After Donald Trump Jr. fleed Moore Hall at UCLA, running away from a crowd of MAGA-wearing Trump supporters angry that he wouldn’t take questions, the Los Angeles Times published an extraordinarily weird story “Protesters demonstrate against Donald Trump Jr.'s appearance at UCLA on Sunday” by Ben Poston and Tony Barboza that did not mention the event’s main happenings at all.
Poston and Barboza’s story is the classic “liberals triggered by Trump” tale. They focus on what was going on outside the building, and prominently mention the few dozen people demonstrating against Trump Jr. outside the building. They interview Trump supporter Andy Stein, 56, who drove a hundred miles from Carlsbad, CA to see the event and was waiting to enter. They write:
“I see the right side as being open-minded and listening, and I don’t see that on the left,” Stein said.
But they don’t mention the main event that day, which completely contradicted Stein. Closed-minded right-wingers in a crowd of hundreds chased Trump Jr. off the stage because they didn’t consider him sufficiently right-wing. For more, see “Don Jr. tried to ‘trigger’ liberals in UCLA appearance. It didn’t end well for him” by the Daily Kos’s Laura Clawson.
No doubt Poston and Barboza were on deadline, and perhaps they filed the story before the event had finished in disarray — but isn’t that bad reporting? And why didn’t the Times update the story even by 10am the next day? Isn’t that lazy reporting? Or is the Times trying to woo back conservative readers by publishing a story that conservatives want to hear?