Abstract
As Stephen Bates reminds us in his new book, An Aristocracy of Critics (Yale University Press, 2020), the 1947 Hutchins Commission report, A Free and Responsible Press: A General Report on Mass Communication: Newspapers, Radio, Motion Pictures, Magazines, and Books, asserted, “it is no longer enough to report the fact truthfully. It is now necessary to report the truth about the fact.”
It was, in fact, always true, not just “now.” But that concept and goal became increasingly urgent, not just relevant, in the following few decades. Sen. Joe McCarthy lied repeatedly about having lists of communists working in the federal government, and it was no longer sufficient to simply quote him accurately just because he was a U.S. senator. The Johnson Administration lied just about every day about the Vietnam War, and it was no longer sufficient to simply quote accurately the president, the defense secretary and military brass. President Nixon also lied about Vietnam War plus Watergate, and again it was no longer sufficient to simply quote accurately the president, his chief of staff, his attorney general and so on.
These are lessons that the journalism profession supposedly drilled into itself and passed down formally through media history, media ethics and reporting courses, and informally inside the journalism profession and media industries.
It does not seem to have worked for very long, if at all. Even among journalists who hold a journalism degree, they continue to demonstrate that, at best, they have a short memory for the grand lessons of journalism, and otherwise never learned them in the first place (it does not help that entire courses in media history and media ethics are rarely required, with media history sprinkled through first-year survey courses and media ethics given a few weeks at the end of a media law course). Exhibit A is presidential campaign coverage. U.S. journalists have engaged in ritual hand-wringing, teeth-gnashing and head-banging about every or nearly every presidential election in my lifetime: Yes, we did a lousy job covering the election. We’re sorry. We’ll do better next time.
Which is always followed by just as lousy, if not worse, performance the next time. Election year 2016 perhaps reached an all-time modern low as Donald Trump, completely unqualified to be president and not pretending to be, received not only far more news coverage (not even close) than his Democratic opponent, former Secretary of State and former U.S. Senator Hillary Clinton, but also all of his Republican primary opponents, all of whom were more serious and almost all of whom clearly more qualified than The Donald. But this Editor’s Note column is not solely or even primarily about news coverage of presidential campaigns or even about news coverage of Trump, although I’ll return to that, as the headline makes clear.
No, the point here is about individual journalists and news organizations generally having the self-confidence and, yes, the courage to report on what is right in front of their faces. As Kyle Pope headlined his September 30, 2020, essay, “Journalism must show Trump as he is, not seek normalcy.” (This also often requires knowledge, often as basic as not referring to mainstream liberals as the Left or Far Left, since those terms, depending on the context, refer to communism or anarchy.)
The year 2020 is instructive without bringing up COVID-19, massive Western wildfires, or the country’s recession and unemployment. As Yale English professor David Bromwich’s essay in the November 2020 issue of Harper’s magazine, “Is America Ungovernable: The difference between protest and reform,” pointed out, news media blew major aspects of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) story. Among other things, the clearly liberal Bromwich complained that news media perceived to also be liberal seemed to have downplayed levels of violence and numbers of violent participants. (Certainly, Americans like me who primarily consume news in written form got a whole other “picture”—more words, less violent video—than those consuming news primarily or solely via television and social media.) My beef with last year’s BLM coverage was that most Americans seemed to have received little to no information about BLM’s leadership, organizational structure (or nearly lack thereof, as the case is), funding sources, financial strength, legal status, and so on. With people even mistakenly donating hundreds of thousands of dollars to a completely unrelated Black Lives Matter organization in California, who really knew or even knows now what and BLM is and isn’t?
In the October 4, 2020, New York Times’ media columnist Ben Smith wrote, “How to Cover a Sick Old Man,” largely about President Trump’s reported case of COVID-19, but also about POLITICO journalist John Bresnahan covering earlier sick old men such as former Senators Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.) and Thad Cochran (R-Miss.). In the December 10, 2020, The New Yorker, Jane Mayer added her story, “Dianne Feinstein’s Missteps Raise a Painful Age Question Among Senate Democrats.” Its central point is that the country in recent decades has had too many octogenarian (or older) politicians who couldn’t do their jobs anymore (in addition to Feinstein—the story mentions the late Senators Robert Byrd [D-W.V.] and Thurmond). But its secondary point is that journalists have been largely unwilling to point out, either directly to their constituents or to the country at large, how their diminished capacities have been affecting their performances in their highly important federal government jobs.
