They want to be seen as neutral
Sargent: Indeed. I want to ask you about this idea of self-censorship under that pressure. You have some experience and insight with what happens inside The New York Times. You were public editor. How do you think editors and newsroom leaders experience criticism like this from Trump? Do they see it as something to worry about? Do they get anxious about being perceived as being biased against Trump? How does this sort of stuff register internally there?
Sullivan: There’s a real push and pull about it. Reporters want to do good stories. They’re not going after Trump, or it’s not really about their personal politics or whether the Times leans left or right. They want to do a good story. They want to do stories that get attention, that could win a prize, that tell us something that we didn’t know. That’s what motivates reporters and their immediate editors.
As you go higher up the food chain, there is a concern that big news organizations not be perceived as too liberal or liberal at all. They want to be seen as neutral. The question is, and this came up a lot during the campaign and it just comes up all the time, can you really be neutral when you’re dealing with Donald Trump?
That.
That’s the thing about Trump: it’s not even about left v right or Democrats v Republicans. Or it is about that but before you even get to that, it’s about Trump himself, Trump the person, Trump the human monstrosity. It’s about handing power to a human with no trace of conscience or empathy or generosity or any such other-directed feeling and morality. We haven’t seen that before. We’ve seen people in power with not enough such feeling, or with such feeling aimed in the wrong direction, but not people with none of it at all.
So, in that sense, it’s grotesque to demand “neutrality” about him. It’s a moral outrage to be neutral about a person like that.
Once again, it’s roughly analogous to reporting on soccer match that ended 10-1 and calling it a draw (to reframe it in terms of bad rather than good, think of goals let in rather than goals scored): You either have to refrain from reporting nine of the goals let in by one of the teams, or You somehow have to make the one goal let in by the other team seem ten times as bad (“but her emails!”, “she called ordinary people deplorables!” etc.)
Telling everyone, clearly and factually, just how depraved and cruel DJT is, IS being “neutral,” in the sense of objective truth. NOT telling the clear truth about DJT is de facto right wing collaboration. So much for “neutrality.” Their false facade of “wanting to be seen” as neutral (1) didn’t work, and (2) normalized evil. It didn’t work, because they were still pummeled with the cudgel of “liberal bias!” while actually operating in the real world as facilitators of the right wing..
There should be a challenge – perhaps with a large reward attached. Name ONE THING Donald Trump has ever done out of sheer generosity and kindness (the real kind, not the “women should just be kind” kind). Just one.
Pete Souza’s book Shade is a good illustration of how challenging the challenge is. Behind the scenes incidents of Obama just goofing around with children, like a human being. There are no photos of Trump doing anything like that, because he’s a trump instead of a human being. He laughed his ass off at the idea he would ever have taken his kids for a walk in Central Park.
I find it frustrating that people frequently harp about “bias”, when I think the more important factors are thoroughness and accuracy. Have a point of view, but give me the information I need; maybe I’ll agree, maybe I won’t, but at least I’ll have the information. The appropriate questions are not whether something is biased, but whether it’s true and whether relevant true information is being left out. Media outlets should not be afraid to put out copious amounts of truth.