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… Read more »
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 Russia and China – which often oppose the use of force against a sovereign country as they believe it sets a dangerous precedent – abstained rather than using their power of veto as permanent members. Military actions resulted from this resolution; On 19 March, nineteen French Air Force aircraft entered Libyan airspace to begin reconnaissance… Read more »
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… Read more »
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… Read more »
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.… Read more »
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. It seems someone who doesn’t care for Trump was leaking like a sieve following his meeting earlier this month with House Speaker Paul Ryan: Trump Supports Cutting Social Security From A `Moral Standpoint:’ Report: Donald Trump supposedly told House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) he supports cutting Social Security but will not admit it… Read more »
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… Read more »
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… Read more »
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: 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. 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”… Read more »
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