(During Fall 2020, I asked my media ethics students on their final exam to make educated guesses about why U.S. journalists have often not pointed out the mental or physical illnesses or other disabilities of politicians such as Thurmond or Feinstein. My students suggested many different reasons [some rooted in ethics and others not]: not wanting to stereotype the elderly, not damaging politicians’ chances of being re-elected, wanting to maintain access to sources, not feeling qualified to essentially make medical or psychological diagnoses, and others. But, to their credit, almost all of my students also felt that reasons for journalists to not share such information could be addressed satisfactorily and that the public needs to know anyway. [And I doubt any students knew that both Byrd and Thurmond were president pro tempore of the Senate—third in succession to the presidency—at the times of their deaths.] No student mentioned the extent to which US journalists have been intimidated by conservative politicians’ complaints about supposed liberal bias, the modern rendition of which was started by the criminal Vice-President Spiro Agnew in Des Moines in 1969 and continued to greater-and-lesser extents for decades up through the apparently criminal President Donald Trump. New York Times’ media columnist Ben Smith felt compelled to respond to Trump in early September 2020 with, “Journalists Aren’t the Enemy of the People. But We’re Not Your Friends.”)
Jane Meyer, Ben Smith, John Bresnahan and many others (including me, of course) also agree that journalists must cover what they must cover. As Smith’s October 4 column put it, This kind of reporting is impolite. It’s also totally obvious, and a natural feature of America’s recent slide toward gerontocracy. On Capitol Hill, everyone “knows this stuff,” Mr. Bresnahan said. “I just am the one to write it.” By refusing to speak honestly about basic facts, the White House is really “annihilating the press’s role,” said Elizabeth Drew, a former New Yorker Washington correspondent who covered President Ronald Reagan’s shooting in 1981 and his staff’s success at playing down the grave risk to his life . . . [J]ournalists must get past the taboos and be frank about the normal process of aging, and must emulate Mr. Bresnahan’s stomach for blunt truths.
Not telling the public something that is well known to government or corporate insiders, by the way, has a long and sad history in the United States, whether it was not telling the public the extent of President Franklin Roosevelt’s disability, or about President John F. Kennedy’s revolving bedroom door, or this corporate executive is an alcoholic or that one is a gay. Not covering something that is right in front of their faces also a long history among U.S. journalists. My usual example is that it seems every community has at least one busybody/gadfly/town crank who shows up at every city council meeting and usually or always speaks during the public comment period. What these people say often is partially to completely inaccurate, but sometimes there is a “stopped-clock-is-right-twice-a-day” moment with a suggestion or a complaint, and occasionally there is an “emperor-has-no-clothes” moment when they ask why the mayor’s nephew got the snow-plowing contract with no competitive bidding. Often, they are the only public commenters during city council meetings except highly scripted presentations by invited citizens. In any case, city councils and journalists both typically act like these people don’t exist: No one listens to them while they are talking and they never get mentioned in the next morning’s newspaper.
In recent months, there finally, emphasis on finally, has been a rising chorus among journalists and many others that almost all news media waited too long to use the word “lie” about President Trump’s lies. Indeed, the Washington Post had documented about 25,000 public lies by Trump during his presidency by Election Day 2020, but the Post never used the word “lie” about any Trump statement until August 2018, about 19 months after he was inaugurated. The New York Times’ editor, Dean Baquet, publicly addressed the issue of how to handle Trump’s lies even before he was elected and, in fact, reported on September 16, 2016, that Trump had
Among those who say that journalists urgently need to reform are the Baltimore Sun’s media columnist, David Zurawik, who on December 22, 2020, published his column, “Journalism needs to do a major post-mortem in coming months on its coverage of Trump.” Zurawik criticizes his fellow journalists not only for not more often pointing out Trump’s lies but also for not calling out Trump more often when the president was being racist and/or “fascist.” Zurawik called for U.S. journalists to say “never again.” I agree, but pardon me if I’m not terribly optimistic about that happening; I’ve seen this movie before.
Mayer’s article on Feinstein and other diminished politicians claims, “The physical and mental fitness of Trump, who is seventy-four, and Joe Biden, who is seventy-eight, have also been extensively covered.” Again, pardon me, but I completely disagree with that. Trump supporters crowed about Biden’s occasional “gaffes,” which occurred in 2020 perhaps once or twice a month, if that, while overlooking the fact that Trump said or tweeted something ridiculous (lie, or guess, or a prescription for injecting bleach) many times per day, every day. The biggest elephant in the room, however, has been Trump’s mental fitness beyond, but including, his lies. And, as Lee Siegel headlined his February 17, 2017, essay for Columbia Journalism Review, “Avoiding questions about Trump’s mental health is a betrayal of public trust.”
