According to the writer, historian and activist Rebecca Solnit, US media are failing to cover Donald Trump properly. “His incapacity to be coherent is pretty much hidden from the public, unless they’re listening directly or reading alternative media,” she says.
Solnit, whose essay Men Explain Things To Me inspired the word “mansplaining”, says she’s convinced that the US mainstream press—including the New York Times—are “sanewashing” the former president and the gibberish he has spouted during the election campaign. Instead of showing how rambling and off-topic he is, they piece together fragments of his speeches to come up with a few crisp sentences.
This week, Solnit joins Alan and Lionel on the podcast to explain why, in her view, the real story is not being covered. Together, they hone in on how the media should cover Trump’s false claims—such as the one he made during this week’s debate, that immigrants in Springfield, Ohio “are eating the dogs… eating the cats…eating the pets of the people that live there.” ABC News factchecked this incredible statement. It wasn’t true.
Solnit says Americans aren’t getting enough of the truth—so can the news better reflect the reality of Donald Trump?
This is an AI-generated transcript. Please check against delivery.
ALAN RUSBRIDGER [00:00:00] Welcome to Media Confidential from Prospect magazine.
LIONEL BARBER [00:00:14] And we're recording the day after an epic presidential debate in Philadelphia between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump. And, Allen, I was up at 530 this morning reading all the headlines The Washington Post, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal up here in Scotland online. And they pronounced Kamala Harris the winner. She got under his skin. She needled him. She talked about the size of his crowds. And then the cherry on the Christmas cake coming early. An endorsement for Kamala Harris from Taylor Swift, having called on people to come out to vote. Registered to vote. She says vote for Kamala Harris. And what's more, she signed off the childless cat lady in a dig against J.D. Vance, Trump's running mate. What about that?
ALAN RUSBRIDGER [00:01:14] Well, it was a magnificent night and spoiled only by Elon Musk's reply to Taylor Swift, in which he offered effectively to, as I understood the tweet, to impregnate her so that she would no longer be childless. But that's the glory of musk. We're going to come back to this later in the program with Rebecca Solnit, the American writer and journalist who's going to be talking about how the American press has been covering the race in general. And she doesn't market quite so highly as we've marked Kamala Harris's performance. But before that lull, you are I can't keep up with you. You were in Italy. You're now in Italy. You're in Scotland. Where? Where are you? Well.
LIONEL BARBER [00:01:58] If you look right behind you very carefully, you may see the shadow of the Loch Ness monster.
ALAN RUSBRIDGER [00:02:06] My God.
LIONEL BARBER [00:02:06] Because here I am up near Inverness by Loch Ness. I'm a middle aged man or late middle aged man in Lycra yet again going through hell. Stormy weather 28 miles this morning called soaked, wet, but ready for Media Confidential.
ALAN RUSBRIDGER [00:02:26] When you talk about the Loch Ness Monster as a reputable newspaper editor, is this what we call fake news?
LIONEL BARBER [00:02:32] Well, I like to have a little bit of myth around when it comes to cycling. It's true that I yeah, even when I was on The Scotsman, I never got Deputed to write the Loch Ness Monster story. But, you know, there's a lot of things and it's a very deep love.
ALAN RUSBRIDGER [00:02:49] It sounds like the sort of thing that Donald Trump would talk about. But we mustn't get ahead of ourselves. A lot has been happening this week. I think you've been monitoring the sale of The Spectator, venerable organ.
LIONEL BARBER [00:03:00] Yes. I had a brief exchange with Fraser Nelson, who's I think obviously quite pleased that this is over. It's been many months in gestation and the magazine has been sold for 100 million pounds. You're noting that, Alan, that's a lot of money for a magazine.
ALAN RUSBRIDGER [00:03:20] But to tell me there's a multiple that has beaten even the record set by the F.T..
