On Wednesday, President Trump unleashed a slew of lies in a rant about Ukrainian President Zelensky. He lashed out again today (Friday), saying Zelensky does not deserve to be at the table because he has “no cards.”
It’s a good thing for Trump they’re playing with cards and not marbles.
Below I’ll show how it was covered by the US newspapers and the British tabloids, as presented by Freedom Forum’s “Today’s Front Pages” and the Press Review from Sky News.
You’ll see a marked difference between the US and British takes on Trump’s lie-filled tirade. In the past, the British tabloids have not been typically known for their allegiance to the highest journalistic standards. Prince Harry settled his lawsuit against Murdoch Group newspapers in January, having testified that the tabloids destroyed his childhood. They also destroyed his mother’s adulthood - and went after his wife’s.
But that was then - last month seems so long ago - and this is now. And what’s happening now is that the ill-timed timidity displayed on America’s front pages is precisely what an autocrat hellbent on destroying the world order needs. The free press is one of the few remaining guardrails operating at this moment, and it’s hard to say that it is operating at full capacity.
Fortunately, we’ve got the British press to remind us that the responsibility of good journalism is adherence to the truth, even when the truth is incredibly ugly and, in some billionaire circles, unpopular.
Here’s something that is very popular right now: Rejecting Putin. Americans see the grave danger of obeisance to Vladimir Putin and they do not support the abandonment of Ukraine. See this screengrab of a Quinnipiac poll from MSNBC yesterday.
Now, let’s take a look at the mealy-mouthed coverage in the US press of Trump’s untethered rant about Zelensky. First the New York Times:
The Times drew a false equivalence between Zelensky’s accusation, which was speculative but rational and fact-based, and Trump’s, which was an angry spewing of unsupported propaganda. In fact, Trump’s echoed those very sources Zelensky accused of supplying the disinformation in the first place. In equating the two leaders in a side by side comparison, portraying this as a “simmering feud” between two individuals, rather than an existential crisis for Zelensky’s nation and the free world, the Times did a disservice to Zelensky, the gravity of the moment, the cause of honest journalism and ultimately, press freedom in America.
And they refused to call a lie a lie. Ukraine did not start the war - that reference by Trump should have been followed not by “Trump suggested,” but “Trump lied,” or at least, “Trump suggested, in a dramatic reversal of the truth.” People are, unfortunately, not smart enough for subtlety. Call a lie a lie.
Calling the new take on the history of the conflict “Mr. Trump’s revisionism” is akin to calling a schoolyard taunt a “doctoral thesis.” Please! The Times is not just insulting my intellect by calling Trump’s deliberate Orwellian distortion of victim and attacker a simple historical “revisionism,” it is insulting the whole idea of historical revisionism - the whole idea of ideas. Next the NYT is going to call this reversal a “Trump Doctrine,” when at best it’s a “Trump Capitulation” borne of a “Trump Fabrication.”
By the same logic of the “Trump Revisionism” for the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Jews provoked the Nazis into the Holocaust - which is precisely what Hitler accused the Jews of doing, particularly on Kristallnacht: and the Times echoed those accusations on its front pages back then.1 The victim becomes the perpetrator in a grand revisionary ruse to justify a murderous revenge.
Oldest trick in the book. Faux revision. The worst wave of looting and destruction in Germany since the Thirty Years War - that’s since 1648 for those keeping score at home - was not a pogrom - it was vengeance. Justified rage. They made me do it. Like those who justify what Hamas did on October 7. To allow history to be “revision-ized” without calling it simply a lie is to allow the victims of the atrocities that have taken place in Ukraine - like Bucha - to be massacred all over again.
I know I’m being dramatic here, but a world where January 6 was a “love fest” is a world where Bucha can be a staged Ukrainian fake-massacre, with actors, in order to get American pity and money. It’s coming. Zelensky is, after all (as Trump pointed out this week) an actor. Oh, and he’s something else.
