If Donald Trump wins the Nov. 5 election, the New York Times will be partly responsible.
As the dominant voice in American journalism, the Times could have fundamentally changed the way Trump has been covered not just by its own journalists but by the political media as a whole. It could have stopped using soft, empty language and false equivalence, and made it crystal clear to the public that if elected Trump would turn America into a racist, authoritarian regime where facts don’t matter.
But rather than call out the dangerous lunacy in plain view, the Times has chosen to engage in tortured euphemisms, passive construction, and poor news judgment.
Here are a few examples of the troubling coverage — or lack thereof:
- When Trump seized up at a rally this week and bizarrely swayed to music for 39 excruciating minutes, the Times called it an “improvisational departure.”
- Trump’s racist threats to deport millions of undocumented people are actually just full of “hyperbolic rhetoric” and “fury.”
- When it was reported that Trump’s top general, Mark Milley, called him “fascist to the core” the Times buried what should have been front-page news deep in an article about something else entirely.
- Times journalists refuse to call Trump’s “false claims” what they are: malicious lies.
- Hurling racist invective at a vulnerable community to fire up a hateful and bigoted base is just “rabble rousing” to the Times. It’s “combative conservatism.”
- And even in an otherwise admirable article on Trump’s cognitive decline, the Times couldn’t bring itself to use the term “cognitive decline.”
- -Dan Froomkin
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