Cleveland Plain Dealer Editor Shows How To Cover Trump: Tell The Truth
For the last eight years or so, one thing has become quite clear: the media has been effectively unable to deal with Donald Trump and Trumpism. He is unique to our political system. He has no shame, is willing to lie without concern, convince himself that his lies are true, and will stop at nothing to win, including fomenting violence and direct attempts to overturn an election.
Much of this was obvious from even when he ran in 2016, and the media had no idea how to deal with it. They assumed a business as usual" stance. Journalism professor Jay Rosen has long called it out as the view from nowhere" reporting. That's when journalists report on what politicians are saying, not whether or not what they're saying is true.
It demonstrates itself worst of all in the form of false equivalencies, which the modern GOP has embraced with gusto.
No matter what the evidence of what Donald Trump has actually done, Republicans will come up with a fake story of what they pretend are Democrats doing the same thing. Donald Trump fought the certification of the vote in 2020? Well, didn't supporters of Hillary do the same thing in 2016? (No, the answer is no. A few random people talked about, and there was basically zero effort to follow through). Donald Trump was caught enriching himself, his family, and his businesses during his presidency with corrupt business deals? The GOP claims that Biden did the same with Hunter Biden and China. Except that didn't happen, and the GOP's main witness," a guy with ties to Russian intelligence, was arrested for making it all up.
The view from nowhere" allows reporters to report on what each side says" not what is the actual truth. It gives a false equivalence to wildly outrageous and nonsense claims, with claims that you might not always agree with, but are at least within the spectrum of normal democratic dialogue.
There are many reasons to not like Joe Biden's policies. I think he's wrong on almost everything I write about. His tech policy positions are mostly ludicrous. He strongly supports KOSA, a bill that will do real harm to kids online. His understanding of how the First Amendment works is mixed up. And going back to his time in the Senate and as VP, he was always a Hollywood-supporting copyright maximalist.
But, Donald Trump would be just as bad, if not worse, on all of those things, and he wants to overthrow US democracy and install himself as a dictator with unchecked power, and to punish anyone who disagrees with him. He wants to break the law with impunity, throw away basic democratic norms, and treat large segments of the population as less than human.
And all that kinda matters.
Chris Quinn, the editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, has published a Letter from the Editor that tries to lay this out to readers of that paper, with the clear and absolutely accurate title: Our Trump reporting upsets some readers, but there aren't two sides to facts. In it, Quinn points out that he had trouble writing the piece because he knows it's going to upset fans of Donald Trump. But, it has to be called out:
This is a tough column to write, because I don't want to demean or insult those who write me in good faith. I've started it a half dozen times since November but turned to other topics each time because this needle hard to thread. No matter how I present it, I'll offend some thoughtful, decent people.
The north star here is truth. We tell the truth, even when it offends some of the people who pay us for information.
The truth is that Donald Trump undermined faith in our elections in his false bid to retain the presidency. He sparked an insurrection intended to overthrow our government and keep himself in power. No president in our history has done worse.
This is not subjective. We all saw it. Plenty of leaders today try to convince the masses we did not see what we saw, but our eyes don't deceive. (If leaders began a yearslong campaign today to convince us that the Baltimore bridge did not collapse Tuesday morning, would you ever believe them?) Trust your eyes. Trump on Jan. 6 launched the most serious threat to our system of government since the Civil War. You know that. You saw it.
The facts involving Trump are crystal clear, and as news people, we cannot pretend otherwise, as unpopular as that might be with a segment of our readers. There aren't two sides to facts. People who say the earth is flat don't get space on our platforms. If that offends them, so be it.
There's much more in the letter, but that's the crux of it. It's not partisan to point this out. It's being factual. And, of course, some Trump supporters will whine about Trump Derangement Syndrome," but the only Trump Derangement Syndrome" is the response from some of his fans to deny the reality of what they know has happened.
There is no view from nowhere. There is no both sides" to Quinn's piece. There is simply we need to tell the truth," even if that upsets some people.
And that's exactly the way to cover Trump. Journalists and editors need to call out the actual risks here. They need to call out the actual crimes he is accused of and how they are not, in anyway, equivalent to what Biden has done. They need to end the view from nowhere" where reporters just write what politicians say, rather than whether or not it's actually true.
And they need to put it all in context. One of the reasons why Trump gets away with all this is because he does it so publicly and so relentlessly that it's impossible to put it into context. It's impossible to see the big picture for what it is: his (and his fans') desire for an authoritarian strongman state, where they get to punish their perceived enemies.
That's not how democracy works. And, it behooves the media to finally start calling out Trump for what he is. Kudos to Quinn and the Cleveland Plain Dealer for doing so.
Hopefully, others in the media will follow. Let truth be the north star.