No. of Recommendations: 10
Lawrence O'Donnell opened his September 9, 2024 show with a rant about this article published 9/9 by
The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/09/us/politics/deb...in which their analysis of the growing concerns over recent public statements from Trump also reflected a problem with the media routinely "sane-washing" Trump's words. In other words, Trump's actual utterances are so incoherent in sound byte form and so incoherent in a literal transcription that no viewer or reader will spend the time listening to, watching or reading them. So instead of providing them verbatim to allow citizens to hear for themselves how incoherent the ramblings are, the press is routinely attempting to scrub them into a more compact, coherent form that the press THINKS resembles what Trump was attempting to communicate.
In the NYT article here, Peter Baker cites this now-famous example of Trump's answer to a question about child care:
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It’s a very important issue. But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about that — because the child care is, child care, it’s, couldn’t, you know, there’s something, you have to have it. In this country, you have to have it. But when you talk about those numbers compared to the kind of numbers that I’m talking about, by taxing foreign nations at levels that they’re not used to, but they’ll get used to it very quickly — and it’s not going to stop them from doing business with us, but they’ll have a very substantial tax when they send product into our country. Those numbers are so much bigger than any numbers that we’re talking about, including child care, that it’s going to take care.
-----------------then by example illustrates the sane-washing process by offering up this alternate explanation of what Trump PROBABLY meant:
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What he seemed to be saying was that he would raise so much money by imposing tariffs on imported goods that the country could use the proceeds to pay for child care. In itself, that would be a disputable policy assumption.
-----------------O'Donnell used THAT as a launching point for a rant about how the NYT itself cannot even STOP contributing to the problem of sane-washing while publishing a story about sane-washing. O'Donnell made the (rhetorical? sarcastic?) point that clearly the political reporters at the NYT do not understand how tarrifs work and they were cementing the false economic understanding that tariffs would be collected from foreign countries and producers and somehow transfer into the US Treasury's coffers.
Of course, if you read that actual paragraph from Peter Baker's story, that's NOT what that paragraph stated. Baker did not explicitly itemize the false economic fact that a
tariff is collected from the
foreign country / producer. But of course, by NOT explicitly
defining his terms in his analysis, Baker's prose could lead a
reader with an incorrect understanding of tariffs to assume Baker was restating Trump's false statement as fact and propagating an incorrect claim of cause / effect / benefit by Trump. This is a problem any time an incoherent statement is repeated to a broad audience without context. Doing so risks giving that incorrect statement gravitas by putting it in print, even in an altered form. Haven't we all experienced a situation listening to Party A and Party B having a discussion where
a) both A and B think they understand process X
b) both A and B are actually incorrect in their understanding of process X
c) neither A nor B even understands they are both mis-understanding X in different ways
d) their discussion / argument hinges on the definition of X
e) their discussion continues without either one clarifying their understanding of X
f) the discussion keeps spiraling into idiocy because neither recongizes the gap
g) the discussion solves nothing and neither party is more informed at its end
Do you step in and attempt to referee that discussion and explain to both A and B why they are both wrong using their flawed analogies for process X? Or will refereeing the discussion to a sound conclusion require a complete reset and re-education of A and B about how X truly works? Or will that discussion be pointless because neither A or B is willing to accept they don't understand X?
O'Donnell's rant seemed to become overly fixated on whether the staff at the NYT undrestand economics and tariffs rather than remaining focused on the core issue. It is not the job of an objective news organization to clarify and correct public statements of politicians and public figures of interest. They are free to ask a follow-up question directly to the figure in question and get that figure to clarify, re-clarify or re-re-clarify their position but not to "helpfully" substitute their own interpretation to feed to the public.
The most important reason for avoiding sane-washing should be the most obvious. When someone is this illiterate about a subject and so mentally deficient in communicating any ideas on any topics, it is impossible to accurately extrapolate ANYTHING spoken into a more coherent space. If you ask someone who's certifiably insane if they think it is time to head out to lunch and their answer is:
The moon's out, Columbus just sailed, I need a haircut and The Beatles are playing Shea Stadium next week...There is nothing you can safely derive from that answer about whether that person wants to head to Panera Bread for a sub. Even though the answer makes no sense in light of the question, if that was a question posed to a candidate running for office, reporting that answer VERBATIM is likely the most appropriate action to take because anyone seeing the question and answer back to back would normally have no trouble recognizing the mismatch between reality and the answer and drawing the correct conclusion (***).
WTH
**** Of course, ADMITTING the consequences of the correct conclusion in public is a different problem for MAGA adherents. 