SALT LAKE CITY — On Aug. 12, The New York Times wrote a headline that was so fiercely criticized that the newspaper changed it.
It was the Monday after the two mass shootings in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio and President Donald Trump had delivered a speech at the White House addressing the tragedies.
“TRUMP URGES UNITY VS. RACISM,” read the Times headline, summarizing the speech.
A social media storm swiftly ensued. The hashtag #CancelNYT caught fire on Twitter, with journalists, readers, politicians and pundits condemning the publication for accepting Trump’s “narrative” of opposing racial discrimination while neglecting to draw attention to what they described as the president’s history of racist remarks and policies.
“It was a badly flawed headline which has been well acknowledged,” Margaret Sullivan, former public editor of The New York Times and a current media columnist for The Washington Post, said in an email to the Deseret News. “It was technically accurate without being truthful in the larger sense.”
But this “public disaster” was about more than a headline. It reflects a monumental struggle facing news organizations across the country: how to consistently report the news in a way that is not only true, fair, and balanced, but is also perceived as true, fair, and balanced in the highly polarized media and political environment that defines the Trump era.
And it’s not just news organizations like The New York Times that are affected.
When the Deseret News announced the hiring of Jill Chappell Adly from CNN, its Facebook comment pages were inundated with accusations that the paper had become a mouthpiece for the left. Yet Chappell Adly, a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, encouraged her CNN colleagues to bring conservative viewpoints into news coverage and to try to be fair and balanced.
With the nation divided into camps, who can be trusted? Is it even possible for news organizations today to accomplish its time-honored watchdog role and cover viewpoints its loyal readers may attack?
Nothing new
The notion that people perceive some media organizations as biased against their political views is nothing new, says Josh Benton, director of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
In fact, such a perception is rooted in the history of American journalism, says Al Tompkins, senior faculty at the Poynter Institute, a Florida-based nonprofit journalism school and research organization. Prior to the 1830s, the majority of U.S. newspapers were aligned with a political party or platform, and were named as such: The Federal Republican, The Press Democrat.
“In the history of American newspapers, journalism has been far more partisan than it is now,” says Tompkins.
Skepticism to media bias is therefore baked into the American media landscape, and it’s no surprise that it has endured to this day, he says.
For example, in a well-known 1987 study, a package of TV stories that were about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict were shown to people — some pro-Israel, some pro-Palestine — and the consistent finding was that people on both sides perceived the TV stories as biased.
“So will we get to a point where everyone feels that the news is unbiased?” says Benton. “No, that’s unachievable in this sort of environment.”
“A new phenomenon” under Trump
Though the public perception of the media as biased isn’t new, the Trump presidency is a “new phenomenon” that has made the task of achieving fairness in reporting more complicated for journalists, says Benton.
Benton says the president’s continual disregard for the truth frequently throws journalists and news organizations off-balance. Trump has made 12,019 statements that were either false or misleading since the day of his inauguration, an average of 13 such statements a day, according to a recent report by The Washington Post.
“President Trump says things that are not true all the time,” says Benton. “We as a journalism system have long dealt with the idea that people on each side are going to spin the facts to be in their favor. We’re not quite set up for a system in which one side tells obvious documented untruths over and over again.”
“To some extent, we haven’t really learned how to cover Trump without being constantly distracted by the latest outrage, tweet or distraction,” Sullivan explained. “Too often, he is the de facto assignment editor. And that’s far from ideal.”
Sullivan agrees.
“Trump says a lot of things that aren’t true, some of which are clearly lies,” Sullivan wrote in an email. “It’s like nothing we’ve seen before in its scope. That alone changes how we report what he says.”
And it’s not just the falsehoods themselves, but their frequency and shock value that creates challenges for journalists trying to focus on any one issue at a time in any depth, says Tompkins.
The president uses this to his advantage, he says.
“Trump plays media,” says Tompkins. “He makes news virtually every day with some kind of thing that he says that he must know is going to be incendiary, and it’s going to be newsworthy and divisive on its face.”
