The Washington Post's profile of Maggie Haberman misses the mark in one important way
Rather than brushing of criticism of Haberman as being the result of ill-informed readers, the Post could have more directly engaged on the issue.
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On July 27, Washington Post feature writer Sarah Ellison e-mailed me. She was working on a profile of New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman, and was reaching out to ask if I’d be available to chat about Haberman’s Trump-era reporting, its limitations, and what its legacy may be.
I offered to chat via phone or by e-mail. She replied with a few questions:
Why does Haberman “seem to drive people crazy on Twitter?” After all, as Ellison would go on to note in her article, Haberman was the most-cited journalist in the Mueller Report and yet is seen as someone who isn’t tough enough on Trump.
What do I find objectionable about Haberman’s reporting? Additionally, is there a specific story of hers that stands out as being particularly problematic?
Here’s the article, which came out today, August 26:
Unfortunately, none of the points I made in my replies found their way into Ellison’s piece. I was slightly disappointed by this because I thought I provided relatively fair criticisms of the Times and of Haberman’s reporting. This isn’t to say that Ellison’s article is bad. In fact, it’s the opposite. It’s very well-written, it provides some important insights, and certainly covered some of the unfair criticism that gets lobbed Haberman’s way.
But since my points weren’t represented in the article, I thought I’d share my replies to Ellison’s emails below. I’m only quoting my side of the conversation for the sake of privacy.
So here’s what I wrote:
To start, I want to just make it clear that I’m in no way trying to discount the absolutely crucial reporting that Maggie Haberman and others at the Times have done in recent years. That said, it’s been extremely difficult to get any criticism of the paper to land. Back in 2017 when the Times got rid of its public editor position, Times executive editor Dean Baquet wrote in a letter to staff that “our followers on social media and our readers across the internet have come together to collectively serve as a modern watchdog, more vigilant and forceful than one person could ever be. Our responsibility is to empower all of those watchdogs, and to listen to them, rather than to channel their voice through a single office.” Yet whenever people criticize the paper or its journalists on Twitter, they tend to be ignored, brushed off, or blocked.
When it comes to criticism of Haberman, I think that it’s important to separate the valid from the ridiculous. There are times when she’ll tweet something that is genuinely newsworthy (for instance, when she tweeted that Trump had been telling people he believed he’d be reinstated — that’s very important for the public to know, in my opinion), and she’ll get what is, in my view, unfair criticism.
But then there are times when people have legitimate gripes with something she wrote, only to be lumped in with people launching ridiculous attacks at her. On a personal level, one particular story that has always frustrated me was an April 2016 piece she wrote about Trump supposedly being a more LGBTQ-friendly Republican. By that point in time, Trump had already come out in favor of the First Amendment Defense Act, a Republican bill written as a response to the Supreme Court’s marriage equality rulings. He had also said that he would try to nominate Supreme Court justices who would overturn those rulings by that point. Those didn’t get mentioned in that article, and Trump’s strategy of surrounding himself with hardcore evangelicals was only briefly mentioned as almost a curiosity.
The article helped set in motion a “Tump is pro-LGBTQ” narrative that simply wasn’t accurate. I wrote about that at Media Matters back in 2019.
NPR @NPR
BREAKING: The Trump administration just finalized a rule that would remove nondiscrimination protections for LGBTQ people in health care and health insurance.Once in office, Trump spent four years attacking LGBTQ rights. It was a sloppy story on her part that had real repercussions for LGBTQ people.
Another baffling article came in January 2017 when Haberman buried a note 12 paragraphs in about Trump using “his old, unsecured Android phone, to the protests of some of his aides.” After years of coverage devoted to Hillary Clinton’s email habits, Trump’s unsecured Android was mostly just shrugged off, treated as a curiosity, and was totally inconsistent with the way the Times had covered Clinton.
The biggest issue that I have with her work (and that of so many others in the press) is her attempts to “both sides” everything. In August 2016, she tweeted, “The problem for Clinton team - after Democrats repeatedly pointed to Bannon personal past, going to be hard to argue Weiner is off-limits.”
It was an absurd comparison. Bannon was effectively running Trump’s campaign at that point, while Weiner wasn’t part of Clinton’s campaign at all. And then there’s the example she had on January 6 in the middle of the assault on the Capitol that “Similar protests, from anti-Trump protesters in late May 2020, sent Trump to the WH bunker.”
Both were just terrible examples of “both sides” journalism.
If the Times actually wants Twitter to act as a check on the publication in ways that are comparable to having a good public editor (Margaret Sullivan was phenomenal in that role, and the Washington Post was lucky to have landed her as a media columnist after that), the Times and its journalists need to be open to criticism and not completely closed off from the world.
Let me know if you’ve got any follow-up questions. I’m happy to offer my perspectives/insights/opinions. I really do want to stress that I’m not anti-Haberman. I could go on and on with criticism of just about anyone covering politics in mainstream media these days.
Ellison replied to my email, noting that Haberman had walked back her January 6 tweet, and asking if there were any other examples I could point to.
And so I responded:
Thanks for pointing that out. I think the general point still stands because even at the time that she tweeted the first message (1:47pm ET), things were already pretty rough at the Capitol. By the time she deleted it and posted her update (2:43pm ET), lawmakers were being evacuated, a pipe bomb had been found, Capitol windows had been broken, etc.
The comparison was weak from the beginning. She was referring to the May 29, 2020 protests outside the White House where protesters were outnumbered and more importantly, never made it *to* the White House itself. In any case, her tweet read more like something I would have expected a Republican member of Congress or a partisan news outlet to tweet. It was unnecessary “whataboutism” that functioned more as commentary than reporting. In my opinion, at least.
Another frustrating tweet to read came during the 2018 White House Correspondents’ Dinner, when she wrote “That @PressSec sat and absorbed intense criticism of her physical appearance, her job performance, and so forth, instead of walking out, on national television, was impressive.”
That tweet of hers is what really kicked the “Oh my god, Michelle Wolf went over the line!” narrative into high gear. Wolf didn’t level