How
to cover a delusional, dark, divisive demagogue
Reuters
memo: We’re ready to cover a hostile Trump administration
Senior Editor
Yahoo News
February 1, 2017
1,769 Comments
Then-President-elect
Trump at a news conference last month. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
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As the press continues
to adjust to President Trump and the new administration, a pair of internal
memos circulated within news organizations this week illustrate the debate
that’s happening in newsrooms around the country: how to cover a president who
claims he views the media as “the opposition party.”
“The first 12 days of
the Trump presidency (yes, that’s all it’s been!) have been memorable for all —
and especially challenging for us in the news business,” Reuters editor in
chief Steve Adler wrote in a memo to
staffers on Tuesday. “It’s not
every day that a U.S. president calls journalists ‘among the most dishonest
human beings on earth.'”
Adler noted that
Reuters operates “in more than 100 countries, including many in which the media
is unwelcome and frequently under attack.”
“I am perpetually
proud of our work in places such as Turkey, the Philippines, Egypt, Iraq,
Yemen, Thailand, China, Zimbabwe, and Russia, nations in which we sometimes
encounter some combination of censorship, legal prosecution, visa denials, and
even physical threats to our journalists,” he wrote.
“We don’t know yet how
sharp the Trump administration’s attacks will be over time or to what extent
those attacks will be accompanied by legal restrictions on our news-gathering,”
Adler continued. “But we do know that we must follow the same rules that govern
our work anywhere.”
He then offered a list
of “Do’s and Don’ts” for covering the Trump White House:
Do’s:
–Cover what matters in people’s
lives and provide them the facts they need to make better decisions.
–Become ever-more resourceful: If
one door to information closes, open another one.
–Give up on hand-outs and worry less
about official access. They were never all that valuable anyway. Our coverage
of Iran has been outstanding, and we have virtually no official access. What we
have are sources.
–Get out into the country and learn
more about how people live, what they think, what helps and hurts them, and how
the government and its actions appear to them, not to us.
[…]
Don’ts:
–Never be intimidated, but:
–Don’t pick unnecessary fights or
make the story about us. We may care about the inside baseball but the public
generally doesn’t and might not be on our side even if it did.
–Don’t vent publicly about what might
be understandable day-to-day frustration. In countless other countries, we keep
our own counsel so we can do our reporting without being suspected of personal
animus. We need to do that in the U.S., too.
–Don’t take too dark a view of the
reporting environment: It’s an opportunity for us to practice the skills we’ve
learned in much tougher places around the world and to lead by example — and
therefore to provide the freshest, most useful, and most illuminating
information and insight of any news organization anywhere.
On Monday night, Wall
Street Journal editor in chief Gerard Baker sent an email to editors asking
them to stop referring to the seven countries included in Trump’s travel ban as
being predominantly Muslim.
“Can we stop saying
‘seven majority Muslim countries’? It’s very loaded,” Baker wrote in the internal
email, which was published
Tuesday by Politico. “The reason they’ve been chosen is not because they’re
majority Muslim but because they’re on the list of [countries] Obama identified
as countries of concern. Would be less loaded to say ‘seven countries the US
has designated as being states that pose significant or elevated risks of
terrorism.'”
While many media
outlets have accurately described the countries in Trump’s controversial
executive order — Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen — as
predominantly Muslim, the administration contends it is not a “Muslim ban.”
On Tuesday, White House
press secretary Sean Spicer went further, arguing that the order does not even
constitute a “ban,” although
both Trump and Spicer had both recently used that term to describe it.
“It can’t be a ban if
you’re letting a million people in … that is by nature not a ban. It is extreme
vetting,” Spicer said. “I think that the words that are being used to describe
it derive from what the media is calling this. He has been very clear that it
is extreme vetting.”
On CNN’s “Reliable
Sources” on Sunday, a panel including Steve Adler of Reuters and Huffington
Post editor Lydia Polgreen discussed the challenges of covering the Trump
administration and its war on words.
“This is not a normal presidency,” Polgreen
said. “This is not a normal time for journalism. I think we’re going to be
under unprecedented pressure and attack.”
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