Via Newsbusters:
During Sunday’s Reliable Sources, host Brian Stelter and his panel discussed a book by former New York Times Executive Editor Jill Abramson that argues that the paper has become too anti-Trump. New York Timescolumnist Frank Bruni did his best to justify the paper’s coverage of the President, describing the negative coverage as “the only honest way to cover this President.”
The segment began with Stelter reading aloud a passage of Abramson’s forthcoming book, Merchants of Truth, that specifically references her successor, Dean Baquet: “His news pages were unmistakably anti-Trump. Some headlines contained raw opinion as did some of the stories that were labeled as news analysis.” Stelter continued: “she also wrote in the book that the Times has a mostly liberal audience ‘so there was an implicit financial reward for the Times in running lots of Trump stories, almost all of them negative,’ in order to gain subscribers.” […]
Bruni disagreed with “the idea that news coverage of Trump is negative,” arguing that his behavior justifies the unflattering press: “No one has lied like him…no one has had the sort of ethical problems that he does, no one has had the areas of ignorance. To call that out accurately is to end up with a body of coverage that is unusually negative but it is absolutely appropriate to the man and the situation at hand.” Stelter then asked Bruni if the Times’s coverage was “negative but accurate.”
After responding in the affirmative, Bruni argued that “I don’t think we have been anti-Trump. I think we have been negative and I think that’s the only honest way to cover this President.”