LIONEL BARBER [00:03:25] Well, Craigslist was being a bit modest, actually. He's not claiming that just yet. I mean, there is the question about whether the spectator makes more than 2.5 million pounds. Is it operational profits? Is it pretax profits? I don't want to confuse you, Alan, or indeed our listeners, but I think it may be that the Financial Times record may be staying intact. Very good, 42 times earnings. But the key issue point is what is Paul Marshall, the hedge fund billionaire multi-billionaire, going to do with The Spectator? Andrew Neil, the long serving former Sunday Times editor, has resigned as the chairman of The Spectator and made way for new management.
ALAN RUSBRIDGER [00:04:11] And wrote a rather elegant farewell note on on on Twitter, which I thought was quite classy. I've been watching Samir Shah's I think it's his first appearance before a select committee in the House of Lords that the new chair of the BBC appeared with Tim Davie, and they talked a bit about Hugh Edwards and his pay off and things like that. But there are a couple of interesting signs. One, one was sharp, went out of his way to talk about the independence of the BBC and say that it it's that really tell you that not recently but pointed out that no fewer than ten members of his board are appointed by the government. He just doesn't including himself. He doesn't think that's a good thing. And they have been dropping hints and and Shaw didn't dampen them down, that they were looking at a form of mutualization of the BBC, which is not reflected on Media Confidential with Lisa Nandy. And I thought it was a good performance by some. As it was, it was pretty robust.
LIONEL BARBER [00:05:16] So what does mutualization mean? How would that work?
ALAN RUSBRIDGER [00:05:19] Well, it would be more like a building society. Yes. So I think the idea is that every baby born in Britain or every baby that came to Britain would be given a share in the BBC. And the somebody clever would work out a governance system by which your share will could be translated into a meaningful vote. I think it just gives the it's a sort of almost an appearance thing of of giving power back in to the viewers and listeners and away from government. I think that was the part of the of the intervention.
LIONEL BARBER [00:05:54] And clearly that would be one way to stop the government having such a preponderant weight of influence over the appointment on the board.
ALAN RUSBRIDGER [00:06:01] Yeah, exactly. Anyway, he trailed that. He was then asked about this report which featured very heavily in the Sunday papers, which claimed to show that the BBC was very biased against Israel. And I have to say, I read this report as by a man called Trevor Assam, who is the Israeli lawyer who's been opposing bias of the BBC for many years. I thought this report was. Very flaky. So I don't know if you've read it lot or read about it, but what they've done. There are six, 6 to 10 Israeli lawyers who have said 9 million words of BBC reporting into Chat Gbtv four and produced a piece of analysis out of that. And I just thought it was a really flimsy piece of methodology, but it got a lot of pick up. They really targeted Jeremy Bowen, the veteran Middle East correspondent of the BBC. And the interesting thing, of course, it challenged about this. Tim Davie, to his credit, backed his reporters, but said that this would be looked at by our old friend, the editorial Standards and Guidance Committee of the BBC. And that is going to be a hot potato because the only external journalist on that committee is our old friend, Sir Robbie Gibb. They know who has got this opaque relationship with the Jewish Chronicle. So trouble ahead.
LIONEL BARBER [00:07:34] Well, it would be important, Alan, to see who this editorial standards committee calls to give evidence and and and that I think should be made public after the fact, not before the fact, because I think it would be important to know the quality of people, their background, their knowledge of the Middle East. It's obviously a highly contentious subject. The BBC did admit to a couple of errors, particularly taking at face value what the Gaza Health Ministry was saying about the number of casualties. And they were not precise enough about the sourcing. But I think since then they've tightened up. And whatever you think, Jeremy Bowen is an extremely experienced correspondent. He's a very good, deeply experienced and I think a fair correspondent in what he's reporting. But that's my opinion, Alan. But I'm entitled to it.
ALAN RUSBRIDGER [00:08:32] I think that's your opinion and you are absolutely entitled to it. But watch this space because I think there is trouble ahead. So that's the the British scene. But what we're concentrating today on the American scene and and a lot have been said even before last night's debate about the way the US press has been covering Trump. And I certainly noticed it with voices in my feeds over the last, I don't know, 2 or 3 weeks of people being highly critical of the American president, particularly The New York Times, rightly or wrongly. And a new word came into the English language saying, what do you want to explain? What scene washing is wrong?