It’s coming. And it begins with a revisionist view of clear-cut truths.
It took the Times about a week following Trump’s first election to get to the point of using the term “lie” on the front page. It was agonizing for them, but they did it. You would think they’d know better by now.
Here’s a point made by the Times’ public editor before Trump took office in a 2016 piece about Trump’s birtherism, “When to Call a Lie a Lie.”
I think The Times should use this term (lie) rarely. Its power in political warfare has so freighted the word that its mere appearance on news pages, however factually accurate, feels partisan. It feels, as Ryan said, as if you’re playing the referee in frivolous political disputes. Trump’s birther moment was no frivolous dispute among sparring candidates. It was part of a five-year campaign tinged with racial overtones and dark motives. On a day when the Republican candidate backs off that claim, with a smile and a wink, I say it’s time to call a lie a lie.
This was written before the 30,000 lies that followed over the ensuing four years.
Once Trump was inaugurated in 2017, “lie” quickly found its way back into all the news that’s fit to print. On January 27, 2017, just after Kellyanne Conway regaled Chuck Todd with “alternative facts,” Dan Barry explained why the Times chose to use “lie” in a headline, regarding a patently false Trump accusation that millions of non citizens had voted in the 2016 election. He quoted a crisis communications specialist, who said, “The media run the risk of being disrespectful to the president of the United States. But the problem is: If he doesn’t get called out in some way, we as Americans are never going to know what’s true and what’s not.”
“In other words,” Barry concluded, “Words matter.”
In 2016, a Times’ political editor explained when she would use the term “lie,” as opposed to “falsehood” or something else less dramatic.
■ It is not used for matters of opinion, but only when the facts are demonstrably clear.
■ Intentionality is important — in the case of Trump and birtherism, he repeated the lie for years, in the face of overwhelming facts that disproved it, suggesting this was a deliberate attempt by Trump to deceive.
■ It is not used to police more frivolous disputes among political candidates or political factions.
Check, check and check. The “Zelensky is a dictator” post is outright lying, as a means of echoing Russian propaganda to delegitimize and betray an ally who has arguably saved the western world - in a move also intended, arguably, to destroy the NATO alliance and hand the world on a silver platter to our greatest enemy - whom 81 percent of the American people don’t trust.
The free press is one of the few remaining guardrails operating at this moment, and it’s hard to say that it is operating at full capacity.
A lie is a lie. Call it that, New York Times, or you become an accomplice to the lie. Not, it’s not merely a “falsehood.” No, Trump did not attack Zelensky for “criticizing disinformation.” He attacked Zelensky for daring to stand up to Putin, as well as to Trump himself (with enviable restraint and class). Ultimately, he was attacking Zelensky because he stands in the way of Trump’s desire to change the world order as fast as he can, knowing that these moves are vastly unpopular with the American people, Congress, and the world. Trump and Putin both know that the clock is ticking. Their window will soon close.
Let’s look at the meek bothsidesism that we find in the headlines of other American newspapers of renown, covering the same story:
“Feuds?” Really? Is this the Hatfields and the McCoys? No, the feud is between Trump and the post-WW2 world order. Personalizing this struggle plays into the autocrat’s hands. For Zelensky it’s not at all personal. It’s patriotic, for the survival of his nation. For Trump it’s personal - but for an alleged narcissist, everything is.
The Globe, using the Times’ feed, falls into the same “falsehood” trap, and speaks of a “breach,” a very passive term, while placing the contrasting accusations side by side, assigning them moral equivalence, even though only one of the statements is fact-based and rational.
This is not a Murdoch publication we’re talking about here. The Globe virtually chased Richard Nixon out of office. It ran the Pentagon Papers. Spotlight uncovered the clergy scandal. It ran cartoons that would likely be canceled today.
My favorite, which ran during John Dean’s historic Watergate testimony:
To their credit, the Globe did run an editorial today2 that used the phrase “flurry of lies” and accused Trump of letting Putin play him like a balalaika.
