New York Times Coverage of Trump Is Critical in Reporting Lies as Lies

American president reported as lying in the New York Times
this week in historic news column by Shear and Huetteman.

The New York Times offers news analyses this week following its decision to run the headline Donald Trump stated a "lie" for a piece by Michael D. Shear and Emmarie Huetteman on Trump's latest voter fraud falsehoods.

Notes the Times' Dan Barry:

Dean Baquet, the executive editor of The Times, said that he learned of Mr. Trump’s latest comments in a text message from an editor on Monday night. After consulting with other top editors, he decided that the use of 'lie' was warranted.

Presidents have been lying since George Washington so what gives at the Times vis a vis Trump?

What gives is Donald Trump is a dangerous malignant fascist, deranged and depraved, who threatens large swaths of the population. It's that straightforward.

Sure the Times should have reported on, with similar justifications, other dangerous liars in the past, but so what?

Trump is a psychopath who can inflict terrible damage, and the ridiculous conventions of American journalism inhibiting reporting on liars as liars can inflict dreadful costs on human beings.

The Wisconsin political culture presents a case study of what can happen when just about everyone plays dumb in the face of fascism.

Take a policy-averse population, a moribund Democratic Party, strident appeals to bigotry and a cowardly corporate press and a polity will produce a Scott Walker, or a Donald Trump.

Wisconsin will survive Scott Walker and the Republican racists' lost decade (2011-2019), but any thinking Wisconsinite will tell you the state has been shaken to its soul.

The New York Times, ever mindful of history, has decided it will not stand by and watch Trump's promised systemic harm of people and the destruction of reforming and humanizing institutions.

In that very notion of characterizing a presidential lie as a lie is a commitment to the truth and an abiding belief in the words of the great Madison newspaper journalist, William T. Evjue,"Give the people the truth and the freedom to discuss it and all will go well."

So the paper acted. Good for the Times.

Canceling Our Wisconsin State Journal Subscription

South-central Wisconsin daily chooses ideology over facts and evidence

This household will receive its last hard copy issue of the Wisconsin State Journal this week. We are canceling our subscription. Our original subscription was for the Capital Times, and we were led to the State Journal kicking and screaming as it was the last resort of a print daily in Madison.

The State Journal has increasingly nixed local coverage like many print dailies, but the State Journal stands out in this regard especially after it axed veteran writers Doug Moe and sports writers Andy Baggot and Dennis Semrau last June, deciding profits are more interesting than people and local policymaking (Lueders, Isthmus).

Unlike other dailies, the State Journal can't blame its dispensing with community coverage on corporate media consolidation, social media, and the Internet (Peck, Editor and Publisher and George, Mediashift).

The State Journal made its decision, and chose hard-right ideology over facts, evidence and analysis; stenography over investigation and reporting. This echoes the rest of the corporate press.

The lifeblood of print dailies, local coverage, appears a quaint memory today.

There is a group of talented reporters still at the State Journal but their copy is almost always slanted toward the Republican Party of Wisconsin by copy editors (they write the headlines), and the perverse conventions of modern journalism, refusing to note as fact the duplicity of political office holders and their paymasters during this period of unprecedented corruption and lawlessness.

As an aside, we note with appreciation the tenacity and outstanding performance of our newspaper carrier.

More important than the depletion of local coverage—a hole being filled in Dane County in part by Woodward Communications, Inc.'s Unified Newspaper Group based in Verona and the weekly Isthmus—is the undeniable fact the State Journal is and has been a propaganda sheet for the rightist Republican Party in its slanted news and disingenuous editorial page.

The State Journal has followed the crazed Republican Party of Wisconsin right off the cliff, damn the consequences for the state.

Its refusal to endorse Scott Walker last year was an act of self preservation, yet even this editorial omits the myriad scandals and economic, social, and environmental disasters that Walker has inflicted onto Wisconsin.

Instead in the milquetoast endorsement of Walker's opponent, Mary Burke, the State Journal describes Walker as divisive and his tenure in chairing his signature 'jobs' agency as sloppy and disappointing.

Corrupt, vindictive, spiteful, destructive and betraying of generations of Wisconsinites would have been more appropriate language in describing Scott Walker, as the editors of the State Journal are aware.

Our household is no longer prepared to support this Republican propaganda organ and the pamphleteers producing it. We'll pick up our free print edition of the local Capital Times, (delivered to subscribers on Wednesdays with the State Journal), at the Meadowridge library.

On a final note, the subscription price of the State Journal varies widely and depends on little known and seemingly arbitrary ways to sign up. Last year we found out that we paid nearly double of what others paid for the same service. This after paying that high fee for over 18 years. There have been many times since the Capital Times became a weekly that we have considered canceling our subscription to the State Journal, but now with all these factors piling up, it seems a wiser choice to get our local news from more locally minded sources, such as WKOW and WISC television.

State Journal Backs Scott Walker in News Columns

Scott Walker received some good news today: Frontpage coverage in the Wisconsin State Journal in a long piece by Matthew DeFour who decided to double as a press aide for the Walker campaign.

DeFour covered an event in Ames, Iowa sponsored by the evangelical The Family Leader, which is partnered with the virulently misogynistic, homophobic and anti-Semitic Focus on the Family and Family Research Council, part of "an exclusionist religious movement in this country [that] has attempted to restore what it perceives as the ruins of a Christian nation by more closely seeking to unite its version of Christianity with state power." (Foxman, ADL (2005), citing The Religious Right: The Assault on Tolerance and Pluralism in America (1994)).

DeFour left out these facts in his reporting of the Family Leadership Summit, the proper biblical kind of "family."

DeFour writes this religious right Christianites' event was composed of "religious conservatives." Actually, a more apt explanation would include the word, Christian Dominionist.

And DeFour quotes Scott Walker speaking about his 'faith': "It defines not just who I am and what I believe in, but how I treat others. I hope people saw that even at the height of when 100,000 protesters occupied our Capitol and I had death threats and all sorts of vicious attacks against me, against my family, against my children, against my parents and others, that we didn’t respond in kind. That in part was driven by our faith."

No knockdown is offered.

Is DeFour prepared to state he could not find a source to knock down the religious right and the governor who compared these same Wisconsin families to ISIS, four years after Walker "dropped a bomb" on these families to use Walker's metaphor in 2011?

Or how about knocking down Walker's false narrative that he suffered "vicious attacks?" DeFour couldn't find a source to knock this nonsense down? Or at least note Walker's lies are unverified?

DeFour did note the response from the some 2,700 Christianites was more subdued than Walker's previous address at other Iowa evangelical events.

Coming into the Stephens Auditorium from the July heat perhaps makes people relaxed, even subdued in the late afternoon.

Unless Brett Favre is talking, most people tend to be subdued in mid-July.