Context collapse

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

56% : Before he began, an announcer instructed the crowd to rise in tribute to the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol on January 6, and Trump himself stood and saluted the national anthem as recorded by the "J6 Prison Choir."
55% : According to the New York Times, after Trump won Iowa, network executives debated the fine line between journalistic responsibility and handing Trump free publicity.
52% : On Saturday, Donald Trump spoke at a rally in Ohio.
50% : The reason this debate has cycled on for so long is because there isn't a satisfying answer: giving our audiences more direct exposure to Trump comes with legitimate benefits and risks, as does filtering that exposure; one could reasonably fear, meanwhile, that both scenarios might redound to Trump's advantage in different ways.
48% : During his speech, Trump promised to help the insurrectionists if he wins reelection, referring to them as "patriots" and "hostages."
48% : In January, The Atlantic's McKay Coppins argued that "if the glut of attention in 2016 desensitized the nation to Trump, the relative dearth in the past year has turned him into an abstraction"; to counteract this, he suggested, all "politically engaged Americans" (including journalists) should attend a Trump rally to remind themselves of the stakes.
47% : This could involve broadcasting more of his words, but it doesn't have to -- to my ear, at least, airing his whole Ohio speech wouldn't have cleared up precisely what he meant by "bloodbath," because his words during that section were rambling and ambiguous (even if my sense is, on balance, that he was using the word in an economic sense).
46% : Then there was the phase of seeing it as irresponsible to broadcast Trump live (at least without some form of real-time fact-checking-by-chyron) due to the information pollution streaming perpetually in his wake -- a phase that arguably reached its zenith with Trump's COVID briefings in 2020, and their associated exhortations to inject bleach.
43% : Now -- after years of relative dormancy, with a heavy emphasis on relative -- the debate is back, and a view similar to Taylor's seems, to my eye, to have gained purchase, spurred, perhaps, by the free pass granted to Trump on questions of age and gaffe-making (at least when compared with Biden), a widespread public amnesia about Trump's most extreme comments (which my colleague Cameron Joseph wrote about recently), and a diminished place in the discourse for the art of close fact-checking (which I wrote about last week).
40% : (Trump has saluted the "J6 Prison Choir" before.)
39% : Taylor realized "how much the reporting of Trump necessarily edits and parses his words, to force it into sequential paragraphs or impose meaning where it is difficult to detect," she wrote.
39% : And whichever we choose, we will still, always, have to decide how to talk and write about what Trump said.
37% : Various media critics took CNBC to task for hosting a rambling phone-in interview with Trump without sufficiently pushing back on his talking points.
37% : Ultimately, journalists cannot -- and probably should not -- make voters feel a certain way about Trump, or even make them pay attention.
37% : Broadcasting the whole speech would have exposed viewers to all the other things Trump did and said, not least saluting the January 6 insurrectionists.
33% : But it was a different comment that dominated discussion of the rally -- one in which Trump predicted (or threatened) "a bloodbath for the country" if he isn't reelected.
33% : Many Trump critics countered that it was fair to highlight the remark, arguing, variously, that Trump doesn't deserve the benefit of the doubt given his long history of violent rhetoric, that it's not at all clear that he was only referring to the auto industry, and that even if he was, his use of the word "bloodbath" was still hyperbolic to the point of demagoguery.
33% : (Watching the interview, CNN's Oliver Darcy felt transported "to 2015, back when news outlets allowed Trump to phone in to news shows and deliver a drive-by of lies to their audiences.")
30% : "I think it's important we start demanding the media vigorously cover the insane, anti-constitutional, violent and dictator-loving rhetoric Trump uses on a regular basis," Sarah Longwell, a leading anti-Trump Republican, said.
30% : "Whether or not it's news in the conventional sense," Glasser wrote in her recent New Yorker essay, "it's easiest to understand the threat that Trump poses to American democracy most clearly when you see it for yourself."
27% : It demonstrates how well-intentioned observers, united in wanting to get the truth about Trump across to the public, still differ on how to do so.
25% : After Trump won the Iowa caucuses in January, MSNBC did not broadcast his victory speech, with Rachel Maddow telling viewers that to do so would come at the cost of knowingly airing lies; two months later, after Trump cleaned up on Super Tuesday, MSNBC did air at least part of his victory speech, triggering an on-air discussion about the best way to balance fact-checking and exposure.
22% : Nearly a decade after Trump rode down the escalator, it is a debate that media outlets have still yet to resolve.
22% : As I've written before, the debate over whether to carry Trump live, while important, also often rests on a false dichotomy: there are different ways of doing so.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.