Joe Concha of The Hill reports the liberal website Slate will host a panel discussion at New York University five days after Donald Trump's inauguration to struggling in public with “how the news media can and should proceed to cover” the president-elect. CNN media correspondent and Reliable Sources host Brian Stelter will moderate the liberal panel, titled "Not the New Normal."
Panelists will include Slate's Julia Turner and Jacob Weisberg, as well as New Yorker magazine editor David Remnick, Huffington Post editor-in-chief Lydia Polgreen and Univision Digital vice president and editor-in-chief Borja Echevarria. Radical-left NYU professor Jay Rosen -- who spent the George W. Bush years whining bush was trying to "decertify" the press -- will offer introductory remarks.
This is the first time Slate has convened a panel on how to cover an incoming president. The focus of the discussion will include "how journalists and media companies at large can play a bigger role in making sure that fact prevails over fiction in the coming months and years," according to Slate. Liberals put themselves on the "fact" side of the divide.
This is a bit rich for the "Fact" side since Weisberg diagnosed George W. Bush with a learning disability in 2008, and on Saturday cheered BuzzFeed for putting unconfirmed rumors about Trump on the Internet. Last year, he told Stelter on CNN you can't cover Hillary and Trump as apples and oranges, since it's "more like an apple and some rancid meat.”
Remnick is a serial interviewer/adorer of President Obama, and recently published a passionate account of how journalists were "f---ing pissed" to be criticized by Donald Trump in a private meeting.
Univision's Jorge Ramos threw a fit at a Trump press conference. The Huffington Post carried an editor's note on every Trump story that insisted "Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther" and published an article headlined “Sorry Liberals, a Violent Response To Trump Is As Logical As Any.”
Slate is charging $30 for tickets to raise money for the Committee to Protect Journalists.