Journalists have had no shortage of resources, in addition to mental health professionals willing to speak on or off the record in interviews: The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President, by Bandy X. Lee, was published in 2017, and was expanded in a March 2019 edition, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 37 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President—Updated and Expanded with New Essays (Thomas Dunne Books) that made a small splash. Flash forward to July 2020, and Trump’s niece, psychologist Mary Trump, released her Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man. In between were Michael Maccoby’s Psychoanalytic and Historical Perspectives on the Leadership of Donald Trump (May 2020); John Kruse’s Recognizing Adult ADHD: What Donald Trump Can Teach Us About Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (July 2019); John Gartner et al.’s Rocket Man: Nuclear Madness and the Mind of Donald Trump (June 2018); John Martin-Joy’s Diagnosing From a Distance: Debates Over Libel Law, Media, and Psychiatric Ethics From Barry Goldwater to Donald Trump (April 2020); Justin A. Frank’s Trump on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President (September 2018); Steven Buser et al.’s A Clear and Present Danger: Narcissism in the Era of Donald Trump (July 2016); Rachel Montgomery and John Gartner’s All I Ever Wanted to Know About Donald Trump I Learned From His Tweets: A Psychological Exploration of the President via Twitter (September 2017); and, of course, Bill Eddy’s Why We Elect Narcissists and Sociopaths—and How We Can Stop (May 2019).
The only English-language book I could find arguing that Trump does not have serious mental disorders is Psychologically Sound: The Mind of Donald J. Trump (March 2020), by the long retired Dr. Sheldon Roth which, based on both its description and readers’ mostly positive reviews, does not seem to bear much connection to reality. Apparently even it is not completely favorable to Trump.
Then there were the books by his former friends and employees (e.g., Omarosa Manigault Newman’s Unhinged: An Insider’s Account of the Trump White House or Michael Cohen’s Disloyal: A Memoir) and journalists given amazing access (e.g., Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House and Bob Woodward’s Fear and Rage).
The books were in addition to developments such as an October 2017 petition with more than 65,000 signatures, apparently most of them mental health professionals, stating that Trump had “serious mental illness that renders him psychologically incapable of competently discharging the duties of President of the United States.” That petition was only one of many attempts by mental health professionals to raise an alarm.
Analogies have run fast and furious: If Trump were a cop, you would need to take away his gun; if Trump were your elderly father or grandfather, you would send him to an assisted-living facility or nursing him, if not a psychiatric hospital; if Trump were a doctor or lawyer, you would have his license revoked; and so on. (Frankly, says Bandy X. Lee, one would “not . . . rule out an involuntary psychiatric evaluation.”) Yet Trump’s mental fitness has not been “extensively covered,” contrary to Jane Meyer’s throwaway claim.
Trump has been variously viewed as suffering from narcissistic personality disorder or malignant narcissism, anti-social personality disorder, paranoid personality disorder, delusional disorder, dementia, sadism, manipulativeness and using projection. Mary Trump wrote in her book that her uncle’s “pathologies are so complex and his behaviors so often inexplicable that coming up with an accurate and comprehensive diagnosis would require a full battery of psychological and neuropsychological tests that he’ll never sit for.” Psychologists’ ethical standards have long been based on the “Goldwater Rule”—that a person’s mental state cannot be diagnosed without a one-on-one examination using proper interview techniques and other protocols. However, many U.S. psychologists have invoked their “duty to warn” (and formed an organization by that name) and clearly believe—as many of the rest of us do—that Trump’s bizarre behaviors and statements are so public, so frequent and mostly unambiguous that we are all well past the point of “If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.” New York Times’ mental health reporter Richard Friedman’s argument that judging Trump as mentally ill lets him “off the moral hook” does not change my judgment about this, nor does the argument that fully covering and discussing Trump’s psychological disorders stigmatizes others (that is a significant concern). As Lee Siegel’s February 2017 CJR essay put it, “The more contentious question has been whether to raise it, and to keep raising it. At this point, not to do so, especially for journalists, is a betrayal of the public trust, a denial of human nature, and an insult to posterity.” We are talking about the planet’s most powerful person (unless you think that would be Xi Jinping or Mark Zuckerberg).
U.S. journalists also cannot and should not have left this matter up to the country’s mental health establishment. As Bandy Lee told Bill Moyers during the January 14, 2021, episode of Moyers on Democracy (from which the quoted words in this column’s headline are taken), the American Psychological Association’s official response to psychologists who felt compelled to warn the rest of us about Trump was that psychologists have no such responsibility, national security (and other matters) be damned. (As it turned out, the rest of U.S. journalists should not, if they were tempted or did, have left this matter up to the New York Times either. It published a full-page op-ed from a former American Psychiatric Association president saying Trump isn’t so bad, along with a Times editorial saying that no one should pass judgment on a U.S. president’s mental health, including psychiatrists. On Moyers’ program, Lee referred to “some of the most renowned figures of psychiatry repeatedly making submissions upwards of about 200 op-eds over the past few years. And the Times has not accepted even one of them.”)