LIONEL BARBER [00:09:17] Well, I'll do my best. I think you have to look at it in terms of sanitizing what most people would say is either highly questionable assertions, deranged behavior, sanitizing quotes, or I think I've got a good definition here from Jeffrey Goldberg, the which I think I would refer to, which is he's the editor of The Atlantic. He says a bias towards coherence. So that means if you have, for example, Donald Trump meandering away, making lots of unqualified assertions about this, that and the other rambling that all the quotes to sanitize them, they're not challenged. And there's a lack of context. So, you know, normalizing the abnormal will be one way of putting it.
ALAN RUSBRIDGER [00:10:16] Alan That's a very good definition. Anyway, that's, that's the charge against the American press at the moment. And we're joined now by a great writer, historian, thinker, activist Rebecca Solnit, who has been writing about this. And she's going to tell us why she thinks this pattern of behavior by the American press is happening. Rebecca, you've just written a piece in The Guardian joining a chorus of other writers expressing really quite extreme disquiet at the way that this presidential race is being covered. Can you just summarize for us the argument that you made in that piece?
REBECCA SOLNIT [00:10:57] Yeah, my argument is an argument a lot of people are making. The real facts of the situation. A lot of the real news aren't being covered, notably the fact that Donald Trump is increasingly incoherent, incompetent, and making dire threats to deport millions of immigrants and democracy in America. You know, and all our climate action and other things that really matter. And so, like a lot of the my fellow journalists, I get up every morning and look at my other sources for The Real News and then check the major newspapers to see if it made it in. And most days, it feels like the major stories are missing or they've somehow been tweaked to look balanced or normal or something that they're not. So we're in a situation where it feels like it's an unprecedented emergency for this country. And because this country dominates the world, for the world and the public is not being told by the press with the most power to do so.
ALAN RUSBRIDGER [00:12:04] Somebody has coined the phrase sane washing to describe what's happening with Trump, i.e., you've got somebody who is far from normal. Whether he's clinically diagnosable or not is is a moot question. But reporters in their covering of him are essentially covering up for him. Do you recognize that as a syndrome?
REBECCA SOLNIT [00:12:25] Absolutely. Trump will go into these absolutely incoherent things that aren't even word salad, their word soup at this point. And reporters will try and extract something coherent from it. You know, he'll say a few hundred words of gibberish and somebody will make it sound in the papers are on the news like he made a policy point that seems like a, you know, a coherent policy point went off and it wasn't there at all. So, you know, that sane washing and his incapacity to be coherent is pretty much hidden from the public unless they're listening directly or reading alternative media.
LIONEL BARBER [00:13:06] Could you give us a couple of tangible stories, Rebecca, that were reported in the mainstream press, like The New York Times, which in your view, a classic example of sane washing?
REBECCA SOLNIT [00:13:21] Yeah. The example everybody's been jumping on in the last few days is that Trump talked to a New York economic forum and was asked a question about child care, which is a real crisis for working parents. And he went into this soliloquy that didn't answer the question at all and touched on all these obscure things and was full of grammatical incoherence. And the Trump's usual, we're going to build the greatest whatever. And then he somehow suggested that tariffs were going to pay for child care, which doesn't make sense at all. And it wasn't reported that way in The New York Times. I don't think The Washington Post did. Although The Washington Post did have a breakthrough recently on actually describing reality as we witness it. And we are seeing the Times and the Post, the two major U.S. newspapers, I think because of this pressure and shaming, are beginning to occasionally crack and let the truth in. But that was one example where, you know, hundreds of words of gibberish were mostly off topic or incomprehensible, were turned into a few crisp sentences as though that's what he'd said.
LIONEL BARBER [00:14:35] So, Rebecca, I want to put you under the spotlight. You are now the editor of The New York Times. What would you be saying to the reporters covering the crucial I mean, this is going to be watched by tens of millions of people. The debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and ex-president Donald Trump on ABC News. What guidelines would you be offering?
