Crazy talk is news because of who says it
How that crazy talk reveals something about facts
Hard to believe, but it was 40 years ago that, in the mid-1980s, I used to dread the final moments of an Iowa City Council meeting.
I was a reporter covering the meetings, first for the Iowa City Press-Citizen and then for The Gazette’s Iowa City bureau. The agenda item in those final moments was council time. This was when council members could bring up items they wanted to pursue at future meetings.
The council then had a couple of members who would just say stuff — whatever was on their minds and without checking the veracity of what they were saying. For example, one did not want to include the University of Iowa to participate in the annual United Way campaign because the Red Cross received United Way money and, the council member said in an unsubstantiated and false claim, the Red Cross never delivered packages to soldiers in the trenches during World War II.
My dilemma, late at night when I either wanted to go home or head to the old Fitzpatrick’s bar to finish the night with other reporters who had covered Tuesday night meetings, was how to handle such a public statement.
On one hand, it was nonsense and not newsworthy. The council had no say in who was in United Way.
On the other hand, these council members were using a public forum to spit out falsehoods and I thought the public should know that its elected officials acted in that manner.
The result of this mental exercise would be a brief in the paper that included basic reporting on the statement and a fact check, which meant going to the library and looking up information in printed sources instead of conducting a modern-day internet search.
The story was news simply because someone entrusted by the public proclaimed something in a public arena. One fact would emerge from these instances — the council members had reasons to distrust agencies, real but mostly imagined, and that distrust affected public policy.
Now, we are bombarded with the Washington, D.C., Reflecting Pool fiasco. Donald Trump says crazy things. We know this but cannot simply stop considering that the leader of the free world, with access to nuclear weapons, acts in this manner.
On one hand, the reflecting pool mess-up could have been a small-fry story that generated a few late-night TV jokes but little beyond that.
READ MORE: IT’S NOT EASY BEING GREEN — THE DC REFLECTING POOL INSANITY, BY SUZANNE TITKEMEYER
READ MORE: WATER DAMAGE, IMPOTENCE AT HOME AND ABROAD, BY NICK CATOGGIO, THE DISPATCH
But Donald Trump had to make a big deal about how he made sure the pool got a paint job he thought was necessary, with the obligatory jab at Barack Obama. When the project turned sour, he turned to Page 1 of his one-page playbook: blame others.
A big problem is, this craziness has left people facing criminal charges, with calls for them to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. That is unfortunate for those who will have to pay to fight legal challenges designed to cover up incompetent stewardship of yet another national landmark. Those expenses will exist even if the charges are dropped or people prevail in court.
My first defense, which a costly lawyer I could not afford would have to argue, would be that Donald Trump’s administration of Trumpophants did the damage through provable incompetence. My first offense would be to sue the federal government for harassment and civil rights violations, again with the help of the costly lawyer I could not afford.
MEDIA COVERAGE
Quit covering the reflecting pool so much, some Americans have been saying on social media, notably on X.
Conservative media spent a lot of time during the past few days analyzing what they called “excessive coverage” by mainstream media, to which they do not believe they belong despite their influence as media outlets. They also, apparently, do not consider their reporting on other media’s coverage to be excessive.
Yet Trump and his administration are the ones ramping up this story, including on Tuesday, June 23, when they put a fence around portions of the pool. This gets us back to how to handle crazy statements by those with public power and responsibility.
RESOURCE: MEDIA BIAS CHART, BIASLY
RESOURCE: THE POLITICAL GAP IN AMERICANS’ NEWS SOURCES, PEW RESEARCH CENTER
RESOURCE: MEDIA BIAS CHART, ALLSIDE MEDIA BIAS CHART™
When someone in public power says something in a public arena, it must be reported. We deserve to know what our elected leaders say.
But something is not true simply because someone said it. Statements require reporting and factchecking. We do not always see that in our new age of social media snippets, which really are not much different from the snippets we get from other media, such as radio and television.
A big test of how the Reflecting pool story moves forward will be whether facts — or simply what people say — are accepted as truth.
Fox (news), Newsmax and OAN, where one-third of the nation gets its news, are in a battle to be Trump stenographers. Others are doing their jobs at various levels, and focusing like lasers on the pool is overkill.
Research from The Center for Integrity in News Reporting shows that more Americans want to be told what everyone says so they can determine what is true than want to be told whether statements are true or false. There is a lot to unpack in those statistics. We should want to know all the facts when making important decisions, but we also should want to know what is true and what is false when making those decisions.
Trumpers are going to believe Trump, and anti-Trumpers will not, so you will hear bias there. That is not bad. Biases challenge us to think beyond the boundaries we hand ourselves. But look at the evidence.
Good reporting on the chemical and political reasons for what is happening to the pool will be the most beneficial information you can read.
Watch for reporting on those arrested, too. Despite what Trump says, evidence supporting legitimate criminal charges should be available long before trial.
Mostly, though, consider whether Trump’s eagerness to talk about the pool so much is an effort to shift blame away from mistakes in how the pool was handled. The man is the master of grievances, real and imagined, and that distrust affects how this nation is run.
One other thing:
Hands off this:
Lyle Muller is a member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative. Check out some of the collaborative’s most recent reporting in this week’s summary. And order his book about an Iowa United Methodist Church’s attempts to wrestle with controversies since its 1841 founding.
2030 feet of lies and incompetence. Just saw a photo of the reflecting pool. North Korean fence and towers. Lincoln is sobbing.