If the coronavirus pandemic becomes for Donald Trump what Typhoon Katrina was for George W. Bush, we may come to look back at last Friday’s interview as Trump’s “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job” moment. The president’s remarks to reporters at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention head office in Atlanta were, as my associate Adam Rogers has actually masterfully described, filled with strange and unsafe fallacies One stood out above the rest: Trump’s flatly false claim that “ any person that wants a test can get a test” The president was either lying about or oblivious of the main truth of the US government’s botched action to the illness. That alone might have been front-page news: “Trump Incorrectly Declares ‘Any Person That Wants’ Can Get a Coronavirus Test.”
Yet here’s how the New York Times, our paper of record, at first covered the claim: it didn’t. The paper’s report on Trump’s interview didn’t even point out the tests comment at first; later, a reference was included, without explaining that the statement was false. Rather, the short article, by a White Home press reporter, made Trump sound downright governmental, focusing on his effort to project calm. In print, it ran with the heading “‘ It Will End’: Trump Urges Nation to Prevent Panicking.”
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A coronavirus pandemic would evaluate the strength of a variety of organizations: health centers, transit systems, worldwide supply chains. We can add the mainstream media to that list. Objective news reporting is constructed on two bedrock principles: report the fact, and don’t choose sides. Trump’s unprecedented dedication to stating what is clearly untrue makes it tough to honor both concepts simultaneously. This puts news organizations into a dreadful bind, especially when many conservatives– and the president himself– are prepared to attack at even the slightest whiff of liberal predisposition. That has actually constantly been true, however the stakes are suddenly greater. The coronavirus reaction is the first time Trump has actually been personally in charge of handling a crisis that is most likely to trigger a great deal of American deaths. There’s no other way around the truth that this is a political story in addition to a public health one. If the traditional press is ever going to determine how to offer accountable reporting on Trump’s job performance, now’s the time.
The first risk to avoid is stenography: uncritically communicating what the president stated without giving readers the pertinent context. As the media blogger Dan Froomkin composed over the weekend, an outright example came after Trump blamed the shortage of tests on a rule embraced by Barack Obama administration that Trump has considering that reversed. You’ll be shocked to find out that there was no such guideline. That didn’t stop he