“To some extent, we haven’t really learned how to cover Trump without being constantly distracted by the latest outrage, tweet or distraction,” Sullivan explained. “Too often, he is the de facto assignment editor. And that’s far from ideal.”
Fairness vs. balance
Despite the new media landscape, Sullivan insists that it is “absolutely possible to be fair and truthful” in the age of Trump. But in order to do so, journalists must make a key distinction between “fairness” and “balance.”
“Being truly fair is not just quoting or representing both sides equally,” wrote Sullivan. “We have to bring more context and fact-checking and analysis to the reporting.”
“Being truly fair is not just quoting or representing both sides equally,” wrote Sullivan. “We have to bring more context and fact-checking and analysis to the reporting.”
Tompkins says it also matters how relevant and important a source is in deciding whether to include their voice.
“Truth-telling is not trying to appear fair by giving everybody a voice no matter how important they are,” says Tompkins. “That doesn’t really serve anybody. I don’t think we owe everybody the same amount of access, because not everyone knows what they’re talking about.”
Tompkins says he believes that’s where media organizations failed in their coverage of the 2016 election. News organizations must hold Trump, like any other candidate or elected official, accountable to telling the truth to the public, he says. But journalists also must genuinely listen to and incorporate the voices of those that support Trump, said Tompkins.
“After the 2016 election, a lot of journalists said: ‘How did we not know that Trump had all of this support?’ The answer was, they didn’t listen,” he said. “I think it’s incumbent upon journalists to listen to what Trump supporters are saying and to find out why they are saying it.”
“It’s not about journalists, never ever,” he added. “It’s never about you. It’s always about the community, about the public you’re serving.”
The power of “core readers”
Serving the public, as Tompkins emphasized, is a value that most news organizations would likely say drives them. But figuring out how to do so effectively is another matter.
Sullivan would know: she served as the fifth public editor of The New York Times. The public editor works independently “examining the newspaper with an eye to protecting the integrity and good practices,” according to the Times.
But the Times cut the position in 2017.
“I was sorry to see The Times end the role,” wrote Sullivan. “I thought that both symbolically and practically it helped readers feel heard and as if they had the possibility of recourse or decisions they didn’t like or that they questioned.”
Even with the public editor gone, Jay Rosen, a media critic and professor of journalism at New York University, says in the digital age, New York Times readers have more power and influence than ever before.
“The digital audience itself, the Times’ own interconnected public, does not know its own power,” said Jay Rosen, media critic and professor of journalism at New York University.
“The core readers have much more power now,” he wrote for PressThink, a project of the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University. “They are a bigger part of the mix. How that power should be recognized, when it might be used, how to listen carefully to it without listening too much, no one really knows yet. The digital audience itself, the Times’ own interconnected public, does not know its own power.”
Subscriptions to the Times surged in the aftermath of the presidential election. Rosen describes these loyal readers as the publication’s “newest corrupting influence,” and achieving independence from this reader base is “already a live concern among Times editors.”
The headline controversy is an example of that, Rosen explains.
Dean Baquet, executive editor of the Times, told the Columbia Journalism Review that it was a “bad headline” that “didn’t have enough skepticism of what the president said.”
“It was one bad headline out of thousands,” a current New York Times staffer told the Deseret News. “But I don’t want to minimize it. I think when you make mistakes, especially at the Times, you should own up to them and make sure they don’t happen again.”
But Baquet also expressed concern about the expectations of some Times readers about the role of the paper in relation to the Trump presidency.
“Our role is not to be the leader of the resistance,” says Dean Baquet, executive editor of The New York Times.
“Donald Trump has stirred up very powerful feelings among Americans,” Baquet said to the Columbia Journalism Review. “Some may think newsrooms like The New York Times and The Washington Post are supposed to be Donald Trump’s adversaries or the leaders of the adversarial movement to take down Donald Trump.”
Baquet insists that the Times is not an advocacy organization or a publication of the left.
“Our role is not to be the leader of the resistance,” he told CNN. “Inevitably the people outside power gain power again. And at that point, what are you? You’re just a chump of the people who won. Our role is to hold everybody who has power to account.”