If U.S. journalists had taken it seriously that Trump has one or more serious mental disorders, they would have kept that in mind covering (and writing) every story, instead of covering a book like Bandy X. Lee’s or Mary Trump’s for one day and then going on as if they had never been published. Keeping in mind the primary and secondary motivating factors of newsmakers is, of course, common and not new for journalists: One politician seems to be primarily motivated by power, another one primarily by getting re-elected, another one by getting rich through well connected business deals, and so on. It would have been highly unusual, though not unprecedented, for journalists to have covered Trump always keeping in mind, in addition to wanting to get re-elected and/or pursue certain policy goals, that his mental disorders were partially to fully responsible for him doing this, not doing that, saying this, and not saying that. But that rarely happened, despite U.S. journalists’ frequent comfort with far more speculative ideas than Trump having multiple mental disorders.
In addition to wanting to avoid having Trump supporters hit them like a tidal wave, I also wonder if U.S. journalists largely did not go with what is front of their eyes because they did not want to encourage serious discussion of removing Trump from office via the 25th Amendment before the January 6 insurrection Journalists need to understand that the 25th Amendment is not just a theory; it exists precisely to remove presidents like Trump. (And invoking the 25th Amendment is not, as U.S. journalists too often but inaccurately say, a “constitutional crisis.” A “constitutional crisis” exists when the Constitution does not provide a mechanism for fixing a important problem, such as a U.S. Senate that does almost nothing for several years other than confirm judges and cut taxes. Therefore, properly invoking the 25th Amendment because of a dangerous president is the constitution functioning, not a constitutional crisis.) If the U.S. would not use the 25th Amendment to remove Trump, just how mentally disordered does a U.S. president need to be to removed from office anyway? (Similarly, if Trump did not fit the bill as precisely a demagogue with “Talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity,” who the Electoral College was designed to stop, who would the Electoral College not elect? The mind boggles—I’m betting Mussolini would have passed muster—and an Electoral College failing at its sole responsibility also is a constitutional crisis.)
While very few mainstream U.S. journalists covered Trump’s multiple mental illnesses in any serious, let alone sustained, way—for nearly all it was impolite, or unproven, or just one Trump characteristic out of so many—I argue (like Trump’s niece, psychologist Mary Trump) that Trump’s mental illnesses are the key fact about him, the one that all journalists needed to always keep in mind and mention whenever relevant, which was pretty much all the time. As Andrew Sullivan’s January 8, 2021, essay, “This Is The Face Of The GOP Now: The descent from conservatism to nihilism is now complete,” says, For anyone with eyes not blinded by tribalism or ears deafened by denial, what happened in Washington this week was always going to happen. Trump’s character and profound psychological deformation always, always meant he would not relinquish power without an almighty struggle. We elected an instinctual tyrant, preternaturally incapable of understanding the give and take of democratic politics, for whom losing in any contest threatens the core of his very being, and who has no effective control over the roiling emotions that course through his thickened arteries. Some of us were ridiculed for saying from the very beginning that there would have to be some kind of violence to remove him, if he were to lose the next election. We still are. We’re called victims of TDS, or Trump Derangement Syndrome, as if this were not the only sane position when a delusional, malignant, tyrant-wannabe has an entire political party in his grip, aided and abetted by tribal media tools. For myself, from the very beginning, having examined Trump’s past and observed his plain-as-day pathology, I just couldn’t envision how this figure could psychologically, voluntarily ever leave the Oval Office. Every single day of his presidency has confirmed this. He has blown through every guardrail against presidential abuse that exists. Trump is now and always has been delusional. He lives in an imaginary world. His insistence that he won the last election in a “landslide” is psychologically indistinguishable from his declaration on his first day that his Inaugural crowd was larger than his predecessor’s. For four years, the actual evidence did not matter. It still doesn’t. Any rumor that helps him, however ludicrous, is true; every cold fact that hurts him, however trivial or banal, doesn’t exist. For four years as president, any advisor who told him the truth, rather than perpetuating his delusions, had an immediate expiration date. For four years, an army of volunteer propagandists knowingly disseminated his insane, cascading torrent of lies. And Trump really believes these fantasies. He is not a calculating man. He is a creature of total impulse. As I wrote almost five years ago now, quoting Plato, a tyrant is a man “not having control of himself [who] attempts to rule others”; a man flooded with fear and love and passion, while having little or no ability to restrain or moderate them; a “real slave to the greatest fawning,” a man who “throughout his entire life . . . is full of fear, overflowing with convulsions and pains.” For the ancients, a tyrant represented the human whose appetites and fantasies had no form of rational control. This is dangerous in normal times. In an emergency like Covid19, it turned catastrophic. For Trump, the virus could not exist or would disappear all of a sudden because it might threaten his re-election. Anything in the press that did not reflect his own reality was, in his mind, invented. Dozens of lawsuits that failed to prove any fraud in the election were simply proof that the conspiracy against him was even bigger. His own propaganda channel, Fox News, broadcast Trump’s delusions as if they were true for five long years. But as soon as their off- camera nerds reported actual election results, Fox too had to be anathematized as fake. His vice-president, the most shameless lackey of them all, eventually could not force himself to do something that was feasible only in Trump’s imagination—and so, he too became a traitor in the bitter, bunker end . . . He is out of his mind. There has been no change in five years, except a faster version of the decline of sanity in anyone wielding that amount of power for that long . . . The people [including journalists] finally acknowledging that they have been enabling a madman for years deserve our gratitude for their late recognition, but can never be free of the shame they will carry for the rest of their lives.
