By July 17, 2015, the Huffington Post had seen enough of Donald Trump’s campaign. Their editorial director Danny Shea and their Washington Bureau Chief Ryan Grim published a remarkable announcement that read:
“After watching and listening to Donald Trump since he announced his candidacy for president, we have decided we won’t report on Trump’s campaign as part of The Huffington Post’s political coverage. Instead, we will cover his campaign as part of our Entertainment section. Our reason is simple: Trump’s campaign is a sideshow. We won’t take the bait. If you are interested in what The Donald has to say, you’ll find it next to our stories on the Kardashians and The Bachelorette.”
In retrospect, it was one of the more interesting and hard to judge journalistic calls of this political season. It’s certainly easy to mock their lack of prescience, since the “sideshow” is now the presumptive Republican Party nominee and he’s polling competitively in the popular vote. They clearly did not sense that our present reality was even a remote possibility, and I called them out for it at the time:
I guess the Huffington Post can’t quite believe that America is real.
Sure, I can understand the sentiment and the rationale. It’s wrong, though. Donald Trump is currently polling at or near the very top of the seventy billion Republican candidates who are running for the presidency. The media have no right to just assume this is all a big joke that doesn’t need to be taken at all seriously.
It should be taken as seriously as a heart attack. And not because I am projecting that Trump will be the eventual GOP nominee. I can guess at that, and of course I have some serious doubts about his staying power, but this is a serious matter in any case. Why is Trump doing so well, and what does that say about the right-wing of our country in this moment of time?
That’s the biggest political story in the campaign right now and it deserves to be front and center, not carried in the entertainment section.
For me, nothing has changed. I still understand the sentiment and the rationale for Huffington Post’s decision to treat Trump’s campaign as beneath contempt and unworthy of consideration. And I still think that they made the wrong call back in July 2015.
Now I see that they’re running a disclaimer or “Editor’s Note” on their political coverage. So, if you look at Sam Stein’s latest piece on Trump, you’ll see find this at the end:
Editor’s note: Donald Trump regularly incites political violence, and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist, and birther, who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims — 1.6 billion members of an entire religion — from entering the U.S.
The Sam Stein piece does appear in the Huffpost Politics section, which is no surprise since the editors long ago had to back down on their editorial stance against treating Trump as a real candidate. But the content of the piece vindicates the moral aspiration of their original stance:
This editorial disclaimer is a lot different than the one they announced last July. It carries no suggestion that Trump’s campaign is a “sideshow” that doesn’t deserve to be covered in their political section. But the moral condemnation and contempt is still there and is now even stronger.
With such a disclaimer, there’s no way to pretend that their coverage of Trump is even-handed. The entire idea that they should aspire to even-handedness is openly and proudly rejected.
And, this is a kind of challenge to other media outlets. It’s saying that Donald Trump’s campaign is so objectionable that it’s morally wrong to be neutral.
It’s laudable, but it should also be controversial. After all, we can all make moral cases against any presidential candidate. For the anti-choicers, the Democrats support of reproductive freedom is morally unacceptable. For many people, the Bush administration’s first term in office, including their reckless decision to invade Iraq with no plan for its governance or reconstruction was criminally irresponsible and immoral. It’s not so easy to decide where to draw the line from a journalistic point of view. Is it like defining pornography as something you know when you see it?
What would happen if every major news outlet, in print and on television, prefaced all their presidential coverage with a reminder that Trump is a racist, misogynistic, religious bigot, and an inciter of violence who routinely dabbles in idiotic conspiracy theories?
Would that be an improvement? Would that necessitate another disclaimer that Hillary Clinton supports abortion rights, voted for a resolution authorizing force in Iraq, and failed to follow protocol with her email while serving as Secretary of State?
I can see how this kind of moral stand could snowball into something ridiculous where media outlets first attempt to list their moral objections to all the news they’re attempting to report and then wind up listing all the moral objections anyone might have to the candidates and parties they’re covering.
There’s something nice about putting your standards and bias right out front where people can see it, but that’s not how straight political coverage is typically done.
The candidacy of Donald Trump is presenting a lot of challenges to our political system. When people look back at this campaign in the future, they’ll probably view the Huffington Post’s moral opposition to Trump with a lot of favor, but whether that’s true of their journalistic judgment and the precedent they set is less certain.
They would be telling the plain truth for once.
wouldn’t it be refreshing to find out?
“For many people, the Bush administration’s… reckless decision to invade Iraq with no plan for its governance or reconstruction was criminally irresponsible and immoral.”
