Part of a journalist’s job is to report the truth, and sometimes that means providing context to what people say.
Suppose I were to write the following: “Bananas have tremendous nutritional value, being loaded with potassium, and make a fine substitute for eggs when baking. While they are an excellent nutritional choice, I personally think they taste disgusting.” For a journalist to then summarize my comments as, “Paul describes bananas as ‘disgusting,'” without acknowledging the qualifier illustrating the nutritional value of bananas, is a failure to report the full truth.
We could apply this scenario to the media’s dishonest reporting on President Trump referring to MS-13 gang members as “animals” this week as an attack on all illegal immigrants. Here’s how the exchange between the president and Sheriff Mims actually went:
SHERIFF MIMS: Thank you. There could be an MS-13 member I know about — if they don’t reach a certain threshold, I cannot tell ICE about it.
THE PRESIDENT: We have people coming into the country, or trying to come in — and we’re stopping a lot of them — but we’re taking people out of the country. You wouldn’t believe how bad these people are. These aren’t people. These are animals. And we’re taking them out of the country at a level and at a rate that’s never happened before.
Clearly, the president referred to the violent gang MS-13 as “animals,” not all illegal immigrants. And yet, here was how the Associated Press summarized his comments: “Trump referred to those crossing US border illegally as ‘animals’ and slammed California sanctuary state laws as ‘deadly.'”
And here was the title of The New York Times’ coverage of the comments: “Trump Calls Some Unauthorized Immigrants ‘Animals’ in Rant.”
Now that the media has yet more egg on their face, reporters like Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Weisman of
The New York Times say Trump is to blame for journalists completely misreporting his comments because he provided no direct link between MS-13 and “animals.” In other words, they have no duty to provide context:
Even though everyone with eyes and ears easily saw through the media’s sham within an instant of reading the transcripts, Weisman says reporters have no responsibility to provide context because they don’t speak Trumpese. Weisman’s colleague Maggie Haberman concurred:
And then Haberman goes on to say that Trump needs to change his language, not that reporters need to actually do their jobs:
People immediately shredded Haberman and Weisman for the buck-passing: