About that Trump Whisperer

On this lazy Sunday in August, the NYT headline to a straight Politics news piece from Maggie Haberman reads "Trump Tweets Reflect Fixation on Women's Appearances".

source:abcnews.go.com

Throughout the Trump term in office, Haberman has amassed a reputation in some quarters as an access journalist who softens Trump's image along with humanizing treatment of Ivanka and Jared. This approach to news reporting adds fuel to the standard NYT editorial policy on political reporting that nearly always requires "balanced" treatment. The political reporter must report straight facts without interpretation and avoid context because adding useful context changes news reporting to opinion that must appear in the Opinion section. Or if an "in-between" approach is called for, label it clearly "News Analysis". "News Analysis" means we added context, but we were extra careful to be as objective as possible where "objectivity" is defined to mean - assemble facts that seem to go together, but always assume good faith on the part of polticians. That approach is, of course, an enabler of politicians who do act in bad faith.

We have called on the Times to recognize and report patterns of behavior, particularly Trump's patterns, as an important fact and not to take Trump's tweets or statements at face value as statements of his beliefs when a more rational interpretation is that Trump says whatever works most to his advantage in an environment of news reporting that fails to recognize his patterns of behavior for what they represent. Add to this the NYT forced balance approach to political journalism that requires looking for comparisons with presidents of the opposing party (Obama and Clinton).

So it is a bit surprising, given the Times "fair and balanced" standards,  that Trump's attacks on the physical appearance of women, which have gone on so long, are finally reported by the NYT in a straight news piece without seeking out behavior by Obama and Clinton for comparison.

OK, so that is a pattern of behavior, but what does it mean? He is fixated on the physical appearance of women. OK, but he has a lot of deep personal flaws, but of greater significance, if we focus on personal qualities, Trump seems to have an abundance of flaws of both character and personality and the president does not appear to have any positive human characteristics. The obvious conclusion to this piece is that Trump, the POTUS, is an unbelievably petty man - someone who none of us would want to know or deal with in our personal lives or in business. Yet that obvious conclusion would render this piece "opinion", so no go.

Without a conclusion from the author, the Haberman report drops off a cliff at the end.

And several typical NYT reporting flaws remain. Why does every article about Trump's many insults have to close with "and he never apologized"? What is that supposed to mean? Of course he never apologized. He never apologizes. And you apologize if you are a person who makes a mistake and hurt someone accidentally. If you insult people intentionally all the time, then an apology is meaningless. The Times' habit of closing with "and he never apologizes", lame as it is, does matter because it demonstrates just how clueless the NYT is in their coverage of Trump, even at this late date. If the Times had the courage to convey reality about Trump in their reporting, they would not fall back on the "fair and balanced" "He never apologized" as if that statement has meaning.

The Times insists on describing the Christopher Steele series of documents as "a dossier that made salacious claims about Mr. Trump." Never mind that the document represented fairly raw intelligence - so it is not really a dossier, so the document does not make "claims". Of greatest significance, the NYT news articles always link "Steele dossier" with "salacious" even though the least important item mentioned in the document is the possible existence of the pee tape. Which suggests that if the Times wants to talk about "fixations" and Trump, they may want to take a look at their own fixation on pee tape.