“There comes a point — and we’re way past it — when reporters covering Trump should be honest with what they’re witnessing,” Eric Boehlert writes in his Monday edition of Press Run. Blunt honesty should not be left to opinion columnists. Dancing around the truth does a disservice to readers and to the country. Much coverage of the acting president’s holiday weekend speeches refused to call his rhetoric incitement to civil war:
This kind of chronic whitewashing has come to define political journalism in the Trump era. As he becomes increasingly desperate while his polling numbers fall, Trump’s loud cries for armed confrontation may become more acute, and it’s the job of journalists to describe exactly what’s happening, and not hide behind polite euphemisms.
Like “fiery” to describe Donald Trump’s Mount Rushmore speech. Or using “stormy” or “combative” to describe Trump statements both at odds with objective reality and aimed at inflaming animosities. At the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) last year, Trump described political opponents as “maniacs” who “hate their country.”
The man who inaugurated his presidency with a mind-bending speech about “American carnage” grew even more toxic over the weekend. He described adversaries as representing a “new far-left fascism” whose goal is “the end of America.”
A flood of demonizing rhetoric from radio station RTLM aimed at a political minority preceded the Rwandan genocide of 1994. The station described the Tutsi minority as “snakes” and urged listeners to “exterminate the cockroaches.” An estimated 1 million died in the violence. The world soon forgot. Trump’s speech writers took notes.
There were a couple signs this morning that a few in the press are done pulling their punches.
As Trump gaslights America about coronavirus, Republicans face a critical choice
“The gulf between reality and President Donald Trump‘s delusional vision of a waning coronavirus threat was on full display this weekend,” CNN reported under the headline above. The column by Maeve Reston still posted under “analysis.”
Trump’s push to amplify racism unnerves Republicans who have long enabled him
Bill Moore (bmaz) posted the image at the top highlighting a Washington Post column by Robert Costa and Philip Rucker bearing the headline shown. Usually, it is only Greg Sargent at Plum Line who is blunt enough for such straight talk. Even then, punches are pulled, yes?
“Trump allies say the president’s words and actions are not racist but rather attentive to his core voters.” See, it’s not him who is racist, just his core supporters. He’s just catering to them.
Print and broadcast journalists are accustomed to cleaning up awkward pauses, “you knows” and “ums” in statements. Tidying up Trump’s statements goes beyond politeness. It obscures derangement an informed electorate needs to see clearly.
Boehlert adds:
When traveling to the U.S. to cover Trump for several days last year, Guardian journalist Lenore Taylor wrote about how amazed she was to watch him speak in person for extended monologues, how utterly illogical his comments were, and how often reporters clean up those comments in order to make them appear sensible within the context of news articles. “Watching just one press conference helped me understand how the process of reporting about this president can mask and normalize his full and alarming incoherence,” she wrote in a piece headlined, “As a foreign reporter visiting the US I was stunned by Trump’s press conference.”
Confrontations so far between Trump’s white nationalist supporters and, basically, everyone are trending in only one direction. People are going to die. It is not a matter of if, but when and how many. Trump, the reality TV star and former wrestling promoter, is just hyping the main event:
Less than an hour after it was finished on Saturday afternoon, vandals came for the Black Lives Matter street slogan in Martinez, Calif.
A woman in flip-flops and a patriotic shirt splattered a can of black paint over the bright yellow “L” in “Black” heaving her paint roller over the letters outside the Contra Costa County courthouse. Her companion, a man in a red “Four More Years” shirt from President Trump’s campaign and red “Make America Great Again” hat, told onlookers, “No one wants Black Lives Matter here.”
“What is wrong with you?” someone asked the unidentified vandals from off-camera, in a viral video of the incident also shared by police.
“We’re sick of this narrative, that’s what’s wrong,” the man responded. “The narrative of police brutality, the narrative of oppression, the narrative of racism. It’s a lie.”
The woman scrubbed away with her black paint roller, looking up to say, “Keep this s— in f—– New York. This is not happening in my town.”
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Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.