Accurately quoting Trump

/ Carlos Carmonamedina for NPR Public Editor

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Carlos Carmonamedina for NPR Public Editor

In our last installment of the Public Editor newsletter, we answered questions about whether NPR was quoting the two presidential candidates equally. Today we are asking if NPR is quoting one candidate, former President Donald Trump, accurately.

Over the last two weeks, media watchers and critics have written about the “sanewashing” of Trump, which is the practice of selectively quoting his speeches to make them sound more coherent than they actually are. NPR listeners have also sent us letters all year critiquing public radio for packaging Trump’s ideas into news stories as if they are sensible suggestions, for making Trump seem “normal.” We have not received these types of complaints concerning his opponent Vice President Kamala Harris.

On the one hand, the former president is normal in that roughly half of the voters in this country tell pollsters they support his candidacy. On the other hand, almost every speech and public statement he makes is riddled with lies, confusing logic and attacks on marginalized people. In some cases, he speaks in run-on sentences that are impossible to excerpt.

Some listeners believe that NPR’s calm and steady approach is a bit too calm and steady. We sought the perspective of a veteran broadcast political journalist and we talked to two NPR political reporters, an executive producer and the head of the Washington Desk. We asked them all to tell us how they approach quoting Trump. Read on to see how we are sorting through this complicated problem.

Finally we spotlight a long-form podcast story about the unintended consequences of economic development on water rights in Southern California. 

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Illustration by Carlos Carmonamedina

Is NPR “sanewashing” Trump?

Almost every time Trump gives a speech or answers questions, he poses a challenge to journalistic conventions.

“His speeches are rambling. They go in a lot of directions. And he strays from prepared remarks. And that makes covering him different from covering other candidates,” says NPR political correspondent Danielle Kurtzleben.

When coupled with the limitations of radio, Trump’s use of fear-mongering rhetoric, disinformation, and his nonsensical stream-of-consciousness style of speech present NPR journalists with the difficult task of conveying the news that listeners need in a succinct way. Some stories are as short as 30 seconds, and most run three minutes or seven minutes. “A very real constraint that we have is, what point (of Trump’s) conveys the information that I need to, in a short amount of time,” Kurtzleben says.

Additionally, NPR also has a longstanding editorial policy of not editing quotes from the president, vice president and nominees to those offices, said Muthoni Muturi, executive producer of The NPR Politics Podcast. “We do not cut stumbles or misspeaks… We want to hew as closely to what was actually said as possible. And that's an editorial rule that applies throughout the Washington Desk, throughout the network, actually.”

So what to do? The NPR journalists know that Trump’s long-winded points, his stories that start one place and veer off to another, and his incomplete sentences are ill-suited for short radio news stories. Yet they still want their audience to understand what he’s saying.

“If you listened to enough of our shows and our podcasts and all that, just as a whole I think you would get a very good idea of what he is saying,” Kurtzleben said.

We reached out to Frank Sesno, a veteran broadcast political reporter and a professor at the George Washington University School of Media & Public Affairs. He agrees with the letter-writers who expressed their concerns.

“I’ve listened to a lot of NPR, and actually I’m sorry to tell you but I do feel that Donald Trump comes across differently on NPR,” Sesno said. “He comes across as more rational, reasoned. And he sounds in many cases like another candidate.”

But Sesno acknowledged the limitations of the medium, and he praised NPR’s even-keeled approach. He said that ever since Trump declared himself a candidate for president in 2015, he has challenged journalists to provide the missing context.

Muturi described the challenge this way: “He has shattered almost every single norm for the behavior of a political candidate and of a former president. And I think that people sometimes have a hard time figuring out exactly where to put that. And it's something that we are constantly talking about and constantly changing.”

Kurtzleben says she thinks about it often as well. “Do we need longer cuts now? Possibly. Sure. I’m open to that, because Donald Trump has changed how we think about covering the news so much that we’ve had to rethink how we do news in various ways over the last nine years.”

