Here's Fox, making up a story

The Fair 'n' Balanced Network is usually rather good at covering its tracks, fibwise, but for some reason it gets careless when Massster is in the spotlight. Here's a fresh example from Monday:

President Trump was asked why Dr. Anthony Fauci, who works for his administration, has a high approval rating on the handling of coronavirus but Trump himself does not. “It can only be my personality,” the president said.

“I have a very good relationship with Dr. Fauci,” Trump said at a White House coronavirus briefing Tuesday. “I agree with a lot of what he’s said.”

Trump said that “for the most part” his administration has done what Fauci has recommended.

"He's got this high approval rating—so why don't I have a high approval rating, and the administration, with respect to the virus?" Trump continued. He touted the administration’s work on testing, PPE supplies and producing ventilators.

"Nobody likes me. It can only be my personality. That's all,” the president said.

Everything after the first sentence is true -- not very accurately assembled (there's some unmarked snippage that makes Trump sound fractionally more coherent than he is), but true. Here, though, according to the White House, is what Trump "was asked":

Q: On that note, Mr. President, last night, in tweets that were deleted by Twitter, you said that Dr. Fauci misled the country about hydroxychloroquine.  How so?

THE PRESIDENT: No, not at all.  I think — I don’t even know what his stance is on it.  I — I was just — you know, he was at the — he was at the task force meeting a little while ago.

I have a very good relationship with Dr. Fauci. ...

In other words, the lede is bogus. It's not a case of the press sharing Trump's obsession with approval ratings, which would be a little snippy if true. ("Mr. President, lots of Faber coeds say Dr. Fauci is the only Delta they'd go out with.") It's a question about why Trump shared, and then deleted, derogatory claims about Fauci. Which might be a small thing in the context of the rest of Trump's performance, but still -- it's the lede, you guys.

As a rule, you should avoid lying about things people can check. Fox may be slipping a bit as the election draws near.

The letter and the spirit

A reminder from the local fishwrap last week that it doesn't do a lot of good to follow the letter of the law if you ignore the spirit of the law.

Some background, in case you haven't been paying attention: The Gannett empire announced in mid-June that it would join other news outlets in capitalizing the "B":

Through a series of internal conversations that began with the USA TODAY diversity committee and ultimately cascaded across our network of local news organizations, we have reviewed our current stylebook and are making the following change:

Effective immediately, the USA TODAY Network — one of the nation’s largest print and digital media companies — will capitalize B when describing Black culture, ethnicity and communities of people.

My view, which is worth every penny of your subscription price: Good. This was overdue. Now provide the resources to enable smart, sensitive editing at the hubs that will put your style into practice, because otherwise you're just dressing up the cop blotter with a small orthographic change:

According to the City of Westland Police Department, two or three Black males began arguing inside a perfume store in the mall, which is located at 35000 Warren Road. 

Stylebooks and textbooks have long cautioned against randomly tossing race and ethnicity into news coverage. Here's the 1999 version of the Freep's own stylebook, for example, under "race":

Identify a person or situation by race, ethnic origins, religion, etc., only if that information is relevant and essential.

And under "crime":

When writing about suspects, physical descriptions are useful only if they give enough information for a reader to identify the person. Race, ethnic origin, religion, etc., are relevant in detailed descriptions -- ones that fit very few people. The following is NOT a detailed description: a man about 6 feet 1, in his mid-30s, Hispanic, wearing light-colored clothing. 

The AP (2019 version) is blunter about the underlying reasons:

Consider carefully when deciding whether to identify people by race. Often, it is an irrelevant factor and drawing unnecessary attention to someone's race or ethnicity can be interpreted as bigotry.

This is your occasional reminder that proofreading is not the same thing as editing. The change in style didn't just fall out of the sky. It arose from a series of sharp reminders that news language ought to be taken seriously. (As we like to remind students in editing classes: No, I don't know what you meant, but I have a really good idea of what you said.) The new rule is about what to do when ethnicity is relevant -- not a lowering of the bar for relevance. If anything, it's implicitly a call to think more closely about what "relevant" and "essential" look like and at who should make those decisions.

Again, I'm not blaming the overworked hub editor who had neither the time nor the social capital to throw a flag on this one. It'd be nice, though, if the system was built in a way that rewarded the editor who pointed out that "two Black dudes arguing at the mall" is exactly what the spirit of the stylebook is meant to stop.

The shield and sword of the Party

The sheer ingratitude of some people. Here's the poor Fair 'n' Balanced Network, working its head off on behalf of the Trump campaign, and all it hears from the top of the food chain is this kind of stuff:

You get the idea that the mean people at the White House simply aren't paying attention, so perhaps we can help a bit. Here's the No. 2 story from the Monday homepage (image at top):

Joe Biden tweeted Sunday night that if he gets elected, his administration “won’t just rebuild this nation — we’ll transform it,” raising speculation online about what exactly in the country will be transformed.

See? Active voice and everything!

The tweet comes after a politically charged Fourth of July weekend, as the country works to manage a new surge in COVID-19 cases and tries to emerge from weeks of tense protests that have resulted in a widening divide between Democrats and Republicans.

Biden’s tweet did not specify what exactly he means by transforming the country. His critics from the left have expressed concern that he served in the upper echelon of government for over 40 years and didn't help solve these major issues in the past. His critics from the right insist that a Biden White House will take marching orders from the Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wing of the party. Some conservatives say his vice president pick will be an early indicator of his administration's direction.
 
Gotta love the style touch on "the Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wing of the party." But at this point, you should have figured out why this is a top campaign story. One of the scariest monsters under the Fox News bed is the scary Kenyan dude's "promise" to "fundamentally transform" the country, so anything that calls that to mind is a win from the outset. (Somehow Ronald Reagan's similar claim from 1989 always goes unmentioned: "We meant to change a nation, and instead, we changed a world.") Still, of course, any claim about transformation needs context and sourcing:

... Scott Morefield, a media and politics reporter for the Daily Caller, responded to Biden’s post and said the transformation Biden was referring to would be the country's turn “into a socialist hellscape."

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