July 19, 2016

Lesley Stahl Enabled Donald Trump’s Lying on “60 Minutes”

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Kudos to Margaret Sullivan, the Washington Post’s media columnist, for calling out Lesley Stahl’s performance in her Sunday interview with Donald Trump and Mike Pence. About halfway through, Trump tossed out his usual lie about having opposed the Iraq War from the start:

That claim, which Trump has made a cornerstone of his campaign, is “blatantly false,” according to The Washington Post’s Fact Checker and many other similar efforts. Politifact, the Pulitzer Prize-winning fact-checking operation, also called it false. And BuzzFeed dug up a 2002 interview in which Trump said he supported the invasion.

….But Stahl — busy trying to herd the other rhetorical cats set loose in the interview — did not say what she should have, something like this: “No, Mr. Trump, that is simply false, and I’m not going to let that go unchallenged.” Instead, she let the man who could be president get away with it, basically affirming his falsehood by twice saying, “Yeah,” as he stated it.

I’ll grant that interviewing Trump is a challenge. He throws out casual lies so often that it’s hard to address them without letting the entire interview go off track. But of course, this is what Trump counts on. Stahl had other things she wanted to get to, and anyway, she’s probably hoping to get future interviews with Trump. How likely is that if she interrupts to tell Trump he’s lying?

So that’s that. Nobody on TV wants to challenge Trump on this stuff because they don’t want to be blacklisted. And after a while it gets boring anyway. So they just say “Yeah,” and move along. The result is that Trump has free rein to repeat his lies endlessly on network TV, and millions of viewers believe him. Why wouldn’t they? They don’t read the Washington Post’s fact checker, after all.

I suppose this is the strategy with Melania Trump’s obvious plagiarism, too. Just deny that it happened, and before long everyone is bored and stops asking about it. It seems crazy, but it works.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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