Monday, May 10, 2021

Mainstream Press Doesn't Need Access To Trump, So Now They Can Bravely Report His Lies Are "Lies" — While Refusing To Truthfully Describe GOP Tactics As Voter Suppression

No Longer Seeking Access, The Press Admits Trump "Lies"
Eric Boehlert, Press Run, May 9, 2021 (emphasis mine)
With a quick succession of headlines last week, the New York Times quietly unveiled a new chapter in its Trump coverage — the paper was suddenly calling out his lies.

"In Turning on Liz Cheney, G.O.P. Bows to Trump's Election Lies," a Times headline read. The next day, the Times published, "Cheney's Replacement Repeats Trumps Lies as Party Looks Ahead." (In a nostalgic twist, the online headline for that article referred to "False Claims.") And the following day, a print subhead for a front-page Times article read, "Party Is Banking On Pushing Elections Lies."

The good news: Beltway journalists no longer seeking access to the Trump White House are now detailing his "lies" in news coverage:

• "The 15 Most Notable Lies of Donald Trump's Presidency" (CNN)

• "Legacy of Lies -- How Trump Weaponized Mistruths During His Presidency" (ABC News)

Yesterday, the Associated Press reported, "Allegiance to a lie has become a test of loyalty to Donald Trump and a means of self-preservation for Republicans."

The bad news: The press should have been doing this for the last four years. Instead, they played purposeful semantics games. Burning through the thesaurus, journalists opted for watered-down phrases such as "falsehoods," "false claims," "inaccurate claims," "alternative facts," "alternative reality," "unsupported claim," and "erroneous description."

It was a deliberate decision to turn away from the truth —and from accurate language . . . Afraid that calling Trump a "liar" in straight news reports would spark cries of "liberal media bias," the press capitulated. . . .

Today, we're seeing journalists maneuver to avoid being honest about today's radical GOP — most notably how the press is tiptoeing around the right-wing's open and drastic voter suppression movement, politely referring to it as "voter restrictions," an effort to "limit voting," or the GOP having concerns about "election security." A straight line exists that connects the media refusing to call Trump a liar, and the media now refusing to call the Republican strategy of "voter suppression" for what it is. . . .

Times editors produced pointless phrases such as:

— "Trump Misrepresents"

— "Trump Falsely Claims"

— "Trump's Baseless Claim"

— "Trump's Falsehoods"

— "Trump's False Claims"

— "Trump's Inaccurate Claims"

When Trump lied without pause during his presidential debates with Joe Biden last year, it was crickets from the press. When Trump spent most of 2020 lying about every aspect of a public health crisis, we never saw a single "Trump Lies About Pandemic" news headline from a major news organization. In office, Trump lied about doctors trying to "execute" healthy newborn babies in the delivery room. Trump even lied about 9/11, and lied during an address to West Point cadets, and the press let him.

And the New York Times led the way in normalizing his atrocious behavior. The incredible part is that during portions of the 2016 campaign, the paper's executive editor Dean Baquet actually bragged about how the Times was comfortable calling Trump a liar, and that using "falsehoods" didn't adequately capture the damage Trump was doing to the truth. . . .

After Trump won his unexpected 2016 victory, Baquet and the Times then sprinted into a retreat and spent most of the next four years pretending it wasn't fair to call out Trump's lies in the news coverage. Suddenly, "falsehoods" was the preferred newsroom describer, and the media succumbed to its defining failure of the Trump era. . . .

It wasn't the Times' "role" to report accurately about Trump's lies, because that would mean the paper was "taking political sides."


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