REBECCA SOLNIT [00:15:01] Well, now that you've made me the editor in chief of The New York Times, I think I'd fire most of the columnists and dismissed most of the political reporters and talk.
LIONEL BARBER [00:15:10] You're very tough, Rebecca.
REBECCA SOLNIT [00:15:12] You know, carry on. You know, crises require extreme responses. And they've got a lot of fantastic investigative journalists who do report the truth. People like Megan Twomey and Jodi Kantor. I'd haul in people who haven't been doing this distorted coverage. Who don't have this history to write fresh the way they report on other stories. Or maybe I'd just hire, you know, some of the great independents who are doing the job.
LIONEL BARBER [00:15:43] But are there any specific as you're a great writer, an award winning writer, best seller in terms of the writing? What would you be telling the reporters to focus on in this debate?
REBECCA SOLNIT [00:15:57] I think we'd be focusing on who's telling the truth, who has a coherent plan, who has a criminal history. The fact that an adjudicated rapist and convicted felon who attempted a coup against this government is being treated as a normal political candidate while he threatens to end elections and democracy in America and threatens harm against his enemies, immigrants, etc.. Asked for $1 billion bribe from the fossil fuel industry may have gotten a $10 million bribe from the dictator of Egypt, etc.. How do you normalize that? And maybe not all of it comes up in the debate, but it should. The other thing I would do, which I did for The Guardian when I covered the Biden Trump debate on June 27th, is look at the biases of the questions themselves, because Dana Bash. And the other guy completely normalized outrageous things, Trump said last time. Trump, in the June 27th debate, claimed that mothers and doctors are conspiring to commit infanticide at birth, a lie he's been telling almost unchecked since at least 2019. So he said this lie in the debate. And what did Dana Bash say? She said, thank you. And then she asked Biden a question. And so I think a lot of the problem is not just Trump. It's that the debate format, this sort of gladiatorial ridiculousness. And the interlocutors in this format have themselves been huge problems all along. They were in 2016 and 2020, and they probably will be in 2024 again more.
LIONEL BARBER [00:17:53] After the break, we'll have more from Rebecca Solnit. We'll be right back.
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LIONEL BARBER [00:19:14] And now back to our discussion about sane-washing the normalization of the abnormal.
ALAN RUSBRIDGER [00:19:21] Rebecca We know that after 2016, there was a great deal of soul searching in American newsrooms and they thought, how could we have got it so wrong? Do you think part of what's happening at the moment is a kind of overcompensation? You've got editors who are looking at the polls saying that 5050, we don't want to be caught out again on the wrong side of history.
REBECCA SOLNIT [00:19:44] No, I think what they got wrong in 2016 is how they cover the race. I think Hillary Clinton, who won by 2.9 million votes but lost the Electoral College in a very corrupted election, lost for a lot of different reasons, including her own shortcomings. But a huge part was biased coverage. The New York Times devoted more coverage in six days to her bullshit emails, scandals, and they did to the policy positions of both candidates. The fact that Donald Trump was a serial bankrupt business failure. With a lot of criminal associates and a history of stiffing employees, sexually assaulting women, etc., was something that should have been covered thoroughly by the U.S. press and wasn't. People really thought he was the fictional character on The Apprentice, and I believe that's who they voted for. The New York Times in particular, his hometown paper, where a lot of his crimes had been committed locally, absolutely failed to let the public know who Donald Trump really was, to tell us what he was going to do. And so I think that. There's a failure that they didn't really address. You know, they all just covered up and carried on. And in fact, they spent the next four years finding it really hard to call a lie a lie when it came out of his mouth. Under-reporting or softening reporting on. What the Trump administration was actually doing, which was often illegal, you know, and corrupt and, you know, really gaslighting the public. And they also constantly went to Trump voters to see how they felt about everything, particularly The New York Times. Anything that happened, you had to see how right wingers felt and whether they felt good about it. And there was an absolute asymmetry on that front, too, that really anointed racist white people as. The real Americans whose needs and desires and beliefs mattered much more than progressive people, non-white people, etc.. So I don't think the papers ever corrected themselves.
