I couldn’t put my finger on it before. It now makes sense. I totally agree that the mainstream media makes Trump seem a lot smarter and more coherent than he actually is. It’s a travesty and shows that big media companies in the US cannot be trusted.
Parker Molloy first brought this up in 2020:
The piece said Trump was regularly unprepared to make real judgments during boardroom scenes, and “editors were often obliged to ‘reverse engineer’ the episode, scouring hundreds of hours of footage to emphasize the few moments when the exemplary candidate might have slipped up, in an attempt to assemble an artificial version of history in which Trump’s shoot-from-the-hip decision made sense.”
The big difference is that in tweets, he’s giving the world a direct look at who he is. In coverage of his spoken remarks, the chaos is largely edited out
The Apprentice gave us a prime-time version of Trump, the fictional business mogul; the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, and others give us Trump, the fictional president. The public deserves better.
The media is back at it again, so Molloy revisited the topic:
The general practice went like this: The press would take something Trump said or did—for instance, using a visit to the Centers for Disease Control to ask about Fox News’s ratings, insult then–Washington Governor Jay Inslee, rant about his attempt to extort Ukraine into digging up dirt on Joe Biden, and downplay the rising number of Covid-19 cases in the U.S.—and write them up as The New York Times did: “Trump Says ‘People Have to Remain Calm’ Amid Coronavirus Outbreak.” This had the effect of making it seem like Trump’s words and actions seemed cogent and sensible for the vast majority of Americans who didn’t happen to watch his rant live.
CNN described that rambling, insult-laden, conspiracy-riddled wall of text—itself a pretty good example of what he spends his time off the campaign trail doing—by writing, “Former President Donald Trump on Tuesday announced he has ‘reached an agreement’ to participate in a September 10 debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, noting that ‘the rules will be the same as the last CNN debate, which seemed to work out well for everyone.’”
Does that really capture what Trump posted?
By laundering Trump’s words in this fashion, the media is actively participating in the erosion of our shared reality.
Voters who rely solely on traditional news sources are presented with a version of Trump that bears little resemblance to reality.
By framing Trump’s incoherent ramblings as some form of avant-garde oratory, the Times isn’t just failing to accurately report—it’s actively warping reality to its readers.
To combat this, we need a paradigm shift in political reporting. Instead of contorting themselves to find rationality in incoherence, journalists should simply present politicians’ words and actions plainly, complete with fact-checks. This might mean rethinking traditional notions of “objectivity” that often lead to false equivalencies and misrepresentation.
Jay Goldberg, who’s referenced in the above article said the following:
It works like this: Trump sounds nuts, but he can’t be nuts, because he’s the presumptive nominee for president of a major party, and no major party would nominate someone who is nuts. Therefore, it is our responsibility to sand down his rhetoric, to identify any kernel of meaning, to make light of his bizarro statements, to rationalize. Which is why, after the electric-shark speech, much of the coverage revolved around the high temperatures in Las Vegas, and other extraneities. The Associated Press headline on a story about the event read this way: “Trump Complains About His Teleprompters at a Scorching Las Vegas Rally.” The New York Times headlined its story thus: “In Las Vegas, Trump Appeals to Local Workers and Avoids Talk of Conviction.” CNN’s headline: “Trump Proposes Eliminating Taxes on Tips at Las Vegas Campaign Rally.”
And then yesterday, Molloy updated us with the latest on the sanewashing. I’m not going to quote it, but it’s stark when you compare the transcript of what Trump said vs. how it was reported.