Cleveland Plain Dealer’s Editorial on Trump and Insurrection Earns Kudos

The Cleveland Plain Dealer once was one of those famous local newspapers at which people like me dreamed of working one day. Its history went back past the Civil War to the days of Jacksonian Democrats. It had a romantic name, resonant with echoes of The Front Page. It won a Pulitzer for editorial cartooning in 1953. It won another for the columns written by my friend, Connie Schultz. Alas, in recent years, the paper fell into the dark mills of absentee owners. In 2020, its owners shuttered the print newsroom, leaving only Cleveland.com. From the Columbia Journalism Review:

On Tuesday, the Cleveland guild announced a decision by Advance to lay off the four reporters who had remained at the Plain Dealer. “After more than 80 years of union membership, Plain Dealer journalists will no longer be represented by Local One,” the guild statement read. “The unit will be dissolved effective May 17. The PD newsroom will no longer exist.” The final four Plain Dealer staffers were offered positions at Cleveland.com, whose staff will continue to publish online and in a daily paper that uses the Plain Dealer masthead.

This weekend, however, the Plain Dealer recaptured a piece of its noble past. It decided to call a lie a lie, and a liar a liar. No fear, no favor. Its editor, Chris Quinn, has declared its independence.

Why don’t our opinion platforms treat Donald Trump and other politicians exactly the same way. Some phrase it differently, asking why we demean the former president’s supporters in describing his behavior as monstrous, insurrectionist and authoritarian. I feel for those who write. They believe in Trump and want their local news source to recognize what they see in him. The angry writers denounce me for ignoring what they call the Biden family crime syndicate and criminality far beyond that of Trump. They quote news sources of no credibility as proof the mainstream media ignores evidence that Biden, not Trump, is the criminal dictator.

But…

The north star here is truth. We tell the truth, even when it offends some of the people who pay us for information.

The truth is that Donald Trump undermined faith in our elections in his false bid to retain the presidency. He sparked an insurrection intended to overthrow our government and keep himself in power. No president in our history has done worse.

This is not subjective. We all saw it. Plenty of leaders today try to convince the masses we did not see what we saw, but our eyes don’t deceive. (If leaders began a yearslong campaign today to convince us that the Baltimore bridge did not collapse Tuesday morning, would you ever believe them?) Trust your eyes. Trump on Jan. 6 launched the most serious threat to our system of government since the Civil War. You know that. You saw it.

Chris Quinn and his reporters have found the key to covering the former president*, and it was laying out there in the sun, in plain sight, all along.

The facts involving Trump are crystal clear, and as news people, we cannot pretend otherwise, as unpopular as that might be with a segment of our readers. There aren’t two sides to facts. People who say the earth is flat don’t get space on our platforms. If that offends them, so be it.

The “reality-based” community, as that loathsome ferret Karl Rove put it during a previous ghastly Republican perversion of political norms and institutions, has found a voice. The P-D ran a beta test on it during the last U.S. Senate campaign when it simply announced it was going to ignore what it saw as the lies spouted by Republican candidate Josh Mandel. At that time, Quinn was just as immovable.

We could have written a traditional “he said-she said” story, saying, “Senate candidate Josh Mandel is calling on Gov. Mike DeWine to end coronavirus restrictions, but health experts warn such steps will endanger more people.” But that’s not what this was about. Mandel knows he is calling on the governor to do something that would endanger countless people. No, what this was about was a naked bid for attention. So, we could have covered it with an analysis piece, saying “Senate candidate Josh Mandel seeks attention by calling for coronavirus steps that would kill Ohioans.”

We ultimately decided not to write about Mandel’s call for DeWine to lift his coronavirus restrictions. Mandel is pretty much a nobody right now, a nobody begging for people to notice his Tweets a year ahead of the Senate primary. Just because he makes outrageous, dangerous statements doesn’t mean it is news…We are proud of our role as a center of discourse, with a diversity of viewpoints you can find nowhere else in the state. But we do not knowingly publish ridiculous and idiotic claims.

See how easy it is, NBC? See how simple, New York Times? See how freeing it must be, Politico? No desperate groping for “balance” before you say that, yes, there’s a guy walking down the street with a duck on his head, and no reason to seek out someone to say that they saw a duck walking down the street with some guy on his ass. No more being tied to the millstone of Both Sides, the one that’s sinking the profession (and the republic) into the abyss. Follow the Cleveland Plain Dealer into the clear air and the light. There’s plenty of room.

Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.