ALAN RUSBRIDGER [00:22:06] That all all that may be true. But at the same time, there was a perception that the the East Coast media in particular just misread it. They they didn't they didn't believe that this was going to happen. And. I mean, there must be some sense of covering their backs this time. They don't want to be made to look foolish again, given that the race is so tight in 2016.
REBECCA SOLNIT [00:22:32] Hillary Clinton was given by the polls a huge chance of winning, I think an 85% chance close to the election. And a lot of people confused 85% with 100%. And then we've got to spend four years in the 15%. And we're still living in its aftermath. I think the whole obsession with polls is part of the problem. And The New York Times in particular is notorious for polls that lean more right than most of the rest of the polls out there. And they have a habit of releasing a poll that looks really good for Republicans and then getting an onslaught of their staff to build stories on it. And the times. Part of their corrosive news at this point. Is that they're essentially campaigning for their agenda. They campaigned since February for Biden to step down with massive stories that felt like it was coming out of Pravda because all their opinion writers would essentially write the same opinion.
LIONEL BARBER [00:23:34] Just to be clear, Rebecca, you do now think that it was right for the president to step down on health grounds?
REBECCA SOLNIT [00:23:42] I think his health was fine. I think he's old and a bit tired. He's had a lifelong stuttering problem, which makes him sound goofy. Ezra Klein at the New York Times and The New York Times in particular. And then a whole lot of high status insider white men all started lobbying to get rid of Biden, particularly after the June 27th debate. But Klein had started in in in February. And what that what those guys wanted was an open convention, which meant they would have pushed by now and then we would have gone for several weeks to several months with no candidate, you cannot fundraise. You cannot get out the vote. You cannot campaign without a candidate. It was a disastrous idea, and that's what I opposed. And they reluctantly recognized towards the end that the only logical and really legal successor and the only Democratic successor was somebody we already voted for and voted for in 2020. The main function of a vice president is to be the replacement should something have the precedent. And so I'm very happy that Kamala Harris is the candidate I when I saw how almost rapturous and generous the reception of her was after Biden steps down, I felt like I lived in a better country because I've seen so many women and people of color and particularly women of color attacked when they run for office. But I think the process of how Biden was pushed out, how a kind of media stampede of distortion, misinformation, etc., happened was really disgraceful. And. Kind of shocking. And the press has essentially decided it's, you know, the fourth sort of pillar of government in a country that's supposed to have three and that they should really be in charge of a lot of the major decisions, whether it's about going to war in Iraq, about be the Democratic candidate, etc.. And. That's not really what the press should be doing.
LIONEL BARBER [00:25:47] Rebecca I have a lot of sympathy with what you're saying. I think it was Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of The Atlantic, talked about a bias towards coherence in the mainstream media. And I've got some good news in that the book and I think it is a I'm about to review it in the Financial Times. The book Lucky Loser by the two Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times journalists exposing Trump's business record. I mean, this is 500 pages. It's devastating. It's going to come out in a few days. That will set the record straight, at least for those who want to read it. But let me just turn to something else, which is the lawfare aspect of this campaign, these cases that have been brought. Do you not agree that actually the press has reported on these cases poorly, particularly the payments hush payments to Stormy Daniels, the brought case in New York by Alvin Bragg, that that actually is flawed when it comes to, you know, an election campaign offense. And secondly, the case on the valuation of real estate, that also has a lot of questions about the quality of the prosecution. Is that not the case? Also saying in Washington that we should be actually more critical of these cases?
REBECCA SOLNIT [00:27:15] I'm not quite sure what you're trying to say, that the prosecution itself was somehow problematic.
LIONEL BARBER [00:27:21] Yes, I.
REBECCA SOLNIT [00:27:21] Am. I don't think it was problematic short version. And I actually think a huge number of crimes Trump committed, including violating the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution. By proxy.
LIONEL BARBER [00:27:32] I see that.
