BREAKING NEWS: Trump Not Immune From Criminal Prosecution

We will talk about the Court of Appeals ruling on 2WAY at 1pm ET today...

Please join us on Zoom at this link at 1pm ET today to talk about this:

Our focus will be on what happens next, with all eyes on the Supreme Court — and the big question of whether Jack Smith can get a jury verdict before the summer (or before the election).

Then we will talk about media coverage of Trump, as planned.

Feel free to share the Zoom information with anyone you wish at this link

To get in the mood for the media talk, please read Jill Abramson’s great piece, exclusive to 2WAY, brilliantly reviewing the historical context:

By Jill Abramson

1) In 2016 none of us thought he had a chance of becoming President. But the reader/audience seemed to be interested in anything Trump and we all fed at the trough and made a lot of money from increased clicks and advertising and revenues. So began the Trump bump. So we covered everything, from the most outrageous lies (without calling them lies at first -- a big mistake) to the live shots of the empty podiums with mics, waiting for Trump's rallies to begin. (This prompted fury by protesters at Jeff Zucker at the 2016 post-election campaign managers conference at Harvard's IOP, and rightly so. First protests over Trump coverage that I remember.) I was writing a political opinion column in the Guardian in 2016, having been defrocked at the NYT in 2014.

2) 2016-2020 Trump as President. The press was at first in shock and somewhat cowed because of our failure to understand the force of Trump's base. We reverted to the customs of White House coverage, including every presidential utterance, no matter how absurd and false. We were slow to report on the freakout at the top of the staff –- like Gary Cohn and Rex Tillerson calling Trump moronic and talk in the Cabinet of invoking the Constitution to disqualify him from holding the office. As usual, Bob Woodward got the real story first, with the publication of his best Trump book, “Fear,” which I reviewed in the WashPost. Then, in anti-Trump over-reaction, the Washington press corps overplayed the Russia connection and Mueller investigation. See Jeff Gerth's good piece on this in CJR, especially critical of the NYT and WashPost, (both newspapers won Pulitzers for the Russia/Trump conspiracy coverage).

The best coverage was on the ground, deep reporting on the consequences of Trump's policies and his reversals of everything Obama did and Congress passed.

Did the press cover Trump's successes accurately and fairly? Certainly, his supporters don't think so. Not sure I do, either, but don't want to be kicked to the floor a la Jamie Dimon.

3) Coverage of the 2020 election was generally good, even the long days of the Tuesday-Saturday undecided results in the tight battleground states. The inside Fox News election night stories were important and riveting, I thought. I think we missed the raw fury of Trump voters who bought -- hook, line and sinker -- his false claims of a stolen election and voter fraud. Like GOP officeholders, including McCarthy and McConnell, we didn't think there were that many bonkers MAGA people who would believe Trump's absurd lies about voter fraud. Best story was the Post's scoop of Trump's pressure call to the Ga. Secretary of State to find those 7,000 non-existent votes.

4) Coverage of January 6. Like the government, the press failed to anticipate how wild and violent the Capitol insurrection could get. The visual investigations immediately after, published and broadcast by the New York Times and CNN, were splendid journalism, way in front of the January 6 hearings, which the press did an excellent job covering. Ditto the legal cases against Trump. It is not the media's fault that they seemingly did not deeply or lastingly engage and/or enrage the public.

5) Trump is the inevitable GOP nominee for President. The Republicans have fallen in line behind him across the board. I think coverage of the GOP's rank cowardice, when most Republicans know the truth that Biden won the election, has been strong.

The best coverage has been focused on what Trump would do in a second term. This includes the NYT series by Haberman, Swan and Savage and The Atlantic's special issue.

However, because it's so possible that Trump will be president again, his every word and outrageous statements receive press attention. Should we really be amplifying his continued calumny of E. Jean Carroll, especially after a jury has ruled that Trump slandered her? Aren't reporters just amplifying Trump's false eviscerating words about her? What is the real news value or information contained in his rants? Maybe best to say “he has continued to slander her” and leave it at that rather than going for the clickbait of Trump's outrageous comments?

In many ways, I worry, we are still flummoxed over how to cover Trump. To censor him is arrogant, as this empowers editors/gatekeepers that the public does not trust anymore. "We get to know what Trump says, but you don’t," won't cut it. But if 2016 was an object lesson in how Trump spins the press and uses us to trumpet his words, did we learn from it and does anything we did learn help guide us now????

As an editor, If I had one piece of advice it would be: Contextualize everything.