Broken Institutions of America

 [Below is a lightly edited email I sent to a friend recently. We were discussing journalism generally, and particularly the major print and Internet houses. I was trying to make the point that fair & objective reporting doesn't require journalists to treat all political statements as potentially valid -- being "fair" doesn't require ignoring truth or falsity. -- Ed.]

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I'm so old I remember when HRC said "you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables," and everyone flipped the fuck out. HRC's own internal expert concluded, for example, that that particular comment caused the biggest shift in undecided voters of the election. (Sidenote. While I buy the comment induced a big swing in undecided voters aspect, I don't buy related analysis that the comment was what got Trump elected. The EMAILZ!!!1! non-scandal and the late Comey letter were much more important in that regard, because the election didn't really turn on undecided voters.)

Today [Sept. 4, 2020], the AP confirms an Atlantic piece from yesterday: "Report: Trump disparaged US war dead as ‘losers,’ ‘suckers'":

A new report details multiple instances of President Donald Trump making disparaging remarks about members of the U.S. military who have been captured or killed, including referring to the American war dead at the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery in France in 2018 as “losers” and “suckers.”

That story is not currently on The New York Times' website. Or rather it is, but it is framed as "Trump Angrily Denies Report He Called Fallen Soldiers ‘Losers’". The BBC and others are taking the NYT approach to framing, meaning they're framing the issue in terms of what Trump is saying about it, not what actually happened, which is wildly fucking absurd. Recall that most people get their news from headlines, because of course we don't bother to read. See Americans read headlines. And not much else.

The real story though is very much *not* how NYT frames it, that Pentagon officials say he mocked fallen soldiers but Trump denies the claims.

Rather, any responsible exercise of journalism would handle it, for example, thusly: "Although Trump denies mocking the dead American war heroes, he has a long history of lying for political benefit. The AP confirmed from seven [or however many] independent sources with direct knowledge of the events that Trump did in fact call fallen soldiers 'losers'."

This shit isn't unknowable ("you decide for yourself what's true!"), and it is in fact the job of the press to put at least some minimal effort into knowing. Truth isn't something that you can only report if you saw it with your own eyes. Our whole legal system is organized around the concept of credibility, and that neutral third parties (ie., jurors and judges, or here journalists) can discern the truth of a matter by hearing accounts of it and balancing the veracity of conflicting statements to reach a conclusion about the events in question. In the law, this is called "evidence." 

 

Being neutral doesn't mean not having an opinion as to truth or lie. It's really just not that hard, but here we are. The media is not capable of doing its job. American institutions are failing.

Edited to add: Today, the Florida "governor" DeSantis is trying to crack down on the right to assemble via new criminal laws that are almost certainly unconsitutional. Recently AG Billy Barr was given the power to declare places an "anarchist jurisdiction", thereby paving the way to withhold federal money. Barr named New York City, Portland, OR, and Seattle anarchist jurisdictions, and threatened to withhold money. These stories are not on The Times' front page. Any actual journalistic outfit would be running with, "Democracy under attack."