REBECCA SOLNIT [00:27:33] Presidency have gone unprosecuted and that Biden's attorney general, Merrick Garland, has been astonishingly sluggish in prosecuting things. Which is why four years after the last election, there's still getting around to, you know, prosecuting, sentencing, trying these cases in many respects.
ALAN RUSBRIDGER [00:27:58] Rebecca London asked you earlier to to name an example of sane Washington. You wrote in your Guardian piece about examples of stories that are being ignored or where, in your view, there's false equivalence. Can you give a couple of examples of those?
REBECCA SOLNIT [00:28:15] My God. There. I do not actually hate to keep picking on the New York Times because I worked very hard to earn it. But there was a remarkable story in The New York Times. I have notes. Harris and Trump have housing ideas. Economists helped out a classic New York Times headline. Harris's economic plans were very normal, kind of progressive help first time home buyers with certain income levels, with down payments, etc.. Trump's housing plan was described as mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, which would round up millions of people, put them in camps, dump them in other countries and disrupt the building trade, the agriculture, the food industry and everything else in this country and I'm pretty confident lead to mass protests. Rose described just just a perfectly reasonable economic approach. You know, it really felt like Jonathan Swift's modest proposal, where he suggests the Irish could solve their hunger problem by eating their toddlers. So that was a sane wash.
ALAN RUSBRIDGER [00:29:23] I think that's a fantastic example that the 2025 budget has also been grossly underplayed by the mainstream media. But you found it more comprehensively covered in alternative so-called alternative channels.
REBECCA SOLNIT [00:29:36] There was this remarkable moment in July when the mainstream media was really neglecting the 2025 plan, which is to institute authoritarianism on day one. If Trump wins and ordinary people on social media started circulating information at a level that I think really shifted, I think there was a study demonstrating it shifted public awareness of the problem. And that's a really interesting thing happening right now, where these very well-funded, huge media organizations should be leading public awareness of important issues. They're often nagged, prodded and dragged into coverage by the public, by smaller presses, independent journalists, etc.. Something very striking that happened when Biden gave the State of the Union address and the wacky lady senator from Alabama gave the rebuttal. What happened is that she told a long story about a Mexican woman who'd been sexually trafficked, suggesting it had happened during the Biden administration and otherwise telling a lot of falsehoods about it. And you guys are professional journalists. You know that our editors, you know that when something big like that happens, there must be dozens of editors, kind of of journalists assigned to watch something like that. But it was an independent journalist with a little tiny independent newsletter who actually went out and fact checked the story about trafficking, released the story on Tick Tock that it was a bunch of lies. And all the mainstream newspapers without shame picked it up from this guy who's probably making a modest income. Awful lot of individual subscribers at his little project. And to me that they weren't that he did the job and they didn't really indicated where we are. There's a lot of fantastic journalists working in this country. A lot of them are at small publications like The New Republic. They've got independent newsletters on Substack or other platforms. They're very active on social media, particularly Twitter architects, and they're doing the job that the mainstream publications have been doing. I get up every morning and look at what they're saying, and then I look at the newspapers to see if the newspapers have picked it up.
ALAN RUSBRIDGER [00:31:55] And you also single out Heather Cox Richardson.
REBECCA SOLNIT [00:31:58] Yeah, she's been on this.
ALAN RUSBRIDGER [00:31:59] Which is which is amazing.
REBECCA SOLNIT [00:32:01] She's been astonishingly successful. She's got about 3 million people reading her, which means she's coming close to the size of The Washington Post online, which is pretty staggering for a history professor. Almost no one had heard of before the autumn of 2019.
LIONEL BARBER [00:32:19] And one of the important things that Heather Cox Richardson does is use context. So you're getting historical context. And if I were to criticize the cut, the coverage is that it lacks context. It's noise you need to have in your mind if you're going to make a judgment about a figure like Trump is. Well, what's gone on in the past? How abnormal is this? And that's what she offers.