“For many people, Hillary Clinton’s… reckless decision to invade Libya with no plan for its governance or reconstruction was criminally irresponsible and immoral.”
See what I did there?
That’s odd, but I don’t remember a US invasion of Libya.
yeah, I see that you trolled a thread about media.
Just encouraging you to put your standards and bias right out front where people can see it.
No, you’re not.
I wrote piece after piece after piece objecting to the decision to intervene in Libya, and I’ve been openly and severely critical of Clinton’s role in that fiasco.
You’re just using any excuse you can find to turn all my threads into anti-Clinton threads.
It’s transparent and inconsistent with the culture of this place, plus it’s inconsiderate and obnoxious.
Two simple questions:
If you don’t answer the same to both questions, “severely critical” seems to be a luxury reserved for the war criminals of your own party.
Oh, so now you want to transition from being right but obnoxious into being wrong and obnoxious. Congratulations.
The action in Libya was authorized by the United Nations and legal under international law. Clinton had an advisory role in the decision to intervene, but not the ultimate authority. The problem that the UN was seeking to address was real, unlike Saddam’s WMD programs. And the intent of the intervention was humanitarian rather than vengeance and “creative destruction.”
Calling it an “invasion” of Libya is hardly clarifying, especially when comparing it to what was done in Iraq.
Evoking Nuremberg for the architects of the Libya policy is the worst kind of hyperbole.
I predicted that the outcome wouldn’t be a humanitarian improvement, but my objections were more about not wanting to take responsibility for a preexisting humanitarian catastrophe rather than in actually causing one. It wasn’t Obama’s fault that Libya is ungovernable and overrun with thugs and religious maniacs. That’s partly the result of Gaddafi’s misrule over decades and partly just the nature of the place. Unlike in Iraq, it’s a real stretch to even say that the U.S. bears any responsibility for creating the Libya that existed in 2011.
In any case, the blame for modern day Libya is so widespread that you can’t credibly start trying to prosecute American policymakers for it.
Furthering on what Booman said;
The UN was involved trying to resolve the Civil War between Qaddafi, in UN resolution 1970 and UN resolution 1973.
The first passed the UN security council unanimously, meaning both China and Russia were on board.
The second passed 10-0
Military actions resulted from this resolution;
Last I checked Hillary Clinton had no control at all over French or Italian military forces.
Neither did she have operational control of the US or British forces.
The US was Leon Panetta calling the shots at defense based on orders from the commander in chief, Barack Obama, at this time.
Not something in the Secretary of States control.
She might have made a very rude ill-advised statement that gets your goat, however she did not have the control over the forces that actually did the fighting.
In your ranting you are claiming she forced President Obama to give orders to the Secretary of Defense, and GEN Carter Ham, U.S. Africa Command Commander.
BTW you ignore the French, British, Canadian and NATO operations during this time.
I happened to be on a six-month assignment in England in 2001. About 2 months into that period, Tony Blair called an election, so I saw the way a British political campaign works. Five weeks long, as I recall. The newspapers were very openly partisan. The Guardian of course was pro-Labour, while the tabloids were mostly pro-Conservative. There was a pretty thorough mixing of news and editorial opinion. Thing is, there was never a question about whether there was a slant to the stories!
US newspapers used to be similar, of course, and a handful still are, but the idea of separating news from opinion has become a quasi-religious dogma. And I think we know where that leads: we wind up with newspapers (and other media) reporting in a completely bland way on Trump’s craziness, his racist statements, and so on, commonly “balanced” by some false equivalency about some other candidate (presently, Hillary Clinton). Is this actually an improvement?
Yes, you got to the heart of the matter and asked the right question at the end.
As I said, the HuffPo Politics decision making should be controversial, but that doesn’t mean that’s it wrong.
I’m opening the subject for debate.
In response to a report that the Wall St. Journal staff was told to be fair to Trump, someone over at New York Magazine wrote:
“He’s a demagogue who tells lies so obvious, so demonstrably false, they don’t merely insult the intelligence of his audience but the concept of empirical reality itself…”
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/05/wsj-staff-told-to-be-fair-to-lying-demagogue.html
Let’s say this guy is correct about Trump. How do you pretend to take him seriously when you believe this?
I think we’re past the point where there is such a thing as “straight political coverage”. I no longer think of people who comment about political campaigns as journalists. They have become something else. I don’t have a word to describe it right now… it’s somewhere between propagandist, activist, advocate, lobbyist, and cynical provocateur with emphasis on the last one.
analyst” to describe what they tell themselves they’re doing. Not sure it fills the need for the word you were searching for, though.
