Thread by @soledadobrien

Good morning! This is for journalism students, as our favorite access journalists—Maggie Haberman and Peter Baker have a story about Trump’s reax to the devastating ⁦@TheAtlantic⁩ article. 1)

2) as per usual I won’t link to the article. No need to be helpful! But please note paragraph 1 starts with (as @EricBoehlert points out) “heated denial” from Trump. And tells us how Trump is “moving quickly”. They tell us Trump “marched over” “visibly angry”

Moving on to Paragraph 3 we hear from the President a quote that ends with: “what sort of animal says such a thing?” Maggie and Peter neglect to use that opportunity—early up—to point out all the terrible things the President said about McCain, Gold Star families, etc 3)

Paragraph 4 reminds us that the Atlantic editor“didn’t name his sources”—I found that kinda funny because the two of them use anonymous sources constantly! Kinda petty! But paragraph 6 is my fave: “the report could be problematic fror Trump”? Bc it’s a horrific thing to say? 4)

Nope! Because Trump is “counting on support”. Hmm. Could be problematic is very... not.. strong...
I digress.
Let’s hop to Paragraph 10 where we learn Biden “sought to capitalize on the comments”. Political horse race framing versus maybe he’s just disgusted. 5)

Zip on over to Paragraph 17 we get the President’s unchecked framing. “It was raining hard. Foggy...”. No actual reporting tells us if this is true or false and of course a whole bunch of other people showed up so... maybe check? 6)

Paragraph 18 is a good example of the Access Journalism part— look who is quoted! Sarah Sanders! She tells us firmly “this never happened”.

Didn’t Maggie just do a glowing review of Sarah’s book? Why yes, she did! Earlier this week! 7)

The entire long story end with Trump who is allowed to frame the entire mess: it’s former employees bad mouthing him.

Uh huh. Isn’t part of a consistent theme that we’ve seen and heard?

Anyway—I think this is a good example of a media fail around an important story. 8)