REBECCA SOLNIT [00:32:50] What's striking about Heather's work, and I do know her personally is that she's demonstrating that a whole lot of people in this country are not looking for more horserace, clickbait, sensationalism, personality stories. They're looking for solid reporting with historical context. And the fact that 3 million people are excited to read about how this era resembles the lead up to the Civil War or other crises in this country's past, it's really striking. People want good news. And, you know, she's making a shocking amount of money because people are voluntarily paying for what she's doing. And it just says a lot about. The reading public versus what's out there?
LIONEL BARBER [00:33:35] I think so, Rebecca. And you've already fired the most of the editors of the mainstream media to be serious. I mean, is there anything that you would advise to try to correct this idea towards the end of this campaign as we reach a climax or for the next campaign? What is the answer? Is it better training? Is it giving journalists history lessons?
REBECCA SOLNIT [00:34:03] What I think that people in the political press live inside a kind of feedback loop mirror world confirmation bias bubble in which they echo each other. They normalize certain positions that are not very coherent or honest assessments of the situation. And they're more preoccupied with what I call the esthetics of objectivity, making things look balanced by treating Democrats or Republicans the same, even though one of them is engaged in a wholesale assault on the Constitution, the rule of law, human rights and reality itself with constant lies. So, you know, just make a little adjustment in that, perhaps.
LIONEL BARBER [00:34:51] Thank you, Rebecca. It was a privilege to talk to you.
ALAN RUSBRIDGER [00:34:54] I think you should be training the next generation of journalists. Thank you so much, Rebecca, for joining us today and welcome. Fingers crossed for what happens between now and November the 6th.
LIONEL BARBER [00:35:09] Alan. I thought Rebecca Solnit made some very powerful points about the reporting on Trump, and they have been late to the party in playing on or observing and writing about his odd aberrant behaviour. The age question. But I wonder whether she was perhaps treading too lightly when you could make the same criticism of the American press in not writing early enough about President Biden's very apparent aging. Clearly, there's something wrong and he's aged a lot in the last year. And the American media missed it.
ALAN RUSBRIDGER [00:35:54] Yeah. And when we we recorded this just before the presidential debate and certainly New York Times ball no punches in its coverage of the debate this morning. It's interesting the debate that this is all sparked in America. And, of course, it's a slightly different tradition from our press here. It it you have journalists who are trained in J-school that objectivity is the key. And I've read some pieces in the American press recently calling that into question and saying with somebody as old in every sense of the word as Trump, how unusual he is as as a figure that the normal rules can't really apply and that you kind of owe it to the readers, not simply to say things like, you know, it's not proven that immigrants are eating pets in Ohio, but this is a man. And you say in every story, this is a man with a track record of of lying. And if that's breaking objectivity, so be it. But but it's something that you just have to keep reminding readers of and I think is healthy that that debate is happening. But I thought Rebecca Solnit was a sort of outstanding advocate for the view that the American press has slipped up.
LIONEL BARBER [00:37:12] And I'm going to put you on the spot, Ellen, if you had been editing this morning, looking at the papers, was is there anything that you would have said? Cohen We should have done this. I mean, they're all the five things that you needed to watch, the five key points or less.
ALAN RUSBRIDGER [00:37:28] I thought they did well. I scheduled The Washington Post had a pretty good day that what they had done was to assemble a about 40 undecided voters and then monitor them in real time in their reaction to the chunks of questioning and seeing how they were changing their mind and changing their votes. And I thought that was quite an effective way of covering that, that the debate.
LIONEL BARBER [00:37:55] That's all for Media Confidential. We'll be back next week with more analysis as we delve behind the headlines.
ALAN RUSBRIDGER [00:38:01] And we've got a new bonus show that will land this Sunday and every Sunday because each week we're trying to answer your questions about the industry and shed some light on what goes on behind the scenes in the world of media. And we've had some excellent questions so far. So do keep them coming in.
LIONEL BARBER [00:38:18] Yeah, I hate being put on the spot, Alan, but there we are. Send us your questions to Media Confidential at Prospect Magazine, Dot Co.uk or at Media Control Pod. Thank you for listening to Media Confidential. Brought to you by Prospect and Fresh Air.
