The Media Still Can’t Figure Out That Trump Says Things That Aren’t True

from the look-out-the-window dept

Debates on how the media should be covering what Donald Trump says have been going on for over a decade now. A few months ago, we wrote about the regularity with which the mainstream media “sanewashes” his more ridiculous statements, taking the incoherent ramblings of a madman and pretending to translate them into actual policy goals. In those cases, the media downplays the things he says, while playing up what they pretend he wanted to say.

But there’s another version of this same problem. The mainstream media also loves to take some random statement he makes, that everyone knows he’s lying (or at least misleading) about, and pretends that he means it earnestly and that it should be reported on as fact.

Both of these failures stem from the same underlying instinct: a desperate need to make Trump fit within conventional political norms. Whether that means cleaning up his incomprehensible gibberish to sound like real policy, or treating his obvious lies as sincere declarations, the effect is identical. The media keeps trying to avoid reporting on just how far outside conventional—and sane—bounds Trump is in how he runs this government.

Margaret Sullivan, who has been one of the sharpest media critics around, has a piece in her newsletter that lays out this side of the problem with depressing clarity:

Are these statements worth reporting? Certainly. Do they require extra dollops of skepticism and context? Even more certainly. But too often, they don’t get that treatment.

The specific examples she highlights are instructive.

On Sunday, as if on cue, federal agents were out in two blue cities in New Jersey, detaining people on their way to work.

“Right now, (ICE) is coming for migrants,” one frightened Hoboken resident, Ernest Boyd, told CBS News. “It’s going to come for all of us.” Jersey City was another target — yes, the same weekend that Trump suggested to reporters on Air Force One that a softer approach was in the offing.

Or even pay attention to what’s happening in Minneapolis. Just as we predicted, despite headlines misleadingly reporting that there was a “new approach” there, we’re still seeing stories every day of ICE and CBP harassing people at schools and dragging away neighbors.

Or take the Greenland situation.

How about his supposed “deal” over Greenland, which his administration was threatening to acquire by “unstoppable force” if necessary? At the World Economic Forum in Davos, he made some remarks about how he could do just that, but wouldn’t do it right now, after all.

The headlines and push alerts, as usual, played it just as he would have liked: “Trump said the U.S. won’t use force to take Greenland” was a typical one from the Wall Street Journal.

“If you only read those headlines,” wrote Parker Molloy on her Substack newsletter, The Present Age, “you’d think the president made some kind of conciliatory gesture.” But, she added, that’s not the core of what happened in that room: Rather, Trump “reminded everyone of his capacity for violence, made clear that resistance would be futile and then offered them a chance to surrender peacefully,” she wrote. His saying he wouldn’t use force “is misdirection, and the coverage fell for it.”

Then there was all kinds of bluster — and coverage — about a supposed “framework for a deal” over Greenland that was again reported as serious breaking news.

“Trump announces ‘framework’ for a future deal on Greenland, drops NATO tariff threat,” was the ABC News take, a typical one.

Sullivan points out the exception that proves the general rule: CNN’s Aaron Blake was one of the few who provided the context that should have been in every headline: “Trump’s Greenland framework sounds a lot like an already existing 1951 deal.” That’s the kind of journalism that actually informs readers.

But for most of the mainstream media, the old pattern holds: Trump threatens something outrageous. Then he backs off slightly from the outrageous thing. The media reports the backing-off as if it’s the story, rather than the fact that the outrageous threat was made in the first place. It’s like praising someone for only punching you once instead of twice.

Part of this is about the fundamental architecture of how news gets consumed:

As always, headlines and news alerts are important. All the nuance in the world in the 12th paragraph doesn’t help much if the headline creates a completely different impression.

This is the core problem. Most people don’t read past the headline. Push alerts are consumed in seconds. The sophisticated context that journalists might include deep in the story is irrelevant if the headline and lede have already painted a misleading picture.

Sullivan offers some practical suggestions that really shouldn’t be revolutionary but apparently are:

First, use words that convey skepticism, not credulity. Instead of a headline that says “Trump orders ICE to ease up…”, try this: “Trump claims a new approach, even as ICE continues arrests.”

Crazy idea: maybe don’t write headlines that treat Trump’s words as equivalent to reality when a decade of evidence suggests they’re often the opposite.

And, to some extent, you can understand why the media keeps doing this. For decades now, the GOP has been “working the refs,” insisting that they got unfair treatment. That the “liberal media” covered them in unfair ways. This was never particularly accurate. The mainstream media has always had a corporatist-bent rather than one that focused on any political ideology.

But, the end result of all that yelling and screaming about “liberal media bias” means that they go out of their way to avoid accurate reporting on just how ridiculous President Trump is. Sometimes that means taking his word salad pronouncements and hopelessly trying to map them to the kinds of things any normal political leader might say. And sometimes, it means taking the untrue things he says as truth, just to pretend there’s some level of normalcy.

The media’s learned helplessness on this issue is its own kind of institutional failure. These are smart people at major news organizations. They have editors. They have fact-checkers. They have a decade of experience covering this specific individual. And still, the default mode is to treat his utterances as newsworthy declarations rather than what they often are: strategic noise designed to generate exactly the coverage it gets.

The press isn’t supposed to be stenographers. They’re supposed to help people understand what’s actually happening. And what’s actually happening is that Trump keeps saying things and the press keeps trying to mold those things from where they really are—way outside political, cultural, reality norms—and presents them in a manner that downplays the reality, cleans up the crazy, and just generally misleads the public.

As the old journalism saw says, if someone says it’s raining, and someone else says it isn’t, a reporter’s job is not to report on what they said, but to look out the damn window and report on what’s actually happening.

It’s raining. It’s been raining for a decade. Now would be as good a time as any for reporters to look out the damn window and report on what’s actually happening.

Filed Under: donald trump, journalism, lies, mainstream media, media, sanewashing