Note that the Associated Press assures journalists that they don't have to be telepathic in order to be accurate. In other words, when using "racist" as an adjective to describe comments or events, reporters and editors “need not involve examining the motivation of the person who spoke or acted, which is a separate issue that may not be related to how the statement or action itself can be characterized.”
Also, does it seem to you like Times editors are slow-walking this issue in hopes of playing out the clock? Trump entered the Republican race in June 2015. It’s now November 2019, and Times higher-ups are still grappling with this topic. Why do I get the feeling that right after Trump loses reelection next year, the paper is going to announce it's now comfortable tagging him as a racist? Not exactly a profile in courage.
To be fair, the Times is hardly alone in its timid approach to describing racist behavior in the Trump era. Instead of an honest conversation, news consumers have been served a feast of euphemisms — "racially tinged," "racially charged," racially incendiary, disparaging," "racially infused," "crass epithet," "crass denigrations," “bluntly vulgar language"—as journalists frantically try to avoid being truthful about Trump. This kind of media timidity was basically invented by the Beltway press in order to cover Trump, and to avoid telling hard truths.
Time essayist Anand Giridharadas recently revealed how in 2016 when writing a piece on Trump's name-calling campaign, an editor forced him to remove the accurate "racist" adjective from his piece. "Of all the biases that assist this normalizing, perhaps the supreme is the bias for sobriety, caution, restraint," Giridharadas lamented on Twitter. "These values build great publications. But we also need to have an honest conversation about what these values miss when we are living in extraordinary, ugly times."
HuffPost writer Julia Craven collected a wide sample of examples of reporters burning up their thesauruses in order to avoid typing the word "racist." From The New York Times: “disparaging,” ”racially tinged,” ”vulgar.” From The Washington Post: ”racially charged,” “crude reference,” “racially incendiary,” ”disparaging,” ”vulgar,” ”expressed a preference for immigrants from Norway.” From the Boston Globe: “the vulgarity,” ”crass epithet,” ”derogatory,” ”crass denigrations.” And from the Associated Press: ”bluntly vulgar language.”
Still, it's rather stunning to watch the Times' best and brightest treat this so-called conundrum like it's some impossible-to-solve physics equation, as editors gather around and try to determine the correct answer.
Fact: Trump is a racist. He constantly uses racist language, such as demanding that congresswomen of color "go back" to where they came from, and likens predominantly black American cities to rodent-infested hellholes. Recall that the bloody gun rampage that unfolded in El Paso earlier this year, just minutes from the Mexico border, was sparked by a white gunman whose manifesto explicitly cited Trump's "invasion" rhetoric about migrants as his motivation to kill as many brown-skinned people as possible by emptying his AK-47 rifle inside a shell-shocked Walmart.
So why the ongoing attempt to make this all way more complicated than it really is? Calling out racism is a moral imperative and by refusing to hold Trump accountable, the press is failing that task.
Eric Boehlert is a veteran progressive writer and media analyst, formerly with Media Matters and Salon. He is the author of Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush and Bloggers on the Bus. You can follow him on Twitter @EricBoehlert.
This post was written and reported through our Daily Kos freelance program.
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