Tag Archives: Journalism

Only Some Professional Writers Are Professional

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Of course, I’m not one of them, if only because I’m not getting paid. You might see an occasional advertisement on this blog (I never do – they just remind me that you guys might), but not a dime comes my way. In fact, I’m paying WordPress more than seven cents a day just to keep whereofonecanspeak.com reasonably operational. 

But back to my topic: If you can stand it, Fred Kaplan of Slate has an excellent little summary of the email situation: “The Hillary Email Scandal Was Totally Overblown”. The whole thing is here. The “top comment” says “this is the most level-headed piece I’ve read on the email ‘scandal'”.

To quote one little bit, this is Mr. Kaplan writing about Patrick Healy, the New York Times reporter who produced a “news analysis” article in the form of an attack ad that Trump can use if he ever runs out of insults:

And yet, here is New York Times political reporter Patrick Healy, in a front-page news analysis, paraphrasing Comey’s rebuke of the current presumptive Democratic candidate for president: The FBI director, Healy wrote, “basically just called her out for having committed one of the most irresponsible moves in the modern history of the State Department.” I defy anyone to pore through the most scathing passages of Comey’s remarks and find anything that remotely resembles this description.

Wow. I would have thought that Hillary using a private email server couldn’t possibly make the list of irresponsible Secretary of State “moves” that includes things like Colin Powell selling Bush’s invasion of Iraq. But I’m not a professional writer like Patrick Healy.

Fortunately, neither is Fred Kaplan.

We Can Happily Look Forward to More of This

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Here’s part of a brilliant report from MSNBC on Trump’s attempt to explain where the money went:

So where does that leave us? Trump said he’d raised $6 million for veterans, but that wasn’t true. He later claimed he never used the $6 million figure, but that wasn’t true. His campaign insisted Trump had contributed $1 million himself, but that wasn’t true. Trump said he “didn’t want to have credit” for the fundraising efforts, but that wasn’t true. He said he and his team were vetting groups they’d never heard of four months after the fact, but that wasn’t true.

And as of yesterday, all of this, the Republican candidate insisted, is the media’s fault. Indeed, Trump thinks journalists should be “ashamed” of themselves for scrutinizing his claims that turned out to be wrong.

Not to put too fine a point on this, but in a normal year, in a normal party, with a normal candidate, this is the sort of controversy that could end a campaign. Legitimate presidential hopefuls can get away with some dissembling and the occasional whopper, but Trump was caught telling obvious falsehoods about support for veterans’ charities.

If this happened to Hillary Clinton, is there any doubt it would be the #1 issue in the presidential race between now and Election Day? That every pundit in America would use this as Exhibit A in their takes on why Americans just can’t trust the Democrat?

Unfortunately, there’s some truth in that last paragraph, although I think there will be less media criticism of Clinton’s “untrustworthiness” as we head toward November. I mean, even if you want to be “tough” on both sides or you have an ax to grind, how do you criticize Clinton for spilling a glass of milk when Trump makes a habit of firebombing dairies?

Reasons to Smile, Clear Sailing Ahead

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Who wants to read depressing crap every day? Not you! Not me! Hell no!

That’s why I’m planning to devote this blog to good news and encouraging thoughts until after the election.

That means I won’t quote from, comment on or link to disheartening articles like these:

“The Dangerous Acceptance of Donald Trump”, by Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker: It’s excellent:

He’s not Hitler, as his wife recently said? Well, of course he isn’t. But then Hitler wasn’t Hitler—until he was. At each step of the way, the shock was tempered by acceptance. It depended on conservatives pretending he wasn’t so bad, compared with the Communists, while at the same time the militant left decided that their real enemies were the moderate leftists, who were really indistinguishable from the Nazis. The radical progressives decided that there was no difference between the democratic left and the totalitarian right and that an explosion of institutions was exactly the most thrilling thing imaginable.

The American Republic stands threatened by the first overtly anti-democratic leader of a large party in its modern history—an authoritarian with no grasp of history, no impulse control, and no apparent barriers on his will to power. The right thing to do, for everyone who believes in liberal democracy, is to gather around and work to defeat him on Election Day. Instead, we seem to be either engaged in parochial feuding or caught by habits of tribal hatred so ingrained that they have become impossible to escape even at moments of maximum danger….

If Trump came to power, there is a decent chance that the American experiment would be over. This is not a hyperbolic prediction; it is not a hysterical prediction; it is simply a candid reading of what history tells us happens in countries with leaders like Trump. Countries don’t really recover from being taken over by unstable authoritarian nationalists of any political bent, left or right—not by PerĂłns or Castros or Putins or Francos or Lenins or fill in the blanks…. If he can rout the Republican Party in a week by having effectively secured the nomination, ask yourself what Trump could do with the American government if he had a mandate.

