March 14, 2020

The New York Times Needs To Be More Honest About Trump and the Coronavirus Pandemic

Unlike many lefties, I am not a New York Times hater. They do some of the best reporting in the country and that’s why I end up linking to them a lot. That said, they sure do screw up their front page way more often than they should. Here it is on Friday evening:

If you look just at the top of the page, you’ll learn that President Trump has declared a national emergency; that he’s agreed to an aid package; that stocks have surged; that New York City has 400 coronavirus cases; that the worst-case estimates for coronavirus mortality are pretty bad; and that travelers entering the country aren’t being screened.

Then we get a coronavirus Q&A: how to clean your phone; what to do with your 401(k); and how to stock your pantry.

Only if you keep going do you finally learn that Trump misled the public over and over during his press conference today. Under a bland headline, reporter Linda Qiu tells us that on live national TV:

  • Trump lied when he blamed Obama for testing shortages.
  • Trump lied or was delusional—or something—when he said Google was ready to go with a coronavirus website.
  • Trump lied when he said he closed the border with Europe “some time ago.”
  • Trump pretended that he had no responsibility for disbanding a pandemic team in the White House.

She could have added that the entire press conference was a master class in how not to respond to the coronavirus: Trump crowded a bunch of people together; he shook as many hands as he could; he said he hadn’t bothered isolating himself or getting tested even though he’s been around other people who have tested positive; and he didn’t use the opportunity to explain best practices to people.

I get that condemning Trump is not the main goal of the news pages of the Times. They aren’t Mojo or The Nation or Rachel Maddow. But purely as a news service, isn’t it important for their readers to know that they can’t trust anything Trump says about the coronavirus pandemic? He’s had several chances to get it right and his self-centered personality simply doesn’t allow him to. This is something that the mainstream news media needs to make sure the public understands.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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