Donald Trump, confusing the Huffington Post
Just over four months ago, the Huffington Post announced that, from then on, it would cover Donald Trump‘s presidential campaign in its Entertainment section rather than in Politics or News. The explanation given was that “Trump’s campaign is a sideshow.” At the time, we said that the Huffington Post’s decision was “boneheaded” because, among other reasons, there were plenty of other Republican candidates whose campaigns fit the “sideshow” bill and/or appeared to be just business enterprises, yet they weren’t being singled out like Trump. Now, the Huffington Post has flip-flopped on its Trump decision, stating that “we are no longer entertained” by Trump, because Trump’s campaign has “morphed into something else: an ugly and dangerous force in American politics.”
The new HuffPost announcement cites Trump’s anti-Muslim policies in particular, especially Trump’s recent proposal that there should be “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” for the change in Trump coverage. Apparently, it wasn’t enough for the Huffington Post that Trump had given similar or even worse treatment to immigrants from Mexico. And worse yet, the HuffPost’s latest announcement does not make clear how it will treat Trump going forward.
Both the original decision to treat Trump as entertainment, and the flip-flop on this decision, make the Huffington Post look bad, in particular by being so reactive. Since when does a publication fundamentally change how it covers someone based on the latest thing the person says? What if Trump goes back to owning a professional sports team? Will HuffPost then move its coverage of Trump to the Sports section?
Perhaps the problem reveals an identity crisis, and it’s not with Donald Trump, who appears to have no issues being a businessman, a television star, a politician and anything else simultaneously. In fact, Trump seems able to cross-promote his activities somewhat seamlessly, maybe even brilliantly. But what is the Huffington Post? Is it a newspaper? A blog? Something else? Amazingly, if you go to the site, there appears to be no answer, either in the “About Us” section, the “FAQ” section or elsewhere. HuffPost’s Facebook page doesn’t provide much help either. The “About” section there merely indicates: “internet lovers | sleep believers | news addicts | big font obsessives | greek yogurt fans.” Wikipedia is slightly more descriptive but not necessarily more clear, calling the Huffington Post:
an online news aggregator and blog, that has both localised [sic] and international editions …. The site offers news, blogs, and original content and covers politics, business, entertainment, environment, technology, popular media, lifestyle, culture, comedy, healthy living, women’s interests, and local news.
Graphically, the Huffington Post looks like a modern version of a newspaper, with different sections, headlines and articles. It has plenty of editors. But unlike a newspaper, there’s no real separation of News and Editorial, and the two announcements about Trump this year reveal HuffPost’s biased inability to “cover” Trump (their term) in a news fashion.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with the Huffington Post being a plain old blog. It can be primarily an opinion publication and still have plenty of well-sourced facts. We’d like to think that Messaging Matters fits that description. But perhaps the HuffPost should at least clearly state to us and to itself what it is. If it has done so in the past, perhaps it should send a reminder. Maybe then it wouldn’t be so confused about how to cover someone like Donald Trump.
Photo by Ninian Reid, used under Creative Commons license. http://is.gd/ZNawwa
