September 14, 2016

Donald Trump Announces Something, Press Goes Wild

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


A couple of weeks ago Hillary Clinton announced a plan to rein in excessive price increases by pharmaceutical companies. It was a hot topic at the time thanks to outrage over the 6x price increase of the EpiPen. However, if my sleuthing is accurate, Clinton’s plan wasn’t covered at all in the print editions of the New York Times and Washington Post, and got only a short blurb in the Wall Street Journal.

Today Donald Trump announced a modest child-care and maternity leave plan that was almost comically underfunded. The New York Times produced a long front-page story. The Washington Post ran a long story in the A section and added a second analysis piece online. The Wall Street Journal provided Ivanka Trump with prime op-ed real estate to tout her father’s plan. That’s some great coverage! And all of these pieces barely mentioned that Trump offered no remotely plausible way to pay for his proposal.

I suppose you can argue that Trump’s child-care plan is more important than Clinton’s drug pricing plan. Or that an actual policy proposal from Trump is so rare that it’s big news no matter what. Or that Republicans don’t normally propose spending money on people in need.

Sure, I guess. I mean, I realize that the marvel of the dancing bear is not that the bear dances well, but that the bear dances at all. Even so, it sure seems like the press really doesn’t care about Hillary Clinton’s policy proposals—oh God, another boring white paper from Hillz—but swoons every time Donald Trump blurps out one of his laughably ill-thought-out ideas—he’s using Ivanka to appeal to suburban women, we gotta get on this! But that’s editorial judgment for you. I’m sure the pros know what they’re doing.

POSTSCRIPT: Can I gripe about something else as long as we’re on the subject? Thanks. Here’s the New York Times:

But in selling his case, Mr. Trump stretched the truth, saying that his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, has no such plan of her own and “never will.”

The Washington Post doesn’t even mention this, and needless to say, neither does Ivanka Trump’s bit of puffery in the Journal. So props to the Times. But seriously: stretched the truth? As Trump knows perfectly well, Hillary Clinton has been pressing for better child-care and family leave policies for decades, and her current proposal has been on her website for months. It’s far more extensive, more generous, and better thought out than Trump’s.

This is why Trump feels like he can simply say anything he wants, no matter how ridiculous. The obvious way to describe Trump’s statement is to call it a lie. That’s what it is. Instead, it either goes unmentioned or, at best, gets tiptoed around inaccurately. In what way, after all, did Trump “stretch the truth”? That implies there’s some kernel of truth to what Trump said, but he exaggerated it. But that’s not what he did. He just lied.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate