This story by ⁦ @jdawsey1⁩ ⁦ @yabutaleb7⁩ ⁦ @ToluseO⁩ is spot-on. They just tell the story straight-up without feeling the need to soften the blame on ⁦ @realDonaldTrump⁩ and the @GOP. It makes the @NYTimes story all the more worse. 1/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/with-trump-leading-the-way-americas-coronavirus-failures-exposed-by-record-surge-in-new-infections/2020/06/27/bd15aea2-b7c4-11ea-a8da-693df3d7674a_story.html

Read the @thislouis @stavernise @FrancesRobles side by side @nytimes. They start to tell the same story but then back away. And their story becomes an apologia of sorts for @realDonaldTrump all leaders around world, public health experts too failed. It’s everybody’s fault. 2/

This seems like a house style: why can @PostBaron provide such hard hitting analyses, while @deanbaquet hedges almost always. It matters. It matters for history. For the present in understanding the crisis. 3/

And I’ll leave you with your Sunday morning reading from the Gospel of Joan (Didion): “The genuflection toward ‘fairness’ is a familiar newsroom piety, the excuse in practice for a good deal of autopilot reporting and lazy thinking but a benign ideal.” 4/

“In Washington, however, a community in which the management of news has become the single overriding preoccupation of the core industry, what ‘fairness’ has too often come to mean is a scrupulous passivity...” 5/

“...an agreement to cover the story not as it is occurring but as it is presented, which is to say as it is manufactured.” 6/

The @nytimes is the pinnacle now of Didion’s deferential spirit in journalism, particularly unsuited for a crisis. End/