This is a real problem. NYT has been doing this throughout Trump’s presidency, but never has it been so damaging as it is right now. https://twitter.com/biblioracle/status/1250038847003598850

If you read NYT or watch nightly news, what you get is a cleaned up version of Trump that doesn’t at all capture what was actually said during these briefings.

Most people do not sit around watching these unhinged press conferences or his rallies or anything else.

There’s a 2018 New Yorker profile of Mark Burnett that I think is important for this current moment: an hour of The Apprentice was made up of 300 hours of footage. Trump would do something that made no sense and editors would make it seem logical. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/01/07/how-mark-burnett-resurrected-donald-trump-as-an-icon-of-american-success

What makes Trump the “reality TV president” has less to do with his showmanship or even the fact that he came from the actual world of reality TV, and much more to do with news media transforming itself into reality TV operations to create the image of a normal president.

I wrote a whole article about this recently, which you should check out https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/reframing-trumps-incoherent-inaccurate-ramblings-bland-political-copy

But here are some examples.

What happened during Trump’s Oval Office speech vs. how NYT framed it:

How Trump spoke at a Fox News town hall vs. how NYT framed it:

How Trump spoke at his visit to the CDC vs how NYT framed it

How Trump’s Feb 26 news conference went vs. how the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times framed it

And on non-covid events, too. After he gave a speech following an anti-immigrant terrorist attack vs how major media covered it

Or the night he got impeached. He was speaking at a rally where he said that a dead congressman was in hell, acted out sexts between an FBI agent and an FBI lawyer, and talked about how attractive Tom Cruise is. Here’s that vs how NYT and CNN covered it

We’re being given a deceptively coherent version of an utterly incoherent man. This is a problem. It’s false, and it should make any serious journalist feel disgust.

Anyway, again, here’s the piece I wrote about that https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/reframing-trumps-incoherent-inaccurate-ramblings-bland-political-copy