How the news media privileges dangerous and hateful Trump-Vance lies

News companies do not have to cover the topics lying politicians want them to cover

A former president of the United States, running again for an office commonly referred to as “Leader of the free world,” is leading a campaign of stochastic terrorism against Haitian immigrants that echoes the dehumanization tactics of Nazi Germany, the latest in his decade-long effort to gain unchecked power by stoking hatred and division and causing chaos and violence. Americans have already suffered and died as a result of his words and actions — and that’s exactly what he wants.

That’s the story the news media should be telling readers and viewers. Instead, even as they debunk lies from Donald Trump and JD Vance about Haitian immigrants, journalists are privileging those same lies by framing their coverage as an assessment and explanation of what Trump and Vance are saying rather than an assessment of what it says about their character that they are telling such hateful and dangerous lies.

Even articles debunking Trump’s lies privilege them, centering his preferred campaign themes

I’ll use the New York Times as an example. In a span of five days this week, The New York Times ran ten news articles that were largely about Trump-Vance lies about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio. These articles were significantly better than such things tend to be, most notably in doing a pretty good job of making clear that the Trump-Vance claims were false. (Not quite so good in making clear they were intentional lies.) Five of the ten ran under headlines that included the word “false” (four articles) or the word “lie” (one article.) Several articles were peppered with multiple direct statements that the Trump-Vance lies about immigrants eating pets were in fact false. But not a single one of these articles focused on what the act of telling such horrific lies says about Donald Trump and JD Vance. Their honesty and integrity were not the focus of the articles; nor was their desire to cause hatred and violence for political gain. The focus of the articles was exactly what Trump and Vance wanted it to be: Immigration, and the (supposed) negative impact it has on America.

Sixteen years ago this month, when I was executive vice president of Media Matters for America, I introduced a phrase, “privileging the lie,” to describe the news media’s tendency to center lies in its coverage of politics – not to center the fact that the people telling the lies are liars, but rather to center the lie; to adopt it as the framing for their reporting.

When a news report treats the truthfulness of a lie as an open question, it privileges the lie. When a news report devotes more and more prominent space to recounting the lie and the liar’s defense of it than it does making clear that it’s a lie, the article privileges the lie. When a news report focuses on the target of a lie’s struggle to deal with the impact of the lie, the article privileges the lie. And when a news report focuses on the topic of the lie — even if it does a good job of making clear the lie is a lie — it privileges the lie, because it allows the liar to set the topic of conversation, and thus increases the electoral salience of a topic the liar believes is to his benefit.

That’s what the news media has done over the last week. The news media surely affects what people think, but it has a larger and more powerful effect on what people think about. So even as the media has done a better-than-usual job of debunking the Trump-Vance lies, it has privileged those lies by helping Trump and Vance increase the salience of immigration, an issue the Trump-Vance campaign believes helps it.

Media critic Margaret Sullivan, who previously served as public editor of the New York Times, wrote of “privileging the lie” in 2019:

This kind of story framing has been called “privileging the lie” — a longtime media cancer that has metastasized because Trump is such a relentless manipulator and master of reductionist politics […]

Instead of snuffing out false and misleading claims, news stories give them oxygen.

That’s what the news media is doing right now: Given the Trump-Vance lies oxygen. Helping them set the terms of the campaign, by making centering the issue — immigration — they want centered. And it’s not just me saying this; The New York Times, for one, knows this is what it’s doing. Here’s a key passage from an article the Times ran on Friday:

For days, images and videos of former President Donald J. Trump and cats have proliferated online, delivered with a knowing wink and an understood endorsement of Mr. Trump’s hard-line immigration message. […]

Yet, Mr. Trump’s politics have long been deeply intertwined with meme culture, and he and his allies have fervently embraced the Springfield memes as a means of keeping one of his central campaign themes, immigration, at the front of the campaign’s coverage. (Emphasis added)

All these stories debunking Trump’s lies have kept one of his central campaign themes at the forefront of campaign coverage. They have privileged and rewarded Trump’s lies.

The media’s focus should be on Trump, not on the issue he is lying about in order to encourage people to focus on it

So how should the news media approach this? How can they cover the Trump-Vance lies without privileging the lie? Simple: Make the character and actions of the people telling the lie the story, rather than making the topic of the lie the story.

When Donald Trump lies that Haitian immigrants are stealing and eating pets, that should be the hook for an article about Donald Trump’s long history of lying; about the fundamental lack of honest, character, and integrity that this demonstrates. The result of Trump’s lies shouldn’t be articles about immigration, it should be articles about Donald Trump’s lifelong dishonesty and the consequences it poses, and articles about Trump’s lengthy history of directing hatred at racial minorities, and about his lengthy history of intentionally inciting threats of violence as well as actual violence.

