The New York Times published the other day what we in the business call a “think piece.”
The article pondered whether reporters who plainly see Donald Trump as bogus and dangerous should cover him with the kind of benign stenographic neutrality common to basic American political reporting.
By benign stenographic neutrality, I mean a newspaper article beginning with this kind of paragraph: “Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said yesterday he thinks the presidential election will be rigged against him.”
“Benign stenographic neutrality” means a mere regurgitation of what the candidate said that bestows an implied level of credence to the charge.
The issue is whether a reporter ought to be permitted in this Trump-crazed environment to write instead: “Without any evidence, not uncommon for him in his highly generalized campaign, Donald Trump yesterday attacked the credibility of the upcoming American elections. But American elections have been flawed in recent years only very marginally, by sub-microscopic numbers of verified vote fraud incidents, far too few to have changed the outcome of any presidential election. (The brouhaha in 2000 was about individual and institutional failing, not fraud). The possible exception was in 1960 when Richard Nixon chose — for the good of the country, he said — not to challenge Chicago vote-fraud reports. Trump had not previously made this charge. He raised it one day after new polling suggested he is in free-fall, raising the possibility of his losing by a substantial margin.”
Each assertive element of that immediately preceding example is accurate. The greater purpose of that accuracy would be to protect the nation’s electoral integrity against an irresponsible candidate’s paranoid or hyperbolic charge.
We’re not talking about opinion columns like what you’re reading. Opinion columnists may go ahead and tell the flat-out truth. Truth is the advantage that opinion holds over benign stenographic neutrality. And the truth is that it’s frightful that a man would seriously contend for the presidency who says racist and sexist and otherwise unsubstantiated, nonsensical, exploitive and inflammatory things and offers no glimpse of a policy or plan to support his boasts that he can personally and singularly fix everything gone wrong with America.
But let’s be nonpartisan. Consider an article with this first paragraph: “Hillary Clinton said Sunday that FBI director James Comey found her truthful in her statements about routing government emails over a private server when she was secretary of state.”
That’s standard reporting, meaning benign stenographic neutrality.
It’s also wrong. Facts would support instead this first paragraph: “Hillary Clinton lied Sunday when she asserted that FBI director James Comey had said she made no untruthful statements about her emails as secretary of state. In congressional testimony, when confronted by Republicans with three public statements by Clinton regarding the emails, the FBI director said the statements cited weren’t true.”
Perhaps there might be, as there usually is, a more appropriate middle ground between the regurgitation of standard political reportage and columnist-style opinion rants.
The currently prevailing fairness model in newspaper political reporting is for the first paragraph to relate one candidate’s spurious statement, then for the second paragraph to report the opponent’s dismissal of the spurious statement as false or nonsensical.
But that’s not really fair, nor does it achieve fact or accuracy or truth. It grants equal weight to the falsehood and the correction. It’s merely symmetrical, much like CNN bringing in a panel of three Republicans and three Democrats to argue and get nowhere.
A better idea was floated a few years ago by Ron Fournier, the former Little Rock reporter who became nationally esteemed through his coverage of the campaigns and presidencies of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.
He contended that journalistic accuracy required a reporter, on his or her own, to declare an inaccuracy or falsehood as an inaccuracy or falsehood.
Here’s how that might work:
“Donald Trump said yesterday that the election this fall will be rigged against him. But he provided no evidence. And speaking of evidence: Voter fraud — such as multiple voting by an individual or voting by one person in disguise as another — has happened only with microscopic rarity in modern presidential races. The 59 precincts in Philadelphia in which Barack Obama got all votes, nearly 20,000, in 2012, often cited by Republicans as evidence of fraud, were mostly clustered all-black neighborhoods. Obama got 93 percent of black votes nationwide. Even if votes were padded or altered, the affected number in 20,000 would be, by the national norm, a mere 1,400, far from enough to have changed Pennsylvania’s electoral votes. Interviews by the Philadelphia Inquirer found no resident who professed to have voted for Mitt Romney.”
Or this:
“Hillary Clinton asserted Sunday that FBI director James Comey had found her statements about her emails as secretary of state to be truthful. Actually, the FBI director said in congressional testimony that a few of Clinton’s public pronouncements, as presented to him by Republicans, were not truthful. Clinton might have been referring to the fact that she was not charged with lying to the FBI when questioned. But that’s not what she said. She implied a context much broader, and untruthful.”
Do you see what’s happening there? No one gets called a brutal name — “liar” — or subjected to a columnist’s colorful array of adjective-rich snarkiness. Facts are reported as facts, not as equal contestants in a political spin game. The reporting isn’t a pro forma political declaration followed by a pro forma political denial, but a political falsehood followed by an objective journalistic correction.
Harsh verbs such as “lied,” a pejorative reference, a cynical attitude, colorful phrasing and bold political pronouncing — such as that Trump is generally unfit for the presidency and Clinton flawed in a compartmental and less disqualifying way — can be left to the opinion columnist, who said it Sunday. And now says it again. And is not finished saying it.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.