Reuters memo: We’re ready to cover a hostile Trump administration
As the press continues to adjust to President Trump and the new administration, a pair of internal memos circulated within news organizations this week illustrate the debate that’s happening in newsrooms around the country: how to cover a president who claims he views the media as “the opposition party.”
“The first 12 days of the Trump presidency (yes, that’s all it’s been!) have been memorable for all — and especially challenging for us in the news business,” Reuters editor in chief Steve Adler wrote in a memo to staffers on Tuesday. “It’s not every day that a U.S. president calls journalists ‘among the most dishonest human beings on earth.'”
Adler noted that Reuters operates “in more than 100 countries, including many in which the media is unwelcome and frequently under attack.”
“I am perpetually proud of our work in places such as Turkey, the Philippines, Egypt, Iraq, Yemen, Thailand, China, Zimbabwe, and Russia, nations in which we sometimes encounter some combination of censorship, legal prosecution, visa denials, and even physical threats to our journalists,” he wrote.
“We don’t know yet how sharp the Trump administration’s attacks will be over time or to what extent those attacks will be accompanied by legal restrictions on our news-gathering,” Adler continued. “But we do know that we must follow the same rules that govern our work anywhere.”
He then offered a list of “Do’s and Don’ts” for covering the Trump White House:
Do’s:
–Cover what matters in people’s lives and provide them the facts they need to make better decisions.
–Become ever-more resourceful: If one door to information closes, open another one.
–Give up on hand-outs and worry less about official access. They were never all that valuable anyway. Our coverage of Iran has been outstanding, and we have virtually no official access. What we have are sources.
–Get out into the country and learn more about how people live, what they think, what helps and hurts them, and how the government and its actions appear to them, not to us.
[…]
Don’ts:
–Never be intimidated, but:
–Don’t pick unnecessary fights or make the story about us. We may care about the inside baseball but the public generally doesn’t and might not be on our side even if it did.
–Don’t vent publicly about what might be understandable day-to-day frustration. In countless other countries, we keep our own counsel so we can do our reporting without being suspected of personal animus. We need to do that in the U.S., too.
–Don’t take too dark a view of the reporting environment: It’s an opportunity for us to practice the skills we’ve learned in much tougher places around the world and to lead by example — and therefore to provide the freshest, most useful, and most illuminating information and insight of any news organization anywhere.
On Monday night, Wall Street Journal editor in chief Gerard Baker sent an email to editors asking them to stop referring to the seven countries included in Trump’s travel ban as being predominantly Muslim.
“Can we stop saying ‘seven majority Muslim countries’? It’s very loaded,” Baker wrote in the internal email, which was published Tuesday by Politico. “The reason they’ve been chosen is not because they’re majority Muslim but because they’re on the list of [countries] Obama identified as countries of concern. Would be less loaded to say ‘seven countries the US has designated as being states that pose significant or elevated risks of terrorism.'”
While many media outlets have accurately described the countries in Trump’s controversial executive order — Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen — as predominantly Muslim, the administration contends it is not a “Muslim ban.”
On Tuesday, White House press secretary Sean Spicer went further, arguing that the order does not even constitute a “ban,” although both Trump and Spicer had both recently used that term to describe it.
“It can’t be a ban if you’re letting a million people in … that is by nature not a ban. It is extreme vetting,” Spicer said. “I think that the words that are being used to describe it derive from what the media is calling this. He has been very clear that it is extreme vetting.”
On CNN’s “Reliable Sources” on Sunday, a panel including Steve Adler of Reuters and Huffington Post editor Lydia Polgreen discussed the challenges of covering the Trump administration and its war on words.
“This is not a normal presidency,” Polgreen said. “This is not a normal time for journalism. I think we’re going to be under unprecedented pressure and attack.”
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