For Yamiche Alcindor, a Washington correspondent for NBC News, “truth is fact.” It’s a simple definition, yet not everyone subscribes to it.
While reporting for PBS in 2020, Alcindor stood outside the White House waiting for former President Donald Trump to walk to St. John’s Episcopal Church. Before she knew it, she was choking on tear gas used to clear peaceful protestors out of Trump’s way. Alcindor quickly returned to PBS to report what happened, but after the news went live, the Government called her story a lie.
“[The Government] gassed me, this is not me interviewing somebody. I was choking, I was crying, I was there,” Alcindor said. “only a couple days later did the Government then say, ‘Oh, actually, ya we did kind of tear gas people. It was some sort of gas, not exactly tear gas.’ This is a prime example of, as a reporter, being like, ‘Ok, the government is telling you one thing but I can tell you as someone who was standing there what’s going on?'”
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As part of the PvNew & Rolling Stone Truth Seekers Summit, presented by Paramount+, Alcindor was joined by CNN anchor Abby Phillip, MSNBC anchor Katy Tur, PBS News Hour co-anchor Geoff Bennett and CBS Mornings co-host Tony Dokoupil for the Politics in the Zeitgeist panel discussion. PvNew co-editor-in-chief Ramin Setoodeh moderated the conversation.
Bennett echoed Alcindor’s remarks about elevating the facts while reporting the news and emphasized that transparency in the journalistic process is more important than ever.
“People often assume bias on the part of us as journalists because they don’t fully understand how we do the work that we do,” Bennett said. “And to the degree that we are able to be more transparent about how we do that news gathering and how we pull together that reporting, is good. It’s good for the work that we do and it’s good for our democracy.”
Trump has remained the biggest story in political reporting since he ran for president in 2016. Tur said that Trump, although unpredictable, is “self-aware” and operates on “gut reaction” regarding how he communicates with his supporters.
“He has an instinct of how to behave in front of a camera and in front of a crowd. That’s why you saw him raise his fist after he almost was assassinated,” Tur said. “I was one of the first people that covered him, so it was often just me and him at rallies. I was the only reporter he knew. So he would come up to me and call me a lot. He is very magnetic, he’s very charming. And when he doesn’t think he can charm you any longer, he’ll get very angry, and that’s when he starts to attack.”
Trump has once again secured the Republican nomination for the 2024 presidential election, but Tur added that this time around, his platform feels flimsy, with Trump simply revisiting his fans’ favorite talking points.
“I find that in this campaign, more than the other two, he seems more like a vessel than he did back then. He had ideas, more concrete ideas in 2016, maybe in 2020 than he has now. Now it feels like he’s going out there, running through the motions, playing his greatest hits,” Tur said. “He had an economy speech yesterday. Where was the economy? He just went on personal attacks, even though all those around him are, are begging him, ‘Please stick to policy, your personality.’ They’re saying this, not me. ’Your shtick is boring now.’ Megyn Kelly said, just the other day, ‘Stick to policy. We think you can win on policy. You can’t win on crowd sizes and attacking her for her race or for how he perceives her intelligence.’”
Tur continued, “My discomfort here is, we interview him and we don’t get a lot of out of it. It’s not as if we’re covering all the crazy things he says. The headline isn’t ‘Donald Trump Compares Himself to Abraham Lincoln,’ ‘Donald Trump Isn’t Clear On What Mifepristone Is,’ ‘Donald Trump Goes On Rambling Speech about Gettysburg, Where He Talks about My Boys and Robert E. Lee.’ The headline is, ‘Donald Trump Gives Long, Meandering Speech, Agrees to Debate Kamala Harris.’ That puts a vaseline over the crazy of what he’s saying.”
Tur went on to compare President Biden’s press coverage versus Trump’s. “If any other candidate, if they said one of the things he said, not 101 of them, that would be front-page news,” she said. “Look at what happened to Joe Biden, ‘This person’s not mentally well. He can’t keep it together.’ And Donald Trump gets a pass.”
Tur continued highlighting one more point she wanted to make. “Fundamentally, the discomfort of covering him on policy, it’s legitimizing a candidate that doesn’t feel legitimate. This is a guy who went out and tried to stay in office because he wanted to. He didn’t like the results of the election, so he went out and he told everybody he could, and all of these people who believe what he says, that there was cheating and there was fraud. He tried to do it in 2016 when he thought he was gonna lose. He did it successfully in 2020, there was a riot at the Capitol an insurrection, and he is starting to do it again. This is a guy who’s running against democracy. To put him out there and talk to him about policy, there’s a discomfort at the core of it, because you can’t put him on the same level as Kamala Harris. I know voters voted for him. And you have to respect the results of how they chose. But it doesn’t take away from the fact that he is somebody who tried to stay in office by illegal means.”
Watch the entire conversation above
