Press Watch: Why Won't Elite Media Call Out Trump's Lies on D.C. Incursion?
The reality TV president's political provocations in the nation's capital have nothing to do with fighting crime
By Dan Froomkin Press Watch
The elite media shouldn’t even remotely indulge the ridiculous lie that Donald Trump’s hostile takeover of law enforcement in the nation’s capital has anything to do with crime.
Journalists should instead be aggressively reporting on Trump’s real motives, which include distracting from the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, perpetuating racism, and normalizing the military takeover of an American city.
And yet the overwhelming majority of the media coverage of this debacle has focused on the issue of crime.
Yes, much of the coverage also notes that the crime rate in Washington, D.C., has actually decreased, rather than increased. But it doesn’t then address or even explore Trump’s real motives.
Consider the New York Times article by Katie Rogers last week. It began:
President Trump on Monday took federal control of the police force in the nation’s capital for 30 days and mobilized 800 National Guard troops to fight crime in a city that he claimed was overrun with “bloodthirsty criminals,” even though crime numbers in Washington are falling. (emphasis mine).
It quoted Trump at length:
“Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged-out maniacs and homeless people,” Mr. Trump said. “And we’re not going to let it happen anymore.”
It didn’t mention Jeffrey Epstein once.
And the closest it came to identifying the takeover as a blatantly authoritarian act was an acknowledgment that Trump’s announcement “was an extraordinary exertion of federal power over an American city.”
Readers were left with little to no hint of Trump’s real motivation.
And if their only source of news is the elite media, they remain uninformed to this day.
Way too many follow-up stories are about the issue of crime, including several about how politically damaging it is to Democrats.
Consider this New York Times article published just yesterday, by political reporters Jess Bidgood and Lisa Lerer. They wrote that with the takeover, “Trump has pushed the issue of crime back to the foreground of American politics” in a way that puts Democrats in a bind.
It's maddening.
It’s not about crime. Let’s review some of the reasons we know that sending federal agents and members of the National Guard pouring into the city the way Trump did is not about crime.
(We are aided here by common sense, social media, alternative news sources, opinion columnists and even a few articles in the mainstream press.)
Most obviously, if it were really about crime, the additional law enforcement resources would be deployed where the crime is. But they are not.
The Washington Post, to its credit, has published a map showing where National Guard troops and federal agents are patrolling D.C.
And as veteran journalist James Fallows posted on social media:
“If you know DC, what this map tell you is: They're making the gaudy show of strength in areas where it matters least and will do least good. Except for sheer spectacle.”
Indeed, there is no greater spectacle than the troops and armored trucks idling in front of Union Station.
New York Times race correspondent Clyde McGrady weighed in on Saturday with a welcome corrective to what the political correspondents have been reporting -- actually speaking to people who live in high crime neighborhoods. He reported:
“In the Congress Heights neighborhood in the southeast corner of Washington, D.C., where there have been several murders and more than a dozen robberies so far this year, residents have greeted President Trump’s promise of liberation from crime with a mix of skepticism, suspicion and outright derision.
“It’s not that they don’t believe crime is a problem in the nation’s capital. They know it is.
“They just don’t believe the president cares — at least not about them. If he did, they asked, why are residents hearing of federal agents roving the whiter areas of 16th Street Northwest but less so in their largely Black neighborhood? Why are National Guard members posing with tourists at the Washington Monument?”
Another tell: If you do want to fight crime, this is not how you do it. As domestic security expert Donell Harvin wrote for Just Security:
“[E]ven if there was a major crime wave in DC necessitating federal intervention, deploying overwhelming force (especially in a city where crime is actually plummeting) does nothing to curb youth violence or address homelessness. It’s actually a far departure from proven, humane and community-based solutions aimed at reducing these problems while protecting civil rights and liberties, and addressing the root causes of these issues.”
He concluded:
Indeed, given the deep tension with community-based policing and other programs that have been working, the president’s bulldozer approach is more likely to make matters worse.
