It’s only straight talk when the press doesn’t do it
Sen. John McCain dubbed his campaign bus the “Straight Talk Express” during his 2000 presidential run. Voters claim to prefer straight talk to mealy-mouthed answers from their politicians. Donald Trump, the MAGA cult claims, “tells it like it is.”
“He’s outspoken. Other candidates wouldn’t tell you how it is, but he does.” – Betty Tully, August 2015
But straight talk is in the eye of the beholder. Straight talk from popular Fox News celebrities consists of xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, and branding anyone to the left of Germany’s WWII dictator as hating America. Shy about being branded the enemy of the people, the straight press often shuns straight talk.
Maybe that’s one of the many reasons the news business is in such a slump. The press danced around calling Trump’s lies lies for years. When finally they began, of course, and whenever he didn’t like his coverage, Trump declared them the enemy of the people and invited his cult to hurl invective at reporters. Voters are fickle about what they consider straight talk.
Dan Froomkin (Press Watch) has called out New York Times headline writers for months for substituting dainty euphemisms for straight talk: “The New York Times cannot bring itself to definitively state anything negative about powerful people in a headline.” Euphemisms are obfuscatory, like the Nixon administration using “counter-insurgency strikes” in place of straight talk. (They were carpet-bombing Cambodia.)
In this news environment, extremists and crooks become “firebrands” and “norm busters.”
Froomkin wrote last month, “It’s not just an individual failure. It’s a system failure. The headline writers are often very low-level editors whose nightmare scenario is being fired for a headline that makes the story appear liberal. So they avoid that at all costs.”
There are rude terms for describing such people. We won’t use them here.
Brian Beutler this morning considers House Speaker contest press coverage of Ohio Republican Rep. Jim Jordan, that wrasslin’ “conservative firebrand“:
But we got a brief and revealing glimpse of how major news outlets would’ve greeted a Republican speaker—even one handpicked by Donald Trump—after Republicans rejected Jim Jordan, leaving the Washington Post to publish this lengthy profile of the Ohio Republican without the coronation it clearly intended to use as news peg.
I’m not sure if this qualifies as a “beat sweetener” because, at several thousand words, it isn’t all flattering. To the contrary, it’s really an investigation and recapitulation of Jordan’s scandalous past as a wrestling coach at Ohio State University, communicated in the language of a soft-touch profile.
But because it’s both things at once, it provides a few clues as to how beltway political journalists would have covered Jordan had he become speaker.
- HEADLINE: “Relentless Wrestler”;
- SUBHEADLINE: “Jim Jordan is an unyielding combatant, whether grappling on the mat or in the halls of Congress”;
- The article describes Jordan’s “firebrand defense of [Donald] Trump”;
- It depicts Jordan “On the mat… a fury of arms and legs, more will and stamina; than brute strength, always on offense, probing weakness, seeking leverage”;
- It marvels at his “metabolic energy.”
Those quotes all come from the lead portion of the article, and it’s peppered throughout with many similar examples. This contrast between the frank descriptions we see of the Republican Party as a whole, and these sorts of sanded-down descriptions of the people responsible for the chaos, is hard to figure from the outside. But it’s perfectly consistent with the professional customs of American political journalism that I’ve been describing in our video series, Decoding the News.