Decades of working the refs
James Fallows makes a very good point here.
Reporters generally (or always?) don’t write the headlines and subheads; that’s the editor’s job. The first para of the story certainly pulls no punches, ending with “He is an inveterate and knowing liar.”
Another thing: there’s an ambiguity in quotation marks. It’s not always clear whether they’re straightforward (someone said this) or scare quotes. But Fallows is still right: even if ‘Lies’ is quoting the indictment, it can still look like scare quotes.
Yep, he certainly has a point there too. Habit? What a benign word for a pattern of criminal behavior.
He sums up:
To underscore a point well known in journalism but not so much in civilian world: 99% of the time, the issue w NYT framing is headlines, subheds, “social sells”—presentation on Xitter et al. Rather than stories themselves. Alas, 99x more people just see the headlines.
Framing is important.
It’s entirely appropriate that the NYT put the allegation “lies” in quotes, because it is an allegation. That’s what the indictment and prosecution will allege; the defence will respond that the statements were honestly held beliefs. Any trial will turn on that. And that’s how one should report trials.
In the old days, journalists held to the distinction between reporting, which aimed to be fact-based and neutral (and trusted the reader to make up their own mind based on that), and op-eds, which presented opinion.
And, regarding the above indictment, I’m sure everyone has an opinion on whether he was lying.
Sadly, that distinction got lost, with every news article needing to be activist, hitting the reader over the head with what they should be thinking, and semaphoring the correct opinions to hold about everything.
That reached a peak in the George Floyd summer, when the NYT became the woke equivalent of Pravda. Thankfully, since then, it is, in some tiny steps, moving back towards its historic role of being a newspaper of record.
James Fallows is complaining here that the NYT is acting as a newspaper instead of just hating on Trump. I suspect that people like Fallows are so used to all reporting being activist that they no longer recognise normalcy. In their eyes there are only two possibilities: the article is either anti-Trump activism or pro-Trump activism. And if it’s not sufficiently obviously the former then it must be latter.
Coel, your comment #1 misunderstands and misrepresents the point that James Fallows tweeted above, about the NYT framing the Trump case of fraud as a case of the First Amendment and free speech. Fallows tweeted [bolding mine]:
NBC News posted an excellent overview of four possible legal defenses for Trump. One possible defense discussed was [italics mine]:
James Fallows is complaining here that the NYT is framing the Trump case of fraud as a case of the FIRST AMENDMENT and Free Speech [NYT front page, Aug 3]:
As a lawyer friend texted me:
Interesting. Thanks Dave!