This morning on MSNBC’s AM Joy program, about 3 minutes and 10 seconds into this segment Joy Reid set some ground rules for interpreting responses from Donald Trump surrogates.
When surrogate Boris Epshteyn pulled the typical Trump campaign ploy of answering a question about a Trump position by switching the answer to how awful Hillary Clinton is, Joy confronted him by very clearly setting these ground rules: whenever a Trump surrogate answers a question about Trump by diverting the answer to a statement about Clinton, the audience should assume one of three things:
A) He doesn’t know the answer
B) The answer would not help his candidate
C) He is not here to answer questions or clarify issues but only to distribute campaign talking points
At one point she also said that when she wanted clarification on Clinton issues she would ask a Clinton surrogate.
It is clear from watching Trump and his surrogates that there is no way to force them to clarify any Trump statement or position. However, it would be refreshing if all journalists would take Joy’s approach and begin to consistently give these simple, explicit, instructions to both the surrogate and their audiences when that surrogate first begins to reply with answers about their opponent in order to avoid clarifying their own candidate’s position on the specific issue in question.
Good job Joy! I hope other journalists follow your lead.