Journalists should have listened to Gerard Baker

American Spectator: At the beginning of the Trump presidency, a few cautious editors, such as the Wall Street Journal’s Gerard Baker, questioned the media’s open embrace of biased reporting. Baker warned reporters that they should stick to demonstrable facts and avoid jumping to any conclusions beyond them. Leave those conclusions to your readers, he argued. He, for example, didn’t care for the practice of reporters labeling Trump’s misstatements “lies,” which he rightly saw as an editorial judgment masquerading as news:

The difference is not what I think or what I might express and an opinion or even given reasonable grounds to believe, but what my reporters can report as facts. And if you’re going to report as a fact that something is a lie, you have to know that it’s not only an untruth, not only a falsehood, you have to be able to be able to impute two things in the mind of the speaker: one, knowledge that it is actually untrue; and two, a deliberate intent to deceive.

And I can see circumstances, perhaps, that Donald Trump or indeed anybody else for that matter, that they have enough evidence to know that it’s truth, and that I would be able to infer from their falsehood that they were telling a lie. But it’s a pretty high bar. Our reporters are very careful about imputing motives to people that go beyond the evidence. We are very strict about this. We don’t impute jealousy or hatred or various other things. It is a judgment making a call about whether or not someone is lying. And again, I don’t rule it out completely. I said I’m careful about it. And I think that most people should be careful about it.

Baker was widely mocked for this stance. But had reporters listened to him, they might have spared themselves countless acts of journalistic malpractice during the course of the Trump presidency. In the last week, reporters couldn’t resist jumping to judgments about bogus stories alleging that Trump suborned perjury and that some MAGA-hat-wearing youth had accosted a Native American, both perfect storms of anti-Trump prejudice.  MORE HERE