its frequent normalization treatment of Trump, some of which we’ve covered and more that BuzzFlash will cover in the future.
However, in concluding this commentary, BuzzFlash wants to focus on another flaw in NYT coverage, how it often uses adjectives and descriptions that make Trump appear heroic and defiant, as if he were a character in a Greek tragedy.
First, however, some context. As quoted in a July 30 New Yorker article by David Remnick, one-time key Trump ideologue Steve Bannon said,
We got elected on Drain the Swamp, Lock Her Up, Build a Wall. This was pure anger. Anger and fear is what gets people to the polls. The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.
The New York Times is very good at “flooding the zone with shit” when it comes to Trump.
Let us look first at how the New York Times covered a Thursday morning press “opportunity” in the Oval Office after Trump was impeached on the prior Wednesday. Here is the first paragraph in an article by Michael Crowley, Annie Karni and Maggie Haberman:
President Trump sat forward on the edge of his chair and chatted at length with reporters in the Oval Office on Thursday, unbowed but for him a little subdued. The day after he was impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors, he dismissed the judgment of the House of Representatives and punched back by celebrating with a Democratic congressman who switched parties to stand with him.
It’s right out of the Trump narrative to characterize him as “unbowed.” There is a resonance of heroism about the word. Then there is an echo of his “counter puncher” image, often employed by Kellyanne Conway, when the article states that Trump “punched back by celebrating.” It is the call of reporters and editors as to what makes a lead paragraph, but this article should have not been led by Trump as a Sophoclean hero.
The NYT DC trio continued with more Trump propaganda:
“I don’t feel like I’m being impeached because it’s a hoax, it’s a setup,” Mr. Trump insisted as he showcased Representative Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey, the newly minted Republican, and looked beyond his seemingly certain acquittal in a Senate trial to next fall’s election.
“I’m beating everybody by a lot,” the president said, “and I think that’s where we’re going.”
It’s been long past time that the media should stop reporting anytime that Trump uses “witchhunt,” “hoax,” “coup,” and other such repeated ad infinitum “big lie” demagogic language, including his repetitive and profane denunciations of Nancy Pelosi. Message to the New York Times, such false claims are no longer news. There is nothing new about them.
Although the article did include some criticism of Trump from other sources, but not any revelations of lies and duplicity from the NYT journalists. Even after bringing up third-party counterpoints to Trump and his campaign claims, the reporters returned to speculating on Trump’s activities and state of mind as if they were detailing the activity of a member of the Royal Family:
By Thursday morning, he was eager for information. He watched television coverage, listening for clues about what Ms. Pelosi might be up to. Almost as soon as she said she might delay sending the articles of impeachment to the Senate, Mr. Trump started surveying advisers about what it could mean. “Why do you think she’s doing that?” he asked one person after another.
Is this the best NYT journalism has to offer? Are we next to learn what Trump had for breakfast?
In a December 18 article about his Battle Creek, Michigan, campaign rally that was meant to divert attention from the impeachment vote, some of the lead paragraphs were again about Trump’s “unbowed” defiance:
“They said there’s no crime,” he said. “There’s no crime. I am the first person to ever get impeached and there is no crime. I feel guilty. You know what they call it? Impeachment light.”
He paused before adding, “I don’t know about you, but I’m having a good time.”
His rejoinder presented the remarkable image of a combative president standing unbowed [remember that heroic characterization?] before his core supporters even as he became the third in American history to be impeached.
It wasn’t until many paragraphs down into the story that the authors wrote of Trump’s despicable abject cruelty:
Mr. Trump also lashed out at a woman [protester] who was escorted from the auditorium by security after interrupting his remarks and making profane gestures, and encouraged security to act more forcefully to remove her. “You got to get a little bit stronger than that, folks,” he said to cheers of approval.
Also, it wasn’t until far down into the article that NYT reporters Michael Crowley, Annie Karni and Maggie Haberman brought up and discussed Trump’s abominable and crude suggestion that the late Democratic Congressman John Dingell might have gone to Hell because Trump was annoyed that his wife, Congresswoman Debbie Dingell, voted for impeachment.
That the NYT chose not to make those two unacceptable and grossly deplorable comments the lead says volumes about how the “Paper of False Equivalencies” has normalized Trump’s uncivil and violence-inciting statements. Here is where the meat of the Dingel obscenity is brought into the story:
But more than anything, his anger at the House Democrats rang through. He declared that they had embarked on “a political suicide march,” and predicted that Americans would soon vote Speaker Nancy Pelosi “the hell out of office.”
Yet in a false note, the crowd was clearly uneasy when the president attacked Representative Debbie Dingell of Michigan, Mr. Dingell’s widow. Mr. Trump fumed that she had voted for his impeachment even though he ordered the lowering of flags after her husband’s death. “Maybe he’s looking up” instead of looking down, Mr. Trump said.
Uh, “Yet in a false note” implies that the rest of the admittedly “rambling” speech was not almost entirely “a false note,” but was acceptable as just surly behavior.
In a December 19, New York Times “Impeachment Briefing” email, Maggie Haberman stated that one of the reasons Trump is eager to have a Senate trial is that “He has fact sets that he wants people to hear and understand.” Now if he actually had “fact sets” (which Haberman did not question), that would indeed be news for the NYT.
The New York Times is the source of daily news for many Americans, particularly the college-educated and the affluent. It owes the nation more than reporting on Trump as if he’s a credible president. It’s not a question of there being two sides to the story; it’s a question of fact vs. propaganda, derangement and lies.
Describing Trump with tragic heroic figure adjectives is a blight on the credibility of the New York Times.. It is also a betrayal of journalistic standards that are vitally needed in these perilous times when a man is in the White House who could never meet The New York Times employee code of conduct, and if ever hired for an administrative position would be fired within minutes. That he would be summarily fired from just about any job in the private sector, but is generally treated as credible by the NYT, is not without its irony.
Yet, somehow The NYT continues to prop up Trump as a credible president, much to the peril of the nation.
BuzzFlash highly recommends following the Twitter feeds of @froomkin, @EricBoehlert and @jayrosen_nyu and @soledadobrien for up to date tweets about press accountability, including The New York Times. Dan Froomkin also has an excellent journalism critique website, Press Watch, and Jay Rosen has an informative media watch blog at Press Think.
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