QOTD -- Covering Trump's Bogus Prosecutions

 

"...The key thing to remember is that we’re already well beyond the event horizon in the corruption of the Justice Department. If federal judges, having dispensed with the presumption of regularity in the functioning of the government, no longer give the Justice Department the benefit of the doubt in court, then we shouldn’t either.

"The implications of that shift are enormous, but too many editors and producers are not fully grappling with them yet.

"Among other things, leaked federal law enforcement details about crimes — which have formed the backbone of news coverage, especially in the pre-charging phase — can’t be taken at anything close to face value anymore (and perhaps never should have been). Social media posts by top officials, including the president himself, are not reliable, and rebroadcasting them as straight news no longer serves a public purpose. That’s not to mention the utterly unreliable real-time social media posts by a groveling FBI director trying to flatter the president and please the White House.  [snip]

"If for days, weeks, and months in advance of charges being brought, news outlets allow themselves to be used to parcel out each investigative development and procedural step in a politicized prosecution, then they’re letting themselves be co-opted by the bad faith actors in service of smearing the putative target. If the average news consumer is seeing the same old headlines they’ve always seen in the run-up to an indictment, how are they to process it as anything other than a normal prosecution? ..." -- David Kurtz, Talking Points Memo, on the media's need for a different perspective in covering the prosecutions of, for example, John Bolton and James Comey (and potentially, Letitia James).  Based on past performance, we're not hopeful that a perspective that demands that truth, rather than he-said, she-said reporting, will prevail.