Reuters instructs its reporters to cover Trump as it does other authoritarian regimes
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In a message to staff today, Reuters Editor-in-Chief Steve Adler wrote about covering President Trump the Reuters way:
The first 12 days of the Trump presidency (yes, that’s all it’s been!) have been memorable for all – and especially challenging for us in the news business. It’s not every day that a U.S. president calls journalists “among the most dishonest human beings on earth” or that his chief strategist dubs the media “the opposition party.” It’s hardly surprising that the air is thick with questions and theories about how to cover the new Administration.
So what is the Reuters answer? To oppose the administration? To appease it? To boycott its briefings? To use our platform to rally support for the media? All these ideas are out there, and they may be right for some news operations, but they don’t make sense for Reuters. We already know what to do because we do it every day, and we do it all over the world.
To state the obvious, Reuters is a global news organization that reports independently and fairly in more than 100 countries, including many in which the media is unwelcome and frequently under attack. I am perpetually proud of our work in places such as Turkey, the Philippines, Egypt, Iraq, Yemen, Thailand, China, Zimbabwe, and Russia, nations in which we sometimes encounter some combination of censorship, legal prosecution, visa denials, and even physical threats to our journalists. We respond to all of these by doing our best to protect our journalists, by recommitting ourselves to reporting fairly and honestly, by doggedly gathering hard-to-get information – and by remaining impartial. We write very rarely about ourselves and our troubles and very often about the issues that will make a difference in the businesses and lives of our readers and viewers.
We don’t know yet how sharp the Trump administration’s attacks will be over time or to what extent those attacks will be accompanied by legal restrictions on our news-gathering. But we do know that we must follow the same rules that govern our work anywhere, namely:
Do’s:
--Cover what matters in people’s lives and provide them the facts they need to make better decisions.
--Become ever-more resourceful: If one door to information closes, open another one.
--Give up on hand-outs and worry less about official access. They were never all that valuable anyway. Our coverage of Iran has been outstanding, and we have virtually no official access. What we have are sources.
--Get out into the country and learn more about how people live, what they think, what helps and hurts them, and how the government and its actions appear to them, not to us.
--Keep the Thomson Reuters Trust Principles close at hand, remembering that “the integrity, independence and freedom from bias of Reuters shall at all times be fully preserved.”
Don’ts:
--Never be intimidated, but:
--Don’t pick unnecessary fights or make the story about us. We may care about the inside baseball but the public generally doesn’t and might not be on our side even if it did.
--Don’t vent publicly about what might be understandable day-to-day frustration. In countless other countries, we keep our own counsel so we can do our reporting without being suspected of personal animus. We need to do that in the U.S., too.
--Don’t take too dark a view of the reporting environment: It’s an opportunity for us to practice the skills we’ve learned in much tougher places around the world and to lead by example – and therefore to provide the freshest, most useful, and most illuminating information and insight of any news organization anywhere.
This is our mission, in the U.S. and everywhere. We make a difference in the world because we practice professional journalism that is both intrepid and unbiased. When we make mistakes, which we do, we correct them quickly and fully. When we don’t know something, we say so. When we hear rumors, we track them down and report them only when we are confident that they are factual. We value speed but not haste: When something needs more checking, we take the time to check it. We try to avoid “permanent exclusives” – first but wrong. We operate with calm integrity not just because it’s in our rulebook but because – over 165 years – it has enabled us to do the best work and the most good.
Media Contact:
Heather dot Carpenter at thomsonreuters dot com
[Reuters PR Blog Post]
http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN15F276
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but extremely sad that it's come to this- that the US Media is treating its coverage of our country-the freakin United States of America- as an AUTHORITARIAN country.
--Become ever-more resourceful: If one door to information closes, open another one.
--Give up on hand-outs and worry less about official access. They were never all that valuable anyway. Our coverage of Iran has been outstanding, and we have virtually no official access. What we have are sources.
I GUARANTEE there are people very eager, ready, and willing to take up the other side to enlarge upon the expanding systemic opposition to trump within government - AND outside of government. I felt that way when the media whored itself to bush/cheney, and did what they were told and bowed to the threats - so WE who depended on the whole truth were severely short-changed. And it cost at least 4,000 Americans in Iraq their lives, sacrificed on the altar of bush/cheney's unwanted, unnecessary, and abominable war. There were TONS of people available to be talking heads, writers, columnists, roundtable experts. There were armies of people, scientists, nuclear specialists and inspectors, and war opponents of EVERY stripe (and some sexy, too, because they were celebrities).
But OMG, Heaven Forbid we lose ACCESS!!! Sadly, they'd have been far better off without it. They would have had nothing but objective truth, separate from the administration's agenda and ulterior motives. They would have been forced to cover and pay attention to the other side, which had been locked out as far as getting its message to the public. Nobody wanted to cover them. Nobody wanted to take photos of the returning flag-draped coffins from the war - you'd be fired if you did. And they were AFRAID. They were totally intimidated. Chicken-shits! They should have turned in their press passes and badges and dogtags and resigned in disgrace, every last one of them, and gone into garbage collecting - the real kind, with the trucks and the king-size cans left out along the curb for Trash Day the following morning, not the figurative or metaphorical kind. There were TONS of people who would have given their eye teeth to get some face time, to get their message out, to give equal time to the other side, to counter the constant and ruthlessly-propagandized drumbeat for war. The so-called news "pros" CERTAINLY should have turned in their presidential kneepads. I suspect some of those were personally autographed.
SHAME on every last miserable useless one of them.
