Tag Archives: Margaret Sullivan

Will ABC, Muir and Davis Stop the “Sane-Washing” of Donald Trump?

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In the last debate, barely 10 weeks ago, Joe Biden’s performance was so bad it was the only talking point in the smoking aftermath. But … had he performed less badly there would have been a larger, more vigorous conversation about the performance of CNN’s moderators, Jake Tapper and Dana Bash.

Amid the Biden wreckage Tapper and Bash were generally credited for running a smooth, straight forward, professional ship. They successfully deflected (muted) complaints that they did nothing to fact check Trump’s usual blizzard of lies and absurd exaggerations. “Not our job,” was basically their response.

Leading up to this evening’s Harris-Trump face-off, the issue of where smoothly professional, above the fray, just-asking-the-questions-here, let-the-viewers-decide journalism separates from acknowledging the reality everyone fully understands is a hotter, more salient topic than it was 10 weeks ago. Trump has gotten that much more incoherent and vulgar. Namely, to re-state the obvious, we aren’t tuning in to Dwight Eisenhower going face-to-face with Adlai Stevenson. (They never debated FWIW.)

One of the candidates this evening has built an astonishing cult of personality by violating every tradition and protocol of normal politics. This obvious fact (again) powerfully suggests that the smooth, Big J journalism embodied tonight by ABC’s David Muir and Linsey Davis needs to adjust to a significantly, substantially different fact of life. A reality that bears little resemblance to the polite and orderly decorum of their grandparents, much as they and we might wish otherwise.

Within the (likely shrinking) circles of people who care about sustaining a vibrant press there has been a flurry of debate recently over mainstream journalism’s “sane-washing” of Donald Trump. The complaint ties directly to the unambiguous fact that after a decade of wrestling with the man’s act professional fact gatherers still have not figured out a way to respond to someone leading a revolution of 60-70 million people despite and/or because he has no respect for the truth … as well as unabashed contempt for the profession asking him questions.

Examples of the current debate can be found in: Margaret Sullivan’s post on “sane-washing.” A Michael Tomasky column in The New Republic. Greg Sargent, also in The New Republic. And a substack piece by James Fallows that is generally credited for reigniting this controversy. (HT to Jim Boyd for that one.)

The gist of it all is that professional journalists are — for a variety of reasons — reluctant (or is it “trepidatious”?) to describe what they hear Trump say and see him doing. Reluctantly certainly to report in the kind of specific language and vernacular understandable to general reader/viewership. To call a lie a :”lie”, or to describe a comment as “incoherent” or, god forbid, “utter nonsense”, contradicts their training and fundamental ethos.

They have been taught — and hired for their current jobs — with the virtues of propriety and “fairness” firmly in mind … even when “fairness” means distorting the obvious reality to make it appear more proper.

If not outright fear, journalists like Tapper, Bash, Muir and reporters at regional outlets like the Star Tribune and local TV have credible reasons for trepidation. Reporting and fact-checking daily on Trump’s ludicrous lies, blithering incoherence and constant vulgarity risks instantaneous and irrational blowback from Trump’s public. Blowback from his base frequently comes disturbing threats of violence and — more significantly — puts the reporter and paper/TV station in the position of devoting dozens of hours and human resources defending itself from attacks. Attacks on their reputation that increase the likelihood of financial consequences in terms of lowered ratings, fewer subscriptions and impact on shareholder value.

The fact Trump understands the mainstream media’s self-imposed restraints on its coverage of him hardly makes the situation better. He knows they’ve tied themselves in knots in order to preserve their status of “fairness” and “balance.”

What I’ll be looking for from Muir and Davis tonight are questions to Trump (in particular) that focus on his most consequential lies and bar stool bombast.

For example:

Will they ask him, first if not early in the evening, what basis he has for still claiming the 2020 election was “rigged” or “stolen”? And will they respond by noting that 63 courts and his own election guru said otherwise?

Will they ask him if he will accept the results of this election … even if he loses?

Will they ask him how exactly he intends to deport 10-12 million immigrants and what he means when he regularly refers to the process as being “bloody?”

Will they ask him to explain how tariffs, essentially a sales tax paid by American consumers, will improve the financial well-being of middle-class Americans?

Will they ask him why he re-posted an on-line “joke” that Kamala Harris provided sexual favors to advance her career?

And of course, with a nod to journalistic fairness, they should put the same questions to Harris … .

However it goes tonight, the question of how professional journalists, some famous and very well paid, continue to cover a rogue operator like Trump will remain vital to the health of not just their profession, but this “democratic experiment”, as the wonks like to call it.

I fail to see how maintaining the attitude that, “We’re not going to ask the most pertinent and obvious quesation out fear of being criticized”, reinvigorates a floundering profession.

The job of reporting “without fear or favor” comes with risks. It comes with having to tell people things they don’t want to hear, and being called names (and worse) for it. It’s not a business you get in to because you really, really want to be liked.

Is the Star Tribune and Other Traditional Reporters Prepared to Join the “Coalition of Reality?”

