FOCUS ON YOUR JOB: THE NEWS
NYT snafu reminds journalists to stick to facts
to report on the president’s own comments without paying greater attention to the incendiary words of his past.
Times editors actually reworked the so-called offensive headline to read — “Assailing Hate But Not Guns.”
They could also have rewritten to say something like “Trump Blames Gamers for Real Life Bloodshed” because he kind of alluded to that too.
The Times even demoted its Washington Bureau editor for firing off tweets about politicians’ personal geography they later deemed were racist.
We dip into dangerous waters when we editorialize in our news coverage. That stuff should be left to columnists like me. Personally, I can’t stand Donald Trump and I think he’s a dope and a menace to society. Of course other columnists disagree with me and believe he’s actually made “America Great Again.”
But let us opinion writers wage these battles. News reporters working for newspapers and television networks and online media should have only one job to do — to report the news.
Back in the days of Watergate, Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein or “Woodstein” as they were called, dug deep and reported straight about the allegations that President Nixon had been personally involved in the cover-up of the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters.
Their stories carried weight because they weren’t trying to convince us, at least overtly, that Nixon was a crook. These guys let the facts speak for themselves and the Nixon administration toppled. Post editor Ben Bradlee left the editorializing to his famed cartoonist Herblock (Herbert Lawrence Block), who peppered Tricky Dick unmercifully in print and rightly so.
Sure, we have regressed greatly since then. Every reporter needs to offer their own “take” on the story instead of busting their humps to gather all the elements for the readers or viewers to decide on their own.
Many of today’s reporters don’t strive to be the next “Woodstein,” instead they want to become another Norman Mailer or William F. Buckley (Google these guys, folks) or speak like Rachel Maddow or Laura Ingraham, who craft opinions and not legitimate news.
Baquet, the first African American executive editor at the Times, called the Trump headline a “bleeping mess” and described how sick and terrible the person responsible for the headline truly feels.
Somewhere in heaven, the great Ben Bradlee is pulling up his shirt sleeves, lighting a smoke and rolling his eyes.
“There really isn’t enough time in the day to convene a task force on every little decision,” Bradlee once said. “If you’re publishing 140,000 words five times a day you’ve got to decide. And you’ve got to get it off the table and get on to the next one before you go crazy.”
Amen to that Ben.