It seems to me some lies and statements cannot be allowed to stand unchallenged. Silence and inaction can lead to very bad outcomes. Loudmouths and bullies do not deserve our respect. We must each decide where the line is and call it as we see it. Heavens knows Faux News, Rush,The Donald and the right wing Wurlitzer tell us what they think, right or wrong, and ignoring them could one day result in losing things dear to us. Huff Post may have to back out of their previous position but that is only a measure of the evil they identified. The fight goes on.
Surprise, Surprise. Trump’s Been Lying About His Opposition To Cutting Social Security
By Heather
It should come as a shock to no one that Trump’s been saying one thing to his supporters on the campaign trail, while telling the Zombie-Eyed Granny-Starver from Wisconsin something else in private.
News reporting is always biased. We should be learning that in high school. I am reminded of how I was taught to be skeptical about advertising: 3 out of 4 doctors recommend… It’s the same idea. One has to learn to challenge the claim.
News is biased because someone chooses what is newsworthy, and in what order it should be reported. It can be biased by defining the starting point of a story. Is it he said/she said. Or she said/he said. Same as to a marriage counselor.
A fault lies in the ability of the populace to see where the bias lies, to factor that into their analysis. Most people don’t bother to give it that much thought and just repeat what they’ve heard (from the news, from friends, etc.) that confirms their own biases.
So Huffpost just falls into that same dilemma. Those who want to believe that Trump is just “entertainment” will continue to discount him. Others will think HuffPost is just biased against him and will discount it.
There is no news outlet who is immune from this, including the NY Times, which is why it’s so easy to criticize the media and get away with it. It’s always true.
Pretty much exactly what I was gonna write. We have this cultural notion that news should be “objective.” But there’s no such thing as objectivity so, at best, we wind up with a thin veneer of supposed-objectivity covering over an underlying set of usually-unexamined assumptions.
My preference would be for news outlets to simply own (and not apologize for) their biases. In other words, Fox News would be fine so long as other media sources weren’t scared of their own shadow around being accused of bias. Just tell your version of the truth and leave it at that. I guess another way of saying this is that our mainstream media would be well served if it became more like the blogosphere.
Any time a media outlet claims that something is true, as opposed to simply reporting on a truth claim, it’s a victory. Even if they’re wrong.
I found myself balking . . . big time . . . at this framing within an otherwise worthwhile post:
Balking because that seems to imply that the Both-Siderist, False Equivalence, He-Said/She-Said current practices of the Corporate Media that HuffPo rejected are “even-handed” and “neutral”, when in fact they are just the opposite. By “reporting” lies, other clear falsehoods, Science- and Reality-Denial, serial self-contradiction, etc., etc., with credulity equal to that given to facts, Reality, plausible claims, etc., the Corporate Media are not being “even-handed” or “neutral”, they’re only engaging in a transparent pretense of doing so. They’re in fact slipping one hand under the lies, Reality-Denial, etc., and giving them a tremendous boost by falsely treating them as equally credible to Reality. Which does major harm by allowing the ignorant, gullible, and/or biased to feel/claim affirmation of their ignorance, delusions, and/or biases (i.e., the “even-the-liberal-NYT . . . ” effect).
I’m generally no great fan of HuffPo*, but what they’re at least attempting here with that “Editor’s note” (“disclaimer” doesn’t seem quite right to me, either), complete with linked documentation, is a good and needed thing, imo. Essentially, they’ve rejected the standard Corporate Media practice of just pretending, falsely to be “even-handed” and “neutral” by actually being even-handed/neutral in accurately identifying lies as lies, bigotry as bigotry, etc., at least wrt Trump. (This should not be taken as blanket endorsement of how HuffPo applies this in practice over time, just of the claim and attempt to do so in this instance.)
*(which I tend to think of as The ClickBait Post, though that model is now so rampant it may have become unfair to continue singling out HuffPo for it)
Somewhere recently I saw an example (rare, perhaps unique) of what I think was referred to by whoever linked it as “in-line fact-checking”, where facts analogous to those in the HuffPo Editor’s note weren’t buried in a note at the end, but inserted right into the article immediately following the offending claim. Wouldn’t it be great if that became standard practice? Na ga ha pen in currently prostituted state of the Corporate Media, though, I’ll wager.
All I could think about while reading this is: “One man’s ceiling is another man’s floor.”
train of thought, but
Huffpost has been running that disclaimer since the beginning of February.
http://www.businessinsider.com/huffington-post-donald-trump-racist-note-2016-1