Or “Trump Has Taught Me to Fear My Fellow Americans”, by Richard Cohen in The Washington Post. Maybe Mr. Cohen hasn’t been paying close attention in recent years, but now he understands:

Donald Trump has taught me to fear my fellow Americans. I don’t mean the occasional yahoo who turns a Trump rally into a hate fest. I mean the ones who do nothing. Who are silent. Who look the other way. If you had told me a year ago that a hateful brat would be the presidential nominee of a major political party, I would have scoffed….

When I see these Trump supporters on television — the commentators …  — I have to wonder where they would draw the line. The answer seems to be: nowhere. They want to win. They want to beat Hillary Clinton, a calling so imperative that sheer morality must give way. Muslims and Mexicans are merely collateral damage in a war that must be fought. What about blacks or Jews? Not yet.

Maybe the talking heads on TV would draw the line at some mild version of fascism, but would the American people do the same?

And “Trump’s Lies and Authoritarianism Are the Same”, by Jonathan Chait in New York Magazine:

Donald Trump is a wildly promiscuous liar. He also has disturbing authoritarian tendencies. Trump’s many critics have seized upon both traits as his two major disqualifications for the presidency, yet both of them frustratingly defy easy quantification. All politicians lie some, and many of them lie a lot, and most presidents also push the limits of their authority in ways that can frighten their opponents. So what is so uniquely dangerous about Trump? Perhaps the answer is that both of these qualities are, in a sense, the same thing. His contempt for objective truth is the rejection of democratic accountability, an implicit demand that his supporters place undying faith in him. Because the only measure of truth he accepts is what he claims at any given moment, the power his supporters vest in him is unlimited….

Truth and reason are weapons of the powerless against the powerful. There is no external doctrine [Trump] can be measured against, not even conservative dogma, which he embraces or discards at will and with no recognition of having done so. Trump’s version of truth is multiple truths, the only consistent element of which is Trump himself is always, by definition, correct. Trump’s mind is so difficult to grapple with because it is an authoritarian epistemology that lies outside the democratic norms that have shaped all of our collective experiences.

Those are just a few examples of the kind of material I’m going to avoid from now on. After all, our political situation isn’t all bad. Some in the press are waking up to the fact that they can’t cover Trump as if he were a normal candidate. Some Sanders supporters are accepting the fact that Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic nominee (and not because the super-delegates are all corrupt). More stories are appearing about Trump’s nefarious past. The businessman’s campaign is running out of money, while Clinton is sharpening her attack and correctly labeling Trump as a fraud and a con man. On top of all that, we’re only a few days away from the end of the primary election season! What’s there to worry about? Life is good! 

Collected Commentary on the Hot Topic

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The New York Times is America’s leading newspaper. I read it every day. Sometimes I read the comments. Sometimes I write one of my own. Has doing this had any effect on the course of human events? Well, every journey begins with a single step, right? Even if you never reach your destination.

In roughly chronological order:

Re: Hillary Clinton’s Dishonesty

Let’s see. A possibly misleading statement about financial transactions almost 40 years ago. Being involved in firing White House employees who were not protected by civil service rules and served “at the pleasure of the President” 20 years ago. Exercised bad judgment in some cases. Changed her positions in some cases. Perhaps criticized a political opponent unfairly.

You may dislike her intensely, but you haven’t made your case that she is especially dishonest, certainly not especially dishonest compared to many other successful politicians. We will see whether she seriously tries to deliver on her campaign promises when she is President. That’s the kind of honesty that will matter most.

…

The expert you cite is an independent blogger who has self-published two books and specializes in conspiracy theories. A look at his blog suggests he thinks every election we have is rigged. According to his “About Me” page, he’s focused on President Kennedy’s assassination since 2012 and produced a spreadsheet that shows “absolute mathematical proof” of a conspiracy. According to comments he’s left on other sites, he also denies that we know the truth about 9/11.

What his “analysis” has to do with whether Hillary Clinton is more or less honest than other successful politicians escapes me. The most important test of a politician’s honesty is whether they try to deliver on the promises they make. By that standard, I predict President Hillary Clinton will turn out to be more honest than many of her predecessors.

Re: A Conversation with Trump

This is the first Maureen Dowd column I’ve read in years. It shouldn’t have been a surprise that what she’s done here is what so many interviewers do with Trump: ask him a question and then let him have the last word. over and over again. It would be more productive and informative if she and other interviewers pinned him down instead of moving on to the next question.