But editorials aren’t enough. If it’s a sham on page 15, it needs to be called a sham on page 1.
Across the board and with only a few exceptions, the American media is acting spooked and submissive. Just see these examples of moral equivalence below, with the Tampa Bay Times even bringing Putin into the dance of the barbs. Tampa, known for its Buccaneers, has gone from trading on the Barbary to “Trading Barbs.”
Meanehile, it’s tit for tat in the Philly Inquirer’s “War of Words.” “Call me a dictator will you? Well, you….you… live in this disinformation space!” So there!
Now let’s take all the British tabloids in without comment. Just see the difference. Notice how The Guardian is able to assign Trump a greater responsibility in creating the rift with Ukraine, which is absolutely true. There was no rift between the countries before Trump came to power. This “rift” is all on Trump, and the Brits get it. The Times of London comes closest to American style of equivocating, with a reference to “trading barbs,’ but the headline, “Zelensky is no dictator,” says what needs to be said.
I’m partial to poodles - so my favorite among the tabloid headlines is The Daily Star. I completely understand why that might not fly as a headline in the NYT, though I do hear echoes of the Trump-Clinton “Putin’s puppet” debate.
But here’s the best one of all, from down under:
Right on point. Trump is gambling of the free world’s assets and our security.
We cannot afford to have a failing/flailing free press right now. This is when we need it most. Trump and Co. know that, which is why they are trying to undermine it on a daily basis.
The Associated Press and the Gulf
And like so many of our most destructive storms, the destruction of our free press will feed off the churning waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
The courts have yet to test whether denying the Associated Press a place at White House briefings violates the First Amendment, but what’s certain is that the government cannot compel a news organization to adopt sudden changes in terminology, such as the usage of the term, “Gulf of America.”
From Freedom Forum’s site (which used to be the Newseum when it had brick and mortar, right near the Capitol - its closing was an enormous loss):
No. The First Amendment prevents government from requiring speech just as it prevents government from limiting speech.
In 1943, in the Supreme Court decision in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, Justice Robert H. Jackson wrote that freedom of speech protects the right not to speak as much as it protects the freedom to express ourselves. Jackson wrote, “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”
Courts may be asked to decide if the White House decision violates that “fixed star.”
The Gulf is only the first foray into Orwellian doublespeak with regard to geography. (With regard to other things, just about everything that comes out of Trump’s mouth is Orwellian).
I think the press should continue to use “Gulf of Mexico.” I don’t really care what it’s called. But almost none of it lies within US territorial waters, so who are we to snag the name?
Journalists need to become very Trumpy in order to survive Trump, and the front pages are the front lines. Now that Trump, in his own eyes, has become the embodiment of the Law, the King, we must do everything we can to defy his dictates. Which is why, when he says “Gulf of America,” I will continue to refer to it as the “Gulf of Mexico.”
Same with “West Bank.” Next week, or whenever the adminstration determines that the expression “West Bank” will no longer be used on State Department maps, in favor of “Judea and Samaria,” I’ll continue to rely on “West Bank” or “the Territories.”
It’s not because I have an aversion to the biblical terms, Judea and Samaria, which are used almost exclusively by Israel’s free press and many Jewish publications here. (It’s revealing that there is no other name for Gaza. At least everyone agrees that Gaza is Gaza).
It comes down to this: If every mainstream news outlet stays with “Gulf of Mexico,” either Trump will drop the insistence of total fealty to his words or those news gatherings at the White House will become very sparse.
It will become silly at times. But right now, if he says tomay-to (and that’s how he pronounces it), the press needs to say tomah-to.
That’s how you defeat a dictator; with a whole lot of people saying “tomah-to.”
With Trump’s poll numbers on a swift downward trajectory that will likely continue unabated, it will become easier for the America’s news outlets to reassert their independence. I hope they do - and soon.
Meanwhile, we can always count on the Brits to hold the line.
NYT coverage:
Here it is:
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