And practically speaking, the takeover appears to be more about immigration and crushing Washington’s sanctuary-city status than it is about crime.
WUSA-9 in Washington found that immigration arrests far outnumbered arrests for any actual crimes last week.
And NBC-4 News in Washington reported that the number of arrests recorded by the Metropolitan Police Department (which includes federal non-immigration arrests) is actually down last week compared to the week before.
Trump’s No. 1 real motive. Now let’s consider some of Trump’s real motives, starting with the desire to distract from the Epstein scandal.
We know he is eager to distract from that scandal because it opens up a rare vulnerability with his base – and the furor isn’t going away.
As it happens, in the recent past, political reporters were admirably blunt about pointing out that Trump was trying to change the subject from Epstein.
Here’s the top of a Times article from July 22:
“President Trump, under fire over his administration’s handling of the Epstein files, escalated his distract-and-deflect strategy on Tuesday, accusing former President Barack Obama of treason and declaring, ‘It’s time to go after people.’”
Here's a Washington Post headline from July 21: “As MAGA world focuses on Epstein, Trump seeks focus on anything else:” Subhead: “In the past 48 hours, Trump has unspooled comments on a litany of controversies, all of which seem designed to distract attention from the Jeffrey Epstein case.”
Here’s a “Trump really wants to stop talking about it” timeline in the New York Times, spanning from July 12 to July 22.
Why they chose not to address the takeover of Washington with the same (appropriate) skepticism is beyond me.
LZ Granderson, an opinion columnist for the Los Angeles Times, argued that of course the takeover was intended to distract from Epstein:
“[E]ither you believe a city experiencing a 30-year low in crime is suddenly in need of an emergency police commissioner or you agree with Joe Rogan’s assessment: This administration is gaslighting the public regarding those files.”
Other motives. What else is the takeover really about?
Racism is at the heart of it.
The Associated Press’s Matt Brown explained that in an unusually frank story headlined: “Trump’s rhetoric about DC echoes a history of racist narratives about urban crime.”
As Dave Zirin wrote in the Nation, “Trump is trying to nationalize what he did to the Central Park 5 and, just like with the Central Park 5, it’s a divisive lie.”
The takeover is also a flex of power, right out of the authoritarian playbook.
As historian Joanne Freeman posted on social media:
“The pretexts for these paramilitary takeovers don’t matter They’re lies Don’t buy into their narrative They’re normalizing military takeovers That should be the opposing narrative, not crime rates which let them steer the conversation WE should steer it What they’re doing is unacceptable. Period.”
Similarly, the Center for American Progress argued that Trump “is preying on people’s legitimate concerns about crime and safety to make the nation’s capital a test case for potential future actions that could turn both the military and police against the public and stifle public dissent.”
There’s a name for this. There is a name for the phenomenon by which the media focuses on the false pretext instead of the real motives.
Back in 2008, political strategist and media critic Jamison Foser introduced the phrase “privileging the lie,” which (as he wrote more recently) describes “the news media’s tendency to center lies in its coverage of politics – not to center the fact that the people telling the lies are liars, but rather to center the lie; to adopt it as the framing for their reporting.” He continued:
“When a news report treats the truthfulness of a lie as an open question, it privileges the lie. When a news report devotes more and more prominent space to recounting the lie and the liar’s defense of it than it does making clear that it’s a lie, the article privileges the lie. When a news report focuses on the target of a lie’s struggle to deal with the impact of the lie, the article privileges the lie. And when a news report focuses on the topic of the lie — even if it does a good job of making clear the lie is a lie — it privileges the lie, because it allows the liar to set the topic of conversation, and thus increases the electoral salience of a topic the liar believes is to his benefit.”
That’s exactly what’s happening here. The media is privileging the lie that the takeover is intended to fight crime, when common sense and a mountain of evidence make it abundantly clear that it is not.
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