If that’s too challenging, how about giving Hillary Clinton equal time? Trump says a bunch of crazy stuff. Report that. Hillary meets with some voters. Report that. Trump insults someone. Report that. Hillary makes a boring speech. Report that.

Giving the two presumptive nominees equal time wouldn’t be as entertaining, but it would help give the electorate a more balanced view of the campaign. This is serious business. It’s time for the news media to get serious too.

Re: Two Performers Refused to Appear on a Talk Show When They Learned Trump Would Be on the Same Program

If only more people refused to have anything to do with Trump. Shame on anyone who supports him, treats him with respect or does anything to imply that he is just another candidate for President, rather than, as one rich Republican donor said, “an ignorant, amoral, dishonest and manipulative, misogynistic, philandering, hyper-litigious, isolationist, protectionist blowhard”, i.e. a danger to our country and the world.

Re: Pro-Nazi Tweets from Trump Supporters

One of the important issues Mr. Weisman raises is how news organizations should be dealing with Trump. The First Amendment gives Trump the right to say all kinds of nonsense (either hateful or simply stupid), but it seems wrong for people in “the news business to find and write up both sides of [this] story, with respect and equal time to all opinions”.

I’m not a journalist or a journalism professor but it seems to me that we’re in a situation now that presents a “clear and present danger” to our country and the world. Trump has a right to speak, and since he’s the nominee, we need to know what he says and does, but it seems wrong for anyone, especially reporters, to treat him and some of his supporters with respect, reporting what they say without comment, as if Trump is simply another candidate for President.

Re: The State Department Inspector General’s Report on Hillary Clinton’s Email

Are editorials like this meant to show that the NY Times is treating all the candidates equally? America is hanging on a precipice, facing the real possibility that an incredibly dangerous person will become President, and we get another demand that Clinton utter some magic words about her email that will satisfy the press. How about you ladies and gentlemen come up with a confession for her to sign: “I screwed up. I wanted to insure my emails were private. It was a serious mistake. I should have been more forthcoming about the details. I apologize. It certainly will never happen again.” Then we could get back to doing whatever we can within the bounds of legality to stop Trump from becoming our President. If the people who speak for the NY Times don’t think they have a responsibility to help stop Trump, they are tragically mistaken.

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Ignoring the Next Six Months – Day Three

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Before I blocked the Huffington Post, I saw that they were adding a few words at the end of certain stories:

Editor’s note:  Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims — 1.6 billion members of an entire religion — from entering the U.S.

The Huffington organization probably feels bad about giving him so much free publicity. (Note: I had to outsmart my browser in order to copy the text above, but I did it in a good cause.)

Then this morning I followed a link to a Washington Post article with the headline “Few Stand in Trump’s Way as He Piles Up the Four-Pinocchio Whoppers”. The gist of the article is that most TV interviewers allow Trump to tell the same blatant lies over and over again, even though it’s clear to everyone – maybe even to Trump and his stream of consciousness – that he’s a huckster whose sales pitch involves telling people what they want to hear (“I tell you, this 1989 Fiat is one of the most reliable cars ever made!”).

The fact-checkers at the Post are so disgusted that they put together a list of his greatest hits. Unfortunately, they haven’t updated the list since March and it’s too long to fit on one page. But even though they demand that TV hosts have a list of Trump’s worst lies available for quick reference, it isn’t clear at all that many journalists will do their job and repeatedly challenge Trump before moving on to the next question.

I think the only solution is to cut off Trump’s microphone. Don’t let him appear on Meet the Press or Face the Nation. Don’t transmit his remarks on the nightly news. Don’t publicize his outbursts in newspapers or on the radio or on websites that purport to cover the news. Lunatics don’t have a right to be heard. Neither do proven liars. That’s not what the First Amendment guarantees.

Of course, it’s standard practice to present the views of Republicans or Democrats running for President, even candidates who tell more than their share of lies. But it’s also standard practice for major-party candidates to demonstrate at least some respect for the truth. (Is it surprising or predictable that someone who is a master of telling certain voters what they want to hear has a reputation among those voters for “telling it like it is”?)

What about the argument that the best way to counter lies and other falsehoods is to subject them to free and open discussion? There’s truth in that and voters do need to know what an important candidates believe and what they promise to do. That’s why journalists should make clear who Trump is, what he’s done in his life and what he promises to do as President. 

But journalists shouldn’t repeat his lies unless it’s to immediately challenge them. And they shouldn’t give him free, unfiltered access to their microphones.

Lastly, it might be said that making it more difficult for Trump to communicate with the electorate would be a bad precedent. Doesn’t that mean future candidates will be similarly affected? Certainly, it would be a precedent, but it would be a good one. It might make it less likely that our democracy will be threatened one day by an even worse demagogue than the one we’ve got now.