Yesterday, James posted about how, across many aspects of the Presidential race, the media holds Former President Trump to a lower level of standards than Vice President Harris (or any of his past opponents). In the comment section people asked what more accurate coverage of Trump look like? A recent article from the Washington Post’s Philip Bump shows one possible approach for covering Trump’s speeches.
In “Tic Tacs, tampons, turmoil: What Trump’s ‘economy’ speech actually covered” Bump uses multiple storytelling and communications methods to show how little of the speech was actually about the candidate’s economic plans. Bump begins by highlighting another example of the Former President loving a good prop or two:
About halfway through [Trump’s] remarks, he held up two containers of [Tic Tacs], one large, one small.
“I just happened to have — somebody gave me this one today,” he said, referring to the small one. “I said, I think we’ll put it up as an example of inflation.”
The point, it seemed, was to show (as he did last year) how Tic Tac container sizes had shrunk while remaining the same price. (His assertion that his use of the mints was “the greatest commercial [Tic Tacs] ever had” would therefore seem not to be true.) But he didn’t actually make that point. He just held up the Tic Tacs.
Trump supporters will probably respond that it doesn’t matter if he finished connecting the dots or not, the point was clear. Different people’s milage with that line of thinking will vary. Ultimately, I don’t think it’s the press’s responsibility to always finish people’s incomplete thoughts.
I think Bump’s approach of accurately covering what was said (or unsaid) is a better form of coverage than writing about intended meaning. It’s an approach that should be consistently applied to both candidates.
What I especially appreciate about this article is it’s used of data visualization to help drive home the core point that this really wasn’t a speech about “economics” and should be reported on as a pretty standard Trump campaign stump speech. To do this, someone at the Washington Post took the transcript of the speech and coded each sentence of it into one of the following groups: (1) the economy, (2) attacking Vice President Kamala Harris, (3) standard campaign riffs, and (4) someone else speaking.
Over the course of the nearly 12,000 words spoken from the stage, about 2,000 actually detailed the economy. And even those were generally a mishmash of robotic teleprompter pledges and off-the-cuff riffs about whatever happened to be on Trump’s mind.
The article then shares this wonderful visualization of the marked-up transcript:
After showing this breakdown, Bump then moves to how that mix was not what Trump had promised his audience:
“We’re doing this as a intellectual speech,” he promised the raucous audience. “You’re all intellectuals today. Today we’re doing it, and we’re doing it, right now. And it’s very important. They say it’s the most important subject.” Later, he added that “I’m not sure it is. But they say it’s the most important. Inflation is the most important. But that’s part of economy.”
Immediately after deciding that inflation counted as “economy,” Trump got started … by disparaging Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.
“Kamala Harris wants to be in charge of the entire U.S. economy, but neither she nor her running mate — he’s a beauty, isn’t he?” Trump said. “He signed a bill. He wants tampons in boys’ bathrooms.”
What actually happened is that Walz signed a number of bills related to the state budget, one of which dealt with schools and included new funding for menstrual products that would be placed in school bathrooms. But here we are, already not talking about the economy.
In that passage you also see Bump tracking how the speech kept veering off topic and also Bump presenting facts connected to one of Trump’s claims. This is a pattern that Bump continues for the rest of the article.
I personally love this approach to deconstructing a bait-and-switch campaign speech. To James’s point from yesterday, this is not following the “soft bigotry” approach and taking Trump at his word.
And, I think most of us will agree that the approach is really wonky. Like I said in the sub head, I love a good data visualization. And I’m not the average news consumer. That’s true of most of the people reading the political section of the Washington Post. The question is, can any aspects of this approach be adapted for reporting to more mainstream audences. My initial thought is “yes,” but I have to think through the details of what that could look like.
What do you all think works with this format? What about it leaves you cold? And what are examples of “good” political coverage of Former President Trump or Vice President Harris? Be sure to share a little bit on what you think makes it good coverage!