NPR political reporter Stephen Fowler pointed out that no matter what choices NPR journalists make, someone is going to be unhappy. Indeed, in the past we’ve heard from listeners who were frustrated that NPR gave air to Trump’s attacks. Two weeks ago letter writers were concerned that Trump was getting more time than Harris. This week listeners want a longer, more unfiltered airing.

“There's going to be a disconnect between how some people want things to be covered, and how they are and need to be covered,” Fowler said.

Sesno believes that anytime Trump speaks or is quoted, journalists need to provide context. “Virtually all of his appearances are filled with invective and accusation and criticism and attack and otherizing,” he said. “And I think that context has to be provided.”

Some NPR formats are more problematic than others. Newscasts, the collection of several short news stories at the top and bottom of every hour, are particularly challenging. So are weekend roundups that mash a bunch of political audio clips together. Both formats have very little room for the necessary context.

Other shows have more room to add information. “We fact check him in the moment,” Muturi said. “And on The Politics Podcast [we] go beyond that and provide context.”

For example, when Trump claimed that noncitizens were voting in elections and that Democrats were relying on noncitizen votes to win the election, Muturi said the podcast team did both a fact check and added in additional context for the audience. They then asked, “Where is this idea coming from? What are the roots of this idea?” To answer those questions, they brought in Washington Desk correspondent Miles Parks who has covered voting issues since 2017.

After covering the laws and safeguards that prevent noncitizen voting, the podcast addressed the origins of the claim, sometimes called replacement theory. “Which is something that perhaps in a two minute or four minute story about the debate, a reporter may not have had a chance to get into,” Muturi said.

We found a handful of other stories that explicitly explore Trump’s nonsensical ideas. Fowler’s August 22 Morning Edition story looked at Trump’s struggle to pivot to a new opponent and featured several long soundbites from Trump. So did this Aug. 30 Sarah McCammon story on Trump’s shifting views on reproductive rights.

And just last Friday host Steve Inskeep played several long Trump clips so that linguist John McWhorter could dissect the choices Trump makes as he talks.

As problematic as Trump is, Sesno warns journalists, “If you turn down the volume too much, then you’re not doing your job.”

Voters need to know about Trump’s current points of view, and they need to hear it straight from Trump himself. That’s not easy. It will take time and extraordinary effort to air those clips in stories that have enough added reporting and context to help listeners make sense of them. For people who don’t like Trump, it won’t be pleasant listening. But expertly crafted, the stories will be educational and memorable. And they will serve a valuable democratic function. — Kelly McBride, Nicole Slaughter Graham, Amaris Castillo

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A deep dive into water

President Theodore Roosevelt’s vision for the country centered on “doing the greatest good for the greatest number.” One example of his effort was the approval of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, which in 1913 began rerouting water south from the isolated Owens Valley community to Los Angeles. For NPR’s Throughline, producer Anya Steinberg reported a documentary-style piece called “Water in the West,” which chronicles the project’s history, its role in growing the Los Angeles metropolitan area and its unintended consequences for the climate and Indigenous communities who lived in the Owens Valley.

Vivid sounds and interview clips take the audience right to the river and the aqueduct to experience the project’s suspenseful past. The piece exemplifies compelling storytelling. The journalism dives deep into the subject while educating listeners about universal issues, like development’s impact on the environment, the rural-urban divide and water scarcity. — Emily Barske Wood

The Office of the Public Editor is a team. Reporters Amaris Castillo, Nicole Slaughter Graham and Emily Barske Wood and copy editor Merrill Perlman make this newsletter possible. Illustrations are by Carlos Carmonamedina. We are still reading all of your messages on Facebook, X and from our inbox. As always, keep them coming.

Kelly McBride
NPR Public Editor
Chair, Craig Newmark Center for Ethics & Leadership at the Poynter Institute

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