Real News Now

Margaret Sullivan and Jill Abramson present starkly different portraits in journalism today in the Washington Post.

In "Trump doesn't believe his own damaging rants about 'fake news", Sullivan correctly reports, with compelling evidence - it's in the title, and worth repeating:

:Trump doesn't believe his own damaging rants about 'fake news".

Surprise, surprise.

That fact is obvious, but editorial standards at WaPo, like NYT, require that reasonable conclusions derived from facts appear as Opinion, in this case, the "Style: Perspective" column. How does Trump get away with it? People like Jill Abramson help him. As Sullivan points out:

"Former New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson drew right-wing plaudits recently when she referred to her former paper’s coverage of the president — as well as The Washington Post’s — as “unmistakably anti-Trump.” (The author of a new book on the press, “Merchants of Truth,” Abramson also praised much of the reporting at both papers.)"

When journalists who tout themselves as objective bend over backwards to treat "both sides" equally, at all times and in all circumstances, one side may realize the vulnerability created - that they can lie, cheat, and steal in plain sight. All they need to do is cry out "fake news", which he said/she said journalistic practice - the companion to 'both sides" -  turns into a meaningless echo chamber of charges and counter charges that easily drowns out meaning.

Abramson's inability to take a stand - on reality, not political preference - is evident in her own WaPo piece today:
"Will the media ever figure out how to report on Trump?"
If editors are all like Abramson, the answer is "No". Fortunately, they are not.

Abramson leads off:
"The news media’s collective shock that Donald Trump won in 2016 was evidence of how out of touch most reporters were with the less affluent, less educated, rural parts of the country, where white voter rage galvanized into votes that made him the 45th president. In the days after the election, there was anguished self-examination in many newsrooms and vows to cover the parts of the United States that had been mistakenly overlooked."

These statements are simply false. If polls had predicted a 50%/50% probability of Trump/Clinton victory, there would not have been the same shock. And Abramson conveniently ignores a series of events - the Clinton email releases, the Comey memo, and other factors. For example, many suburban Republican-leaning voters were convinced - mostly by the even-handed coverage of Trump by responsible news orgs like the New York Times in particular, that both candidates were equally terrible and that, as the Times so clearly put it - "Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia."

 These factors had an impact in the final weeks of the campaigns.

But Abramson is conflating the issue of how and why Trump won with the issue of how news organizations need to report on politics so that readers understand best what exactly is going on. To Margaret Sullivan, who previously worked as the Public Editor at the Times when they still had that role, news orgs need to recognize Trump's games  for what they are and report accordingly. As Sullivan says, "The fact that the Trump coverage comes off as negative doesn’t make it “hostile” and doesn’t make it “anti-Trump.'"

But to Jill Abramson,
"One way out of the reactive cycle is to report the story from the places where the pro-Trump and Trump-curious live, to cover the facts and truths of their lives. The Caro approach offers a way forward for news organizations to find contributors from, or place correspondents in, the communities that support the president, to soak up the sense and sensibility of under-covered America. That way, we mix with the other tribe. The 2020 campaign, already upon us, offers a great opportunity to fulfill the pledge we made after the last election."

What Abramson is saying - unbeknownst to her apparently - is that support for Trump is so incomprehensible - that we need to go to places that have large majority Trump voters to understand how this is possible. These people must be so so angry - "white voter rage".  This is a case of deciding what the story must be and seeking it out until you find some facts to support it. The NYT and other news orgs took it upon themselves to nail down the story they had already told themselves by going on this mission many times after the 2016 election. These white people must be so angry. It must be the economy. All of this is the noble savage take. It can't be white racism or white resentment or white supremacsim. In many cases, what these journalists found was Republican Party operatives willing to masquerade as angry independent voters.

And note that last line. "That way we mix with the other tribe." There it is. The former executive editor of the NYT saying that she was not able to report true stories because she and her tribe did not mix with the "other tribe." Wow. The other "side". There is not truth based on facts, only stories two "sides" believe to be true based on their own "facts". Maybe Kellyanne Conway could be executive editor of the New York Times. Instead of traveling all that way to the country, why not bring the other "tribe" in-house right at the top?