My own editor’s note: Yeah, I know now that HuffPost puts this note on ALL stories about Trump. So OK — let’s talk about that…
This gave me a good laugh this morning…
Frequently, out of a sense of obligation to the reader, an editor feels the need to write a brief note clarifying a point raised in something being published.
But I don’t think I’ve ever seen this before…
Check out this HuffPost piece about some critical things Cokie Roberts has said about Republicans who see Trump as a racist, but support him anyway.
It’s a fairly straightforward bit of reporting. Depending on your tendencies, you might say “You go, girl!,” or you might think she’s gone too far. The item notes that she may have gone too far for NPR’s sensibilities a few months back:
Roberts has been a fierce critic of Trump. In March NPR had to clarify her commentator role after she co-wrote a column asking “the rational wing” of the Republican Party to stop his march to the presidential nomination….
But that’s not the good bit. The good bit is that, after all that straining to be fair and give you all the info, someone at HuffPost felt compelled, for reasons that are unclear to me, to add this editor’s note at the end:
Editor’s note: Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims — 1.6 billion members of an entire religion — from entering the U.S.
Just in case you wondered, dear reader.
I have no idea who did that. The organizational chart of HuffPost is a mystery to me (unlike on a newspaper’s editorial page, with the EPE’s name on the masthead). It’s so unique — so, um, idiosyncratic — that it would have been nice if this editor’s note had been signed. Because I’m certainly curious.
According to its nameplate, part of the HuffPost’s mission is to entertain. Well, they got the job done with this…
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Since January 28 this year, that note appears on any Huffington Post article covering Trump.
Oh!
Well, then.
That shows how little I read HuffPost.
No doubt somewhere there’s something explaining it…
And yep, here it is.
Well, I feel dumb. Seems like I would have heard about that before now…
Link doesn’t click through
Oops. Try it now…
The Washington Post‘s Erik Wemple said “It’s hard to refute the Huffington Post’s readers’ note,” but went on to state a preference for this summation of “Trump’s general awfulness” by that paper’s Dana Milbank:
Nah, the HuffPost note is better. States the case with laudable brevity…
Kind of reminds me of the way a lawyer would make a make a manufacturer put a legal disclaimer on a product.
My contracts professor said if you want a laugh, read the disclaimers on, say, lawn mowers: each one represents a law suit….like “Do not use to trim hedges.” I liked the one on a paint stripper gun “Do not use to dry hair.” Yeah, it’s shaped like a hair dryer, but it melts paint, people!
Years back, my wife had a case where two guys were repairing a car. In the course of repairing it, they removed the gas tank, and were going to sandblast it (to clean it, I think). The problem arose when they started sandblasting it because they….wait for it….didn’t remove the gasoline from the tank.
Their lawyer was arguing that the gas tank should have had a warning label mentioning that you shouldn’t sandblast a fully loaded gas tank, because how else would you know not to do that, right?
I hope your wife was handling defense…
Yeah. She was defending the manufacturer, whose position was essentially: Dude, how is your stupidity our fault?
I think there’s probably a Latin maxim for that, right?
Caveat moron?
The first law firm I practiced with did a ton of insurance defense work for Allstate. Let’s say that my colleagues had considerably more hilarious stories than I did. Somehow, stories about securities filings, even at the luxury late night accommodations at the printers, just pale in comparison to what some people do — and then file insurance claims?!??
Brad, if you were still in the business and had to cover repeated stories about Trump, would you consider such as disclaimer also, or would you simply note the truth each time he told a lie? Or would you report it as straight news?
No, I would not do something like that. It’s rather silly and gratuitous.
It’s kind of like… using the word “controversial” in the lede of a story. I was taught early on that if you had to say something was “controversial,” you hadn’t written the story right. If you’ve described the situation fully, the reader will SEE that it’s controversial. And if you can’t make that clear simply setting out the facts, maybe it’s not…
Yup, it’s the rule of “Show, don’t tell.”
The media were blamed for going too easy on Trump in the beginning (defined as pretty much until he clinched the nomination), treating whatever he said as facially accurate….
Many people have selectively short memories. Inconvenient truths…