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It doesn’t necessarily follow. Just because Republicans and what pass for conservatives today are determined to learn nothing from the Trump era that the rest have to blunder on without changing the way we go about our business. And be “we” I’m referring to anyone who is now, has been or in any way engages in some form of journalism.

But mostly I’m concerned with the traditional, primary sources of news reporting.

Despite admirable-to-superb work from a few national outlets — The Washington Post, The New York Times, ProPublica, The Atlantic, even Vice to some extent — regional and local news organizations, like the Star Tribune here in Minnesota — continue to play the traditional game of “neutrality”, where no act, no behavior is so egregious or outrageous that you ever say so in a “news story.” Instead, as journalism schools have taught since the days of Herbert Hoover, reporters and editors compile facts … and let … you guessed it … the reader decide.

Very few large news organizations employ an ombudsman or a “reader’s editor” any longer, (if they ever did). Someone to answer questions about how and why stories are covered. As the few who have had such jobs now tell, on podcasts and such, it was a perilous undertaking. Not so much for the flack and anger of partisan readers, but for the venom of internal politics, where large egos with serious reputations on the line did not much like someone publishing criticism of their work anywhere, much less the very paper they worked for.

Margaret Sullivan, who was such an editor, at the New York Times and now at The Post, has written about the vital need for journalism to grasp the realities of the 21st century and adapt. She echoes the thinking of the more firebrand NYU professor, Jay Rosen, who long before Trump commandeered a major political party, won election and ran amuck, said that America’s traditional press was incapable of evolution.

Rosen more than Sullivan has no problem describing the mainstream press today as a hidebound creature with a near religious devotion to out-moded conventions. Among those conventions being the deep aversion to betraying any sense of judgment when reporting on political behavior.

Rosen likes the phrase, “the view from nowhere”, to describe the perspective of the typical traditional news story. A story that leaves the impression of a reporter/organization with no stake in the consequences of what they’ve seen and heard. And no larger responsibility to insist on truthfulness as a criteria for publication.

This was the comfortable perspective that continues — after four years of Donald Trump — to struggle with the use of the word “lie.”

Sullivan had a column recently recommending three changes in basic journalistic conventions necessary to keep up with the head-spinning bad faith and shamelessness of Trump and Trump-era Republicans. (Being a traditional animal herself, she of course was careful not to go full-inflammatory and actually call out Republicans by name.)

But she did argue for an evolution in convention to include judgmental-sounding language in garden variety news stories. For example, pointing out — right then and there in the printed story — that what Politician “A” was just quoted saying has been debunked — here and here — and why they’re essentially spouting nonsense. Given that many if not most readers consume The Post (and the Star Tribune) on-line, dead-tree space is not an issue with that sort of evolutionary adjustment.

She wrote this in the context of The Big Lie. Namely that this last election was rigged, and that Joe Biden stole it from Trump. In other sectors of American culture, the response to The Big Lie has been fascinating and encouraging. An impressive number of large corporations are withholding campaign donations to — Republicans — who supported The Big Lie, acknowledging the toxic effect that the lie and whole cavalcade of lies that made Trump possible is, well, bad for business.

I suspect these companies will in short order come creeping back to the influence-buying game. But when they do they should be smart enough to expect some reporter somewhere — perhaps The Post’s David Farenthold — will check their paperwork and tell the world that in the view of AT&T, JPMorgan and Coca-Cola or whoever — the likes of Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz and Matt Gaetz have been punished enough and have learned their lesson.

Rosen and others have also suggested a new acid test for Lie enabling. Any reporter interviewing any politician simply asks, “Did Joe Biden win the 2020 election fair and square?” If the answer is anything other than, “Yes,” the interview is over and said politician gets no space to spew in that reporter’s publication.

The rise of Donald Trump required a lot of ennabling in a lot of ways from a lot of different sources. It wasn’t all talk radio blowhards, FoxNews and foaming mouth bloggers. There was the misguided deference to traditional “neutrality” by papers like the Star Tribune. Large rimary news organizations who were reluctant to regularly, routinely, consistently fact check candidate Trump and Trump-like politicians in real time — then and there in their reported stories. (And I give you the long, conventional, “neutral” free-ride Michelle Bachmann got from Minnesota media as Example #1 of such implicit enabling.) That deference to convention played a significant role in sustaining the unwarranted credibility of preposterous, toxic lie-building.

The phrase I like today is the “Coalition of Reality.” Are you in, or out?

Given what four years of Trump has wrought, given The Big Lie, given January 6, given the five dead, including a cop, and given the astonishing number of Americans who continue to believe the tortured fantasy of election fraud, traditional conventions have to evolve. Allowing anyone with a campaign bus or an election certificate to say whatever they want unchallenged and uncorrected is not fair, “neutral” reporting. As we have seen, it is sustaining a toxic fiction, a poisonous unreality.

I don’t know that I’d really ever want to “get back to the days” of Herbert Hoover or Dwight Eisenhower. But the reality of 2021 is a lot more aggressively shameless than those lost eras.

The boys and girls or professional news reporting are going to have learn a lesson or two from what has and is going down.