{"id":107173,"date":"2016-09-19T09:23:28","date_gmt":"2016-09-19T17:23:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=107173"},"modified":"2016-09-19T09:27:45","modified_gmt":"2016-09-19T17:27:45","slug":"peter-beinart-the-death-of-he-said-she-said-journalism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=107173","title":{"rendered":"Peter Beinart: The Death of ‘He Said, She Said’ Journalism"},"content":{"rendered":"

From The Atlantic<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\nLast Saturday, The New York Times published an extraordinary story. What made the story extraordinary wasn\u2019t the event the Times covered. What made it extraordinary was the way the Times covered it.<\/p>\n

On its front page, top right\u2014the most precious space in American print journalism\u2014the Times wrote about Friday\u2019s press conference in which Donald Trump declared that a) he now believed Barack Obama was a US citizen, b) he deserved credit for having established that fact despite rumors to the contrary and c) Hillary Clinton was to blame for the rumors. Traditionally, when a political candidate assembles facts so as to aggrandize himself and belittle his opponent, \u201cobjective\u201d journalists like those at the Times respond with a \u201che said, she said\u201d story…<\/p>\n

But the Times, once a champion practitioner of the \u201che said, she said\u201d campaign story, discarded it with astonishing bluntness. The Times responded to Trump\u2019s press conference by running a \u201cNews Analysis,\u201d a genre that gives reporters more freedom to explain a story\u2019s significance. But \u201cNews Analysis\u201d pieces generally supplement traditional news stories. On Saturday, by contrast, the Times ran its \u201cNews Analysis\u201d atop Page One while relegating its news story on Trump\u2019s press conference to page A10. Moreover, \u201cNews Analysis\u201d stories generally offer context. They don\u2019t offer thundering condemnation.<\/p>\n

Yet thundering condemnation is exactly what the Times story provided. Its headline read, \u201cTrump Gives Up a Lie But Refuses to Repent.\u201d Not \u201cfalsehood,\u201d which leaves open the possibility that Trump was merely mistaken, but \u201clie,\u201d which suggests, accurately, that Trump had every reason to know that what he was saying about Obama\u2019s citizenship was false.<\/p>\n

The article\u2019s text was even more striking. It read like an opinion column. It began by reciting the history of Trump\u2019s campaign to discredit Obama\u2019s citizenship. \u201cIt was not true in 2011,\u201d began the first paragraph. \u201cIt was not true in 2012,\u201d began the second paragraph. \u201cIt was not true in 2014,\u201d began the third paragraph. Then, in the fourth paragraph: \u201cIt was not true, any of it.\u201d The article called Trump\u2019s claim that he had put to rest rumors about Obama\u2019s citizenship \u201ca bizarre new deception\u201d and his allegation that Clinton had fomented them \u201canother falsehood.\u201d Then, in summation, it declared that while Trump has \u201cexhausted an army of fact checkers with his mischaracterizations, exaggerations and fabrications,\u201d the birther lie was particularly \u201cinsidious\u201d because it \u201csought to undo the embrace of an African American president by the 69 million voters who elected him.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Comments at Steve Sailer<\/a>:<\/p>\n

* The amazing thing to me was that the CNN panel which followed that event were so furious that they had been \u201cplayed\u201d (their word) by Trump in such a fashion. And then to see in the NYT that Trump\u2019s questioning Obama\u2019s birth place, after Obama had sold his books on the basis of his having been born in Kenya and raised in Hawaii and Indonesia, was considered by the esteemed editors a \u201clie.\u201d I never knew that one could \u201clie\u201d by asking a question.<\/p>\n

* I think Trump is deliberately and naturally very funny.<\/p>\n

His comment to the effect that Hillary probably paid PR guys $2 million but he came up with \u201cCrooked Hillary\u201d all by himself for free tickled me no end.<\/p>\n

I thought SPY Magazine\u2019s characterization of him as the \u201cshort-fingered vulgarian was funny. But he\u2019s much funnier than they were.<\/p>\n

And as adaptable and resilient as he\u2019s proven himself to be under the relentless, unfair and dishonest onslaught by the left, I bet he\u2019s pretty healthy psychologically. Certainly healthy enough to be POTUS.<\/p>\n

* The left always marched humorously in lockstep. The pranks those guys pulled seemed mean-spirited whereas Trump\u2019s stunts are more good-natured. They wouldn\u2019t have called their followers \u201cdeplorables\u201d\u2013that\u2019s what they would have called the squares or straights. They laughed at the Establishment but they didn\u2019t laugh at themselves. They were full of righteous indignation thinly overlaid with smug humor. It was obvious to me as a teenager that in the left\u2019s eyes, all people were equal but some people were more equal than others.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From The Atlantic: Last Saturday, The New York Times published an extraordinary story. What made the story extraordinary wasn\u2019t the event the Times covered. What made it extraordinary was the way the Times covered it. On its front page, top … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-107173","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journalism"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107173","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=107173"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107173\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":107179,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107173\/revisions\/107179"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=107173"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=107173"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=107173"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}