GREAT MOMENTS IN OBJECTIVITY FROM THE EDITOR OF THE COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW:   

Narrative has become a maligned word of late, but we find ourselves today in a news environment where the narratives are established, and the days’ Trump coverage seems largely in service of reinforcing (for the left) or debunking (the right) that narrative. We say this, the president says that, we’re at an impasse. Donald Trump called developing nations a shithole, unless he didn’t, but he probably did. What do we learn? Probably that he’s a racist who lies, both of which we already knew. But that doesn’t stop us from repeating the exercise day after day; maybe this will be the thing that finally does him in.

According to his bio, “Kyle Pope is the Editor in Chief and Publisher of the Columbia Journalism Review.”

As Ann Althouse wrote last month, “‘Shithole’ is a perfectly good rude, slangy word. It has a great history, and it’s vivid and effective. It is not a racial term, and shame on the people who are making it racist. I wonder if these people ever think of the pain and damage they are causing by proclaiming and insisting upon a connection between dark skin and excrement. They’re revealing what’s in their head, and they don’t mind burdening dark-skinned people with the knowledge that they are being thought about like that.”

James Taranto tweets, “A lot of the complaints about Trump’s departures from norms seem to me to be justifications for the critics’ own departures from norms.” “Do any members of ‘the political press corps’ dispute this characterization of their attitudes,” Taranto asks in a follow-up tweet linking to the CJR piece.