News organizations do Donald Trump’s dirty work for him when he says something vile, they report it, and they don’t clearly explain what’s wrong with it.
Case in point: Trump’s questioning of Kamala Harris’s race in an interview at the National Association of Black Journalists convention on Wednesday.
It earned him banner headlines that I suspect he’s quite pleased with.
Report after report repeated what he said — often casting the remarks as controversial, but leaving it to the reader or viewer to figure out why.
As director David Simon wrote on Twitter:
What is notable in reading most of mainstream journalism’s coverage of Trump’s utter meltdown today at NABJ is that most reporters and editors are incapable of and mortified by the task of calling overt, raw racism what it is. They can attribute the claim to others, but dare not hear it with their own ears and then say so.
The reporters will tell you that “everybody knows” what was wrong with what Trump said. But precisely what was wrong about them is not so easy to explain.
That’s why reporters don’t do it!
In this case, the comments were not just “false,” they were lies, and they were not just “controversial,” they were plainly racist and divisive.
How, exactly? We need to be very clear.
- They were racist in that Trump was questioning the entire biracial experience. Kamala Harris did not “turn” Black. She was born Black and Indian. The two aren’t at odds with each other
- They were racist in that Trump, a white man, had the gall to opine on the way a person of color described herself. That’s incredibly disrespectful.
- They were racist in that, in a baldfaced lie, Trump accused Harris of “turning” from one race to another – as if such a thing were possible — in an act of political expediency. That’s a vile charge.
- They were racist just like Trump’s early “birther” attacks on Barack Obama, born of Trump’s refusal to abide a Black man as president.
- And they were racist because they reduced Harris to the subordinate category of “other”. Trump’s whole campaign has been about demonizing the “them” in “us versus them.”
Every article about what Trump said should make those points, and others, abundantly clear.
A “news analysis” by New York Times reporters Lisa Lerer and Maya King came closest to properly contextualizing the remarks, if anybody saw it. They wrote:
The former president has a history of using race to pit groups of Americans against one another, amplifying a strain of racial politics that has risen as a generation of Black politicians has ascended.
And they explained:
The audacity of Mr. Trump, a white man, questioning how much a Black woman truly belongs to Black America was particularly incendiary.
And it evoked an ugly history in this country, in which white America has often declared the racial categories that define citizens, and sought to determine who gets to call themselves what.
But good luck finding the word “racist” even in that story. And there was wildly insufficient analysis in the New York Times’s lead article, under a completely anodyne headline: “Trump Questions Harris’s Racial Identity, Saying She Only ‘Became a Black Person’ Recently.”
The Associated Press story headlined “Donald Trump falsely suggests Kamala Harris misled voters about her race” didn’t explain what was wrong with what he said beyond that it was inaccurate – although it did note that “Trump has repeatedly attacked his opponents and critics on the basis of race.”
In the lead Washington Post article, Brianna Tucker and Hannah Knowles wrote that Trump “accused Vice President Harris of once hiding Black heritage she has routinely highlighted in her career, escalating his attacks on her racial identity in a combative interview with Black reporters.”
They noted that Trump “has spoken for years with inflammatory and sometimes racist remarks about Black Americans that have drawn widespread condemnations.” But they didn’t unpack his Wednesday comments.
The worst headline by far — “Harris faces a pivotal moment as Trump questions her identity” — appeared (briefly) on a second-day story by Washington Post reporters Cleve R. Wootson Jr. and Sabrina Rodriguez. Social media quickly lit up with complaints about the Post blaming the victim.
The article itself, ironically, wasn’t so bad. It at least put Trump’s remarks in recent historical context:
Trump’s comments Wednesday did not come in a vacuum; he has been stepping up his attacks on Harris’s identity. On Tuesday, he suggested that Harris would be unable to stand up to foreign leaders because of her appearance, though he pointedly declined to elaborate.
“She’ll be like a play toy,” Trump told Fox News. “They look at her and they say, ‘We can’t believe we got so lucky.’ They’re going to walk all over her.” He added, “And I don’t want to say as to why. But a lot of people understand it.”
I liked how CNN.com handled the story Wednesday afternoon with the headline “Trump goes on rant questioning Harris’ race”. And HuffPost nailed it, as it often does, with the headline: “Trump, In Latest Racist Lie, Claims Kamala Harris ‘Happened To Turn Black’”
There was some controversy over whether Trump should have been welcomed on stage at the NABJ convention. My view is that anytime Trump makes himself available for questioning by journalists, those journalists should take him up on it.
But they should also be ready. And that means ready to fact-check him in real time. As I’ve argued before, when Trump says something bogus, you stop him right there. I’ve been arguing since at least 2017 that anyone with a chance to interview Trump owes it to the public to confront him with the facts he so routinely denies.
Arguably, for Trump, this was mission accomplished. As Colbert King wrote in a Washington Post opinion column:
Trump was not speaking to [NABJ] but to a MAGA audience beyond the Hilton Chicago that loves mocking people of color. He was having jaded fun. …
As offensive as all that was to the Black men and women staring in his direction, Trump knew it was getting a belly laugh with his crowd, who can’t get enough of that stuff.
The obligation for our major news organizations is not just to transmit Trump’s messages, but to explain what’s so toxic about them. If that was so easy to do, reporters would be doing it already, and they’re not.
Kamala Harris graduated from a traditional black college, Howard University, and is a member of a black sorority. She chose early in her adult life to identify with her black roots. It is not a recent phenomenon.