'Vile stuff': NYT shamed by its own former public editor for whitewashing Trump racism

Brad Reed
October 13, 2024

Republican presidential nominee and former U.S. President Donald Trump holds a campaign rally in Reno, Nevada, U.S. October 11, 2024. REUTERS/Fred Greaves

Former New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan this week shamed her one-time employer for its coverage of the 2024 presidential election.

Writing on her Substack page, Sullivan picked apart the Times' widely criticized decision to frame a story about former President Donald Trump openly espousing racist rhetoric as simply being about his "long-held fascination with genes."

As Sullivan put it, the Times' headline takes "hate-filled trope and treats it like some sort of lofty intellectual interest," as though Trump were really some acclaimed genetic biologist rather than a former game show host with a long history of racist rhetoric.

And Sullivan argued that the article itself wasn't much better than the headline, as it only mentioned that Trump has "a pattern of using dehumanizing language to describe undocumented immigrants" in the story's 11th paragraph.

Still later in the story, the Times informed readers that Trump had also directly echoed Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler by saying that immigrants had "poisoned the blood" of the nation.

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"This is vile stuff," Sullivan commented. "Cleaning it up so it sounds like an academic white paper is really not a responsible way to present what’s happening."

What's more, Sullivan added, it doesn't take an experienced journalist to identify the major issues with the paper's framing of Trump's racist rhetoric.

"I showed these headlines and stories to my graduate students at Columbia University’s journalism school on Friday morning," she wrote. "I didn’t ask leading questions or try to tell them what to think. Theydidn’t hesitate in identifying the problem."