Media Bias: NY Magazine's Olivia Nuzzi writes of Trump's "incoherence" at briefings

With the Neutral Zone Infraction, Just the News tries to do its part to maintain the line between fact and opinion in American journalism by blowing the whistle each week on an egregious example of slanted coverage by reporters. This week's offender: New York Magazine's Olivia Nuzzi.

In a piece this week arguing that President Trump's coronavirus press briefings should be covered by the media so members of the public can witness the president's comments firsthand, New York Magazine Washington Correspondent Olivia Nuzzi described the president as a poor communicator who often fails to deliver a clear message while speaking.

She employed language like "endless yapping," "insanity," and "incoherence" while writing about the president and his remarks. 

Nuzzi said that media reports about Trump's comments make it seem as though the president delivered a clearer message than he actually did, and she said that people should see the president's remarks for themselves.

"But to watch Trump speak, uninterrupted by TV hosts and pundits, is to understand that he does not have a message, that the stray sentences he formulates which do articulate a belief of some kind are anomalies, and he is likely to muddy their meaning in the next breath, or bury it with a series of half-formed thoughts and throwaway verbal crutches — many people are saying, some people would say, if you can believe it, and so on," Nuzzi explained. 

"And when we extract his words in clips or quotes in news articles, when we divorce them from their rambling context to place them in the context of the real world, and his real record, we are also helping him articulate a semi-coherent worldview and ideology when there usually isn’t one. We are aiding and abetting him in the creation of a message, and giving the voting public the option to abstain from sitting through his endless yapping to discern his meaning for themselves," she wrote.

"When you listen to what he says, and how he says it, you are confronted by his insanity in a way that is more powerful, and harder to ignore, than hearing a cable-news analyst or reporter explain to you why you shouldn’t take him seriously, why it would be stupid to do so, when he’s lied or been wrong about X, Y, or Z so many times before," Nuzzi explained.

Nuzzi's comments cross the journalistic line of neutrality as they stray far from straightforward reporting and into the realm of judgment and opinion.

Just the News reached out to Nuzzi who provided the following comment:

"I would never want to be in anything other than poor standing of your 'neutral zone.' My coverage of this president, and of all politicians, is not objective—but it is fair. I urge you to familiarize yourself with the last half century of magazine writing, where you’ll see plenty of examples of highly subjective writing that is motivated not by partisan ideology but by the author’s specific worldview and sense of right and wrong. My work belongs to that tradition." 

Some people, including former George W. Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer, criticized Nuzzi this week for asking President Trump the question: "If an American president loses more Americans over the course of six weeks than died during the entirety of the Vietnam War does he deserve to be reelected?"

Nuzzi responded to Fleischer by telling him to "shut the f*** up."

She wrote that the question was a legitimate inquiry and not "a gotcha question."