President Trump’s battles with reporters and cable hosts have been drawing plenty of criticism as they play out at news conferences and online.
But in too many instances, journalists are making egregious errors that provide fodder for those who already view the media as an untrustworthy collection of Trump-haters.
Donald G. McNeil Jr. has been a health and science reporter for the New York Times for three decades. I’ve followed his byline for a long time and always assumed he was a straight shooter.
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But in an interview he did Tuesday on CNN, McNeil bristled with bias, spewing anti-Trump and anti-administration opinions in a way that totally crossed the line for a beat reporter. He went so far, in fact, that the Times had to publicly scold him, albeit gently.
Had McNeil been a commentator or columnist, his remarks would have disappeared into the vast sea of partisan punditry. But he is covering the pandemic as a reporter for one of the nation’s top newspapers.
In his interview with Christiane Amanpour, McNeil said: “We completely blew it for the first two months of our response. We were in a headless-chicken phase, and yes, it’s the president’s fault, it’s not China’s fault.” Headless chicken? That set the tone for what followed.
His next target was the Centers for Disease Control. “We lost two months there, and that was because of incompetent leadership at the CDC…I think Dr. Redfield should resign.”
And with that, the journalist who covers the pandemic urged Robert Redfield to quit on grounds of incompetence. I’ve never heard of a reporter doing that, and it colors every single thing he writes about the agency from now on.
There was more. The “real coverup,” he said on CNN, was carried out by Trump, who kept saying the virus is “going to go away, it’s nothing…This is not somebody whose grasp of the science is even third-grade-level.” Wow.
And McNeil says it was a “mistake” for Trump to take the virus task force away from HHS Secretary Alex Azar and replace him “with Mike Pence, who’s a sycophant.”
Trump, Pence, Redfield–McNeil doesn’t think much of the people he’s covering.
The Times statement says that in the interview “Donald McNeil, Jr. went too far in expressing his personal views. His editors have discussed the issue with him to reiterate that his job is to report the facts and not to offer his own opinions. We are confident that his reporting on science and medicine for The Times has been scrupulously fair and accurate.”
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But how can Times readers have confidence that’s the case after the CNN eruption? A reporter not accustomed to being on television can be forgiven for blurting out something wrong, but this interview was bursting with bias.
Meanwhile, Chuck Todd, to his credit, apologized for an egregious error on “Meet the Press.”
The NBC program said it had inadvertently engaged in selective editing of a Bill Barr interview with CBS’s Catherine Herridge about the Mike Flynn case. What “Meet the Press” aired was Barr saying “history is written by the winner. So it largely depends on who is writing the history.” Bam, end of sound bite.
What Barr said next was: “But I think a fair history would say that it was a good decision because it upheld the rule of law. It helped, it upheld the standards of the Department of Justice, and it undid what was an injustice.” Todd and his panel could have attacked that reasoning, but the bite as played totally changed his meaning.
Todd now says his staff did not do the editing, but only saw the shorter of the two clips that CBS aired–a pretty lame explanation.
On his daily MSNBC show, Todd said: “We should have looked at both and checked for a full transcript–a mistake that I wish we hadn’t made and that I wish I hadn’t made.
“The second part of the attorney general’s answer would have put it in the proper context. And had I seen that part of the interview, I would not have framed the conversation the way I did. And I am obviously very sorry for that mistake. We strive to do better going forward.”
We all make mistakes. The problem for the mainstream media in the Trump era is that virtually all of them go against the president and his team, the very people who journalists often accuse of lying. There has been too much sloppiness, too many assumptions and too much running-and-gunning, leading to too many corrections and apologies.
Faith in the media has been fading for decades, but right now that lack of trust is a clear and present danger to the profession.
