The following is in response to the Suburban Mom column, President Trump and the new age of journalism, that appeared in the Jan. 31 issue of the WWP News.
As a journalist like Ms. Brossman, I have been appalled by the Trump administration’s relations with the mainstream media (which means the media who use fact-checkers and make truth a priority).
I also know something about avoiding bias in reporting. I was copy chief for Parade magazine for 34 years. We appeared in more than 300 newspapers when I retired in 2009. Half of those papers were in so-called Red States, and half were in Blue States, so we had to walk a fine line to avoid alienating our audience.
This was not always easy, and we got complaints from both sides or the political spectrum. The important thing, however, was to get facts straight, so we had three full-time fact checkers. I feel sorry for fact checkers today, because our president does not care about truth. Worse, he has told his supporters not to believe what they read in the nation’s most respected newspapers—just what they read in Tweets.
I thought the Suburban Mom column of Jan. 31 was well written and insightful. My only disagreement was the implication that there is no objective news reporting on television. I would recommend that everyone watch the PBS Nightly News broadcast.
While it perhaps is not as good since Gwen Ifill died last year, it still does a terrific job of covering the day’s events and always presents both sides of an issue—if there really are two sides and not just nonsense, such as a disagreement with evolution or climate change.
— Martin Timins, West Windsor
