Lawrence Glickman, an historian at Cornell University, lobbed some sharp criticism at both the New York Times and the Washington Post for their coverage of former President Donald Trump’s speech to autoworkers in Michigan on Wednesday night.
In particular, Glickman argued that the two papers did a disservice to their readers by not stating at the start of their articles that Trump’s speech was delivered in front of a non-union audience rather than in front of United Auto Workers members who are the ones leading a strike for better wages.
“A central fact is that, in the midst of a UAW strike, Trump spoke last night at a nonunion factory,” Glickman wrote on Twitter. “Yet the NY Times mentions this only at the end of the 6th paragraph and the Washington Post brings it up in only the 19th paragraph. These are failures of framing.”
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Glickman further castigated the Times for writing that both Trump and President Joe Biden this week spoke to people “affected by the United Automobile Workers strike” when Biden was the only politician to meet with the striking workers themselves.
In addition to this, Glickman criticized the Post for giving Trump too much credit for efforts to revive manufacturing jobs in the United States.
“Furthermore for the Post to claim that Trump promoted ‘aggressive state intervention in industrial policy’ seems exaggerated, especially when the Biden administration unlike Trump has actually passed legislation that qualifies as such,” he argued. “This is the Post’s description of his ‘industrial policy’ of ‘aggressive state intervention’: ‘Without specifying how, Trump suggested he could restore domestic manufacturing immediately and with a pen stroke.'”
