My Reply: Getting to Hard Truths
Subscribers' questions on Trump's veracity, a president's power, a journalist's mission, and an editor's dilemma.
My call for questions Monday yielded some tough ones, which I’ll attempt to answer here in our semi-regular “My Reply” column at Convulsions.
Your part is in italics. Mine is not.
Trump v Newsom
President Trump says he called California Gov. Gavin Newsom about the National Guard deployment in California. Newsom says the call never happened. wants to know the truth. “Who is right?”
REPLY: I can find no credible documentation to definitively answer your question, Donna. But after deep comparative research into the rate of lies and hyperbole committed by both men, I can say with a fair amount of certainty that Trump misspoke. The tell: His lips were moving.
My friend wants to know how how journalists should cover presidential executive orders. She points to a “frightening example” of Trump’s use of the tool: an executive order that The Guardian says would allow Veterans Administration doctors to refuse treatment for Democrats and unmarried vets.
REPLY: No matter who occupies the Oval Office, journalists need to take executive orders seriously. While they are not as durable as laws, presidential directives can have enormous impact. Abraham Lincoln used one to emancipate slaves. Franklin Roosevelt signed 3,721 of them to jump start the New Deal. Harry Truman desegregated the military with a stroke of his pen.
Setting aside their biases, journalists should carefully read each order, solicit the opinions of lawyers, historians and other experts, and report the bottom-line truth about what the orders say and mean.
Side note: While executive orders are not mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, the practice of bypassing Congress to quickly implement policies started with George Washington, who signed eight.
Whither Democrats
wants to know how Democrats can “challenge the status quo and promote policies that make lives better for their constituents with the existence of well-funded super PACs?”
REPLY: Super PACs and dark money are used to corrupt U.S. politicians and protect the status quo. Same goes for gerrymandering, the filibuster, closed primaries, the Electoral College, election laws that favor a two-party monopoly, and any number of political institutions that need to be disrupted. But rather than leveraging them as an excuse when Democrats lose, why don’t Democrats use them as the cornerstone of a national movement to reform politics? Why don’t they run under a unified message to transform how we campaign and govern in the 21st century?
A pointed question: When they’ve won the White House and Congress this century, why haven’t Democrats forced systemic change? I’ll tell you why: Democrats don’t want the system to change because they benefit from it, even when they lose an election or two. They’re like Republicans in that way.
To answer your question, Carl: If Democrats wanted to challenge the status quo, they would. If they wanted to overcome systemic barriers to change like super PACs, they could.
Whither journalists
submits two questions. The first: “As (The Associated Press) Washington bureau chief, you had a front-row seat to presidential actions and decision-making. What was the most challenging aspect of maintaining journalistic objectivity when covering a president, especially during a polarizing administration or crisis, and how did you navigate the pressure from both political operatives and your audience to shape narratives?
REPLY: It was simple, Bob. I was well-trained in school and in my first newsrooms to be objective as humanely possible. While I can’t claim that my liberal bias didn’t ever seep into my coverage, I can say I tried hard to be fair, skeptical, and compliant only to the truth. It was a source of pride.
More to the point, my bosses had a financial incentive to insist that I be even-handed. Until the internet disrupted the century-old business model, news organizations made huge profits by branding themselves as objective and building large, multi-partisan audiences who bought products sold by advertisers. That media model is dying. Most people today don’t want objective journalism. They want their biases confirmed.
An editor’s dilemma
’s second question: “During your tenure, what was the most ethically or professionally complex story your team pursued, and how did you balance the pursuit of truth with external pressures—whether from government officials, corporate interests, or internal editorial constraints, while ensuring the story’s integrity and public impact?”
REPLY: So many examples from which to choose. But I’m going to go with the times at The AP and The Atlantic when we uncovered important stories that the government argued would be irresponsible to publish. More often than not, after listening carefully to government officials, we determined that national security or privacy concerns were trumped by the public’s right to know. But more often than you might think, we decided to hold a story until a safer or more responsible time to publish.
It was never an easy call, and we could only weigh both sides of the argument if we had some level of trust with the government officials who were pressing us. I was a trust-but-verify guy. I often wonder how editors today make these calls, given the lack of credibility inside the Trump administration, which is unlike anything I experienced covering Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama.
Clarifying Q&A well worth the read.