It was a triple-liberal-team up against Donald Trump on Tuesday’s edition of the taxpayer-supported PBS NewsHour with an interview segment headlined online, “How media organizations are facing the task of covering Trump’s anti-democratic rhetoric.” (Ironically, the segment on the dangers Trump posed to democracy was introduced with news that Trump had been removed from the ballot in Colorado. Who’s against democracy, again?)
Host Geoff Bennett set up White House correspondent Laura Barron-Lopez, perhaps the show’s most liberal reporter, to talk to leftist journalism professor Jay Rosen and Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg (who recently took over PBS's Washington Week) about “one of the greatest challenges that journalists are facing,” how to cover Donald Trump’s campaign for a second term. You can't treat it like it's normal! It's a grave threat!
Barron-Lopez teed up her guests with Trump’s recent spicy rhetoric:
Barron-Lopez: In the span of one week, former President Trump, who's the overwhelming front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination, said he'd be a dictator for one day and echoed the anti-immigrant words of Adolf Hitler.
Donald Trump: They're poisoning the blood of our country. We will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, that lie and steal and cheat on elections. It's so bad, and people are coming in with disease. People are coming in with every possible thing that you could have.
Barron-Lopez: Historians of fascism and veteran reporters warn that the GOP is poised to nominate a candidate in Trump who is anti-democracy. Since launching his campaign, Trump has called for terminating the Constitution, lied about America's election system, and has vowed to use the prosecutorial power of the Justice Department as his personal tool for revenge. How will the press cover Trump in the coming year?
She invited Goldberg to discuss his magazine’s deeply paranoid special issue about the dangers of Trump II. (NewsBusters covered the hysteria.)
Goldberg: Because I don't want to participate in the normalization of extremism. And I thought it would be important before the primary season starts to put in one place, one package, a reminder to people of all of the different manifestations of Trump ideology and Trumpism as a kind of a warning….
There was no daylight between the “objective” journalist and her liberal guests:
Laura Barron-Lopez: It becomes normalized.
Jeffrey Goldberg: It becomes normalized, yes.
Laura Barron-Lopez: We become desensitized.
Jeffrey Goldberg: Yes.
Barron-Lopez raised the stakes in her first loaded question to Rosen.
Barron-Lopez: Jay, how would you grade press coverage so far since January 6? And do you think that the press has an obligation to protect democracy?
Jay Rosen, NYU School of Journalism: Well, I think it started out as business as usual, where the horse-race perspective on politics was alive and well. And it's shifted recently to something that is a lot more productive. I call it not the odds, but the stakes, in which journalists are, as "The Atlantic" did, trying to be very clear about what could and probably will happen if he is reelected….
In other words, Rosen is pleased journalists are acting in the interest of Democrats.
This anti-Trump hysteria was brought to you in part by BDO.
A transcript is available, click “Expand.”
PBS NewsHour
12/19/23
7:36:05 p.m. (ET)
Geoff Bennett: The 2024 election is shaping up to be unlike any other in modern history. Late today, the Colorado Supreme Court decided to disqualify former President Donald Trump from the state's election ballot because of his involvement in the January 6 insurrection. The ruling has been put on hold pending an appeal.
How to cover the former president's campaign presents one of the greatest challenges that journalists are facing.
Laura Barron-Lopez has this conversation she recorded earlier today.
Laura Barron-Lopez: In the span of one week, former President Donald Trump, who's the overwhelming front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination, said he'd be a dictator for one day and echoed the anti-immigrant words of Adolf Hitler.
Donald Trump, Former President of the United States (R) and Current U.S. Presidential Candidate: They're poisoning the blood of our country. We will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, that lie and steal and cheat on elections.
It's so bad, and people are coming in with disease. People are coming in with every possible thing that you could have.
Laura Barron-Lopez: This isn't new. It dates back to 2015. Donald Trump: When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists.
Laura Barron-Lopez: Historians of fascism and veteran reporters warn that the GOP is poised to nominate a candidate, in Trump, who is anti-democracy.
Since launching his campaign, Trump has called for terminating the Constitution, lied about America's election system, and has vowed to use the prosecutorial power of the Justice Department as his personal tool for revenge.
How will the press cover Trump in the coming year? To discuss, I'm joined by Jeffrey Goldberg, editor in chief of the Atlantic and moderator of "Washington Week," and Jay Rosen, professor of journalism at New York University.
Jay and Jeff, thanks so much for joining. Jeff, I want to start with you.
"The Atlantic’s final edition of this year is from front to back all about the stakes of a second Trump term. Why did you decide to do that?
Jeffrey Goldberg, Moderator, "Washington Week With The Atlantic": Because I don't want to participate in the normalization of extremism.
And I thought it would be important before the primary season starts to put in one place, one package, a reminder to people of all of the different manifestations of Trump ideology and Trumpism as a kind of a warning.
And what I did was, we asked a whole group of our writers, many of whom have been covering Trump since 2015, at least, I asked them to simply, tell me what you think will happen the second time around, right? It's not totally predictive, because Trump says things out loud. He's telling us that he is an authoritarian. He's telling us that he's going to have a revenge — he's telling us all these things.
And he says it so often that we tend to ignore it. It's kind of a — it's a seeming contradiction, right, that he's saying to us so frequently that he's going to be a dictator now that it just becomes background noise. And I think there's a big danger in that.
Laura Barron-Lopez: It becomes normalized.
Jeffrey Goldberg: It becomes normalized, yes.
Laura Barron-Lopez: We become desensitized.
Jeffrey Goldberg: Yes.
Laura Barron-Lopez: Jay, how would you grade press coverage so far since January 6? And do you think that the press has an obligation to protect democracy?
Jay Rosen, NYU School of Journalism: Well, I think it started out as business as usual, where the horse race perspective on politics was alive and well. And it's shifted recently to something that is a lot more productive. I call it not the odds, but the stakes, in which journalists are, as "The Atlantic" did, trying to be very clear about what could and probably will happen if he is reelected.
And I think the reason why this has spread is first that the horse race among Republican candidates is not very interesting this year. Most of Trump's challengers are not interested in criticizing him. So this is a very kind of favorable environment for skipping to what matters a lot more than the horse race, which is the stakes.
The odds, as I have called them, are a gambling term. They gamify the election, but this election is not a game. You simply cannot compare Donald Trump as a candidate to any other candidate.
And in American journalism, the practices of political reporters and editors rest on a kind of mental image of the political system in which you have two major parties that operate in roughly the same way, but they have a different ideology, different priorities.
And that hidden sort of structure is now completely bankrupt, and the two parties don't resemble each other at all. And you simply can't use the tools from the long period in American politics where you had two roughly similar parties. Now you don't.
Laura Barron-Lopez: Jeff, speaking of the stakes, some of the comments that the former president makes, like how he'd be a dictator for a day, for day one, get a lot of attention.
But John Dickerson of CBS News called that — quote — "bait," that Trump says these on purpose so then that way they will be replayed and will narrow the focus of what he'd do if he's elected again. Dickerson says we should focus on the specifics of Trump's actual plans, comments like this.
Donald Trump: I will direct a completely overhauled DOJ to investigate every radical out-of-control prosecutor in America for their illegal, racist and reverse enforcement of the law.
Laura Barron-Lopez: Do you agree with Dickerson?
I mean, how should the press cover Trump's rhetoric versus his actual plans?
Jeffrey Goldberg: I mean, it's yes/and. We can do two things at once. We can cover the outrageous authoritarian language, which, of course, leads you to the policy, right?
I mean, when he says he wants to be a dictator, he's saying because he wants to build the wall, right? And he's going to destroy the federal bureaucracy. And he's promised to sort of undo 100 years of civil service, among other things. And so I think you take the language. I understand the point. It's like there's the carnival aspect and then there's the bureaucratic aspect.
I think we can cover both at the same time. When he says "I want to be a dictator," that should be the headline across every wire service, every newspaper, every Web site. That should be it. He's a former president of the United States and the presumptive nominee of one of the two major parties. That is axiomatically newsworthy.
Then I think you should look at what he's saying. And we did this in this issue. We have a whole piece on what he would do to the Department of Justice should he come back into power.
Laura Barron-Lopez: Jay, you often talk to national and local journalists about changing their standards, about adapting to the current environment.
And you're currently encouraging a lot of news outlets to — quote — "demote the horse race." What does that look like in practice?
Jay Rosen: Well, the horse race in practice starts with who's going to win. And an alternative model for election coverage, which is called the citizens' agenda, starts in a completely different place.
And this model has been around since the 1990s prior to the Internet. Instead of starting with the candidates, saying who's going to win and who's got the smart strategy, you start with the people you are trying to inform. And you ask them a very simple question, which is, what do you want the candidates to be talking about when they compete for votes?
And if you can ask that question, not just once or twice, but thousands of times, patterns will emerge in their responses. And you can synthesize from those patterns a kind of agenda or priority list, and then use that priority list to structure your coverage, so you know where to put your reporting resources in.
And that brings journalists back in touch with the publics that they're supposed to inform. Then we will have a better chance of serving democracy.
Laura Barron-Lopez: Jeff, at least two dozen former Cabinet and administration officials who served under Trump, including two former defense secretaries, James Mattis and Mark Esper, and his former Attorney General Bill Barr, say he's not fit to be president.
But, still, in a recent FOX News poll, three in 10, 30 percent of Trump 2020 supporters said a president breaking some rules and laws is justified to set things right.
How is it that a sizable portion of the public doesn't view Trump the way a significant number of the people who worked with him, who knew him well do?
Jeffrey Goldberg: If I had the answer to that, I'd be a political consultant, and not a magazine editor.
I don't know. It's incredibly disturbing. Remember, the disturbing or destabilizing aspect of the Trump period in American history is that the normal laws of political physics don't seem to apply within the Trump ecosystem, right?
Like, if two dozen of a former president's top aides say that he's unfit for leadership, that would destroy a normal candidate's chances of coming back into politics, right? But, for that matter, in 2015, when Trump said that John McCain — he didn't admire John McCain because he likes people who weren't captured, in the Republican base, you ask anybody in 2014 if a candidate could survive saying that, the answer is no.
But there we have it. I think what what's happening is there's a distrust of elites, and anyone who has been in the Cabinet is axiomatically elite in the mind of a voter. There's a mistrust of general authority. There's a mistrust — and, by the way, this is fomented very much on purpose. It's not like it grew organically.
This is created, this paranoia. And there's an exploitation of resentment. For a lot of people, it's — Donald Trump, he vibrates to their resentments, and he understands that and he articulates them. And he says he wants to be their retribution and their revenge.
Laura Barron-Lopez: Jeffrey Goldberg of "The Atlantic," Jay Rosen of New York University, thank you so much for your time.
Jeffrey Goldberg: Thank you.