Any post-mortem of U.S. journalism after January 20, 2021, needs to start not with asking the normally important and urgent question of why U.S. journalists overwhelmingly allowed Trump and other administration officials to publicly lie hundreds of times per week for 4 years. (There is a larger issue of why U.S. journalists allow themselves to be regularly lied to by everyone from police officers to corporate CEOs.) That needs to be done, too, as argued by many including Nieman Reports’ January 2021 essay, “The Extremist Mob at the U.S. Capitol Was America, Too: Journalists need to do a better job conveying that ugly truth to audiences.”
The post-mortem needs to address U.S. journalists’ tendency, far from sensationalizing the ordinary, to minimize elephants in the room. As Kyle Pope’s September CJR essay said, For the past three and a half years, we have covered this man, and this administration, with a willful, Groundhog Day forgetfulness . . . Let’s put an end to this awful cycle. How about if, in the weeks left before the election, we try and cover this president for what he is, not what we want him to be? What if we try to be honest about what is happening, rather than trying to stuff Trump into a costume of normality that he refuses to wear anyway? . . . The fact that we have a president who has lost all mooring is itself the story, not a sidebar or an observation left to the opinion pages.
So most urgently and importantly, the Trump presidency post-mortem by the news media needs to start with asking a question that went from so outlandish as to not even be posed hypothetically, to our painful reality: Why did almost all U.S. journalists—from the New York Times down to local journalists who should have covered Trump’s Congressional and Republican Party enablers—essentially do nothing about their country having a “violent” president, with a “loose grip on reality” and who “lacked mental capacity for rational decision making” (Lee), for 4 years?
Clarification
The Fall 2020 issue’s article, “Autism in the media: A longitudinal study of stigma cues and framing of attribution,” by Nan Yu and Laura Farrell, does not explicitly refer to autism as a “disease”–a word otherwise used in several contexts–but also does not say that autism is not a “disease”; autism is more accurately a “syndrome.” The article does not mention that the definition of, and diagnostic criteria for, autism were changed in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Standard Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), in 1980, 1987, 1994, and 2013, newsworthy changes that affected which, and how many, children were diagnosed on an autism spectrum. The article, in analyzing 1998-2013 news media coverage of autism attributions, could have emphasized that, even by 2020, various symptoms are only correlated with autism (and other conditions); causation still has not been established.
Hinsley & Lee receive NRJ’s Third, Wolfgang et al. win Fourth, Research Awards
Amber Hinsley’s (Texas State University) and Hyunmin Lee’s (Drexel University) article, “Tweeting in the midst of disaster: A comparative case study of journalists’ practices following four crises,” received NRJ’s third $1,000 research award, voted by the journal’s Editorial Board as the “best” article in the Summer 2020 issue. The recipients of NRJ’s research award for the Fall 2020 issue are J. David Wolfgang, Hayley Blackburn, and Stephen McConnell (all at Colorado State University) for their article, “Keepers of the comments: How comment moderators handle audience contributions.” Beginning in 2020 (Volume 41), recipients have been determined and awarded following receipt of the journal’s printed copies by the Board’s participating members. Recipients also are noted on the journal’s website. More information is available at: https://journals-sagepub-com-s.web.bisu.edu.cn/home/nrj