Emily Cunningham

Reporters think that they can’t say anything that suggests a value judgement unless it’s “attributed” because if they state it outright they will demonstrate bias. That’s why @katierogers and @npfandos say the *Democrats* call Trump’s tweet “racist.” That’s simply a fact. 1/nhttps://twitter.com/owillis/status/1150458822374449152 …

But to tell brown Americans to “go back to where they came from,” as if dark skin made them foreign, is *by any objective measure* a racist statement. Not to call it such outright makes racism and anti-racism mere partisan opinion. And that’s very dangerous. 2/n

You see the same bias in climate reporters: they refuse to call our continued burning of fossil fuels an emergency, but will merely quote someone claiming it is (while providing the “balance” of a quote from someone who disagrees). 3/n

I don’t know if folks are trained to write this way in school or if the big papers require the adoption of this style, thinking it provides them with deniability. But in any case that deniability is not objectivity, nor is it truth-telling in any moral sense. 4/n