I know some people will object to this. “This is just how journalism is done,” they will say. “News companies assess the truthfulness of statements and give readers context about the underlying debate, they don’t suggest people are liars.” To which I would respond, first of all, that “this is how things are done” is pretty much never a compelling response to “this is how things should be done.” And second of all: Yes, this is exactly what news companies do — when they want to. The New York Times and other news companies made honesty (or the supposed lack thereof) a dominant theme of their coverage of Hillary Clinton (“Americans Don’t Trust Her” … “besieged by lingering doubts about her honesty,” to pick just two random examples) and Al Gore. In the ten New York Times news articles about Trump’s lies about immigrations, you won’t find so much as a single aside suggesting he is “besieged by lingering doubts about his honesty.” If you’re thinking that’s because unlike Hillary Clinton, Trump isn’t “besieged by lingering doubts about his honesty,” think again! A Marist poll released this month found that among the 27 percent of registered voters who say the most important quality in president is honesty and trustworthiness, Kamala Harris leads Trump 72% to 26%. Donald Trump’s dishonesty should be a central theme of the story on the merits, and there’s plenty of evidence it hurts him with voters, if the news media needs additional justification for focusing on it (which they shouldn’t.)

We’re so used to seeing the news media cover politics a certain way that it can be difficult to imagine a different way. Sometimes it helps to imagine an analogous scenario that isn’t about politics.

Imagine a man, let’s call him Bob, is standing at a bus stop, waiting for the 5:10. He’s wearing a Dave Matthews Band hat and doing a crossword puzzle on his phone. Now imagine another man, let’s call him Bill, who has twice been convicted of random assaults and just got out of prison, walks up to him and punches him in the face and says “I hate the Dave Matthews Band.”

Would you expect a news report about this assault to focus on Bill’s history of violence, his previous convictions for assaulting people, and his time in prison? Or would you want news reports to focus on the Dave Matthews Band and the polarized reaction to their music? You’d expect a focus on what the assault and Bill’s history of violence say about Bill, right? There are, to be sure, deeply held views both pro and con about the Dave Matthews Band, but the Dave Matthews Band quite obviously is not the story here, right?

Well when it comes to Donald Trump and JD Vance lying about Haitian immigrants, immigration is not the story here. The story is that Donald Trump and JD Vance are liars who want to incite hatred and violence as a means to attaining power, and are doing so in a way that echoes history’s most evil dehumanization campaigns.

Granted, immigration isn’t the Dave Matthews Band. It is more important than that. But a lot of issues are important, and they weren’t the dominant story this week. The New York Times didn’t run ten articles in five days about the effects of immigration on a single city in Ohio because immigration is that much more important than every other issue. They did so because Donald Trump wanted voters to focus on immigration and told lies about it, and the New York Times gave him what he wanted. And so did pretty much every other news company in America.

Trump’s lies are causing real harm to real people — just he intends

By lying about Haitian immigrants, Donald Trump and JD Vance have inspired bomb threats that have forced the evacuation of Springfield’s elementary schools:

Springfield Mayor Rob Rue had no trouble parceling out the blame for Thursday's bomb threat that forced the evacuation of City Hall and two elementary schools:

“All these federal politicians that have negatively spun our city, they need to know they're hurting our city, and it was their words that did it,” he told Six On Your Side.

No bomb was found after Dayton's bomb-sniffing dogs went through the threatened structures -- which included a couple of state Bureau of Motor Vehicle offices -- as well as facilities such as the Clark County courthouse. The Dayton office of the FBI has joined the probe in an attempt to trace the emailed threat.

Rue said the email threat spewed hate toward immigrants in general and Haitians in particular.

"There was enough negative language toward immigrants, towards Haitian folks that would bring enough concern. And then when it followed up with ... at the end, of a bomb threat ... it was pretty much just the beginning of the conclusion that they're going to threaten to harm people."

The threatened violence came about a day and a half after former President Donald Trump told 67 million viewing Tuesday night’s debate the claim that “they’re eating the dogs. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”

Backing up what local police have repeatedly said, Republican Rue insisted, “That's just not happening in our community. Pets are safe in our community, and it’s unfortunate that there was a spotlight put on a story that was validated that was not true at all.”

It is important to understand that this is what Donald Trump and JD Vance want. They want these threats of violence against immigrants. They want actual violence against immigrants. They want this both because they hate immigrants and because they believe fear and chaos help them electorally; they believe anything that increases the salience of immigration helps them.

We know Trump and Vance want this hatred and violence because it is the obvious outcome of their words, and because in the wake of it they have continued their lies. We know this is what they want because they have inspired hatred and violence in the past, and they have not changed their ways afterwards. And we know this is what they want because the foreign autocrats they idolize have similarly stoked racist fear and hatred.

Nearly two weeks ago, before Donald Trump and JD Vance began lying about Haitian immigrants eating pets, the New York Times ran a lengthy piece headlined “How an Ohio Town Landed in the Middle of the Immigration Debate” that noted “by most accounts, the Haitians have helped revitalize Springfield … But the speed and volume of arrivals have put pressure on housing, schools and hospitals” and attempted to explain both. Sprinkled throughout the narrative is praise for the Haitian immigrants and the effect they have had on the city, as well as criticism – some of it extremely racist. And then way down at the very end of the article, more than 70 paragraphs deep, came this striking image: “On a recent Saturday, about a dozen Nazi sympathizers — masked men in matching red shirts, black pants and boots — waved swastika flags as they marched in downtown Springfield near a jazz festival. At least two of the men, who authorities said were outsiders, carried rifles.”

It’s not a bad article, overall. Full of detail and nuance. But when I read it one thought came immediately to mind: If Nazis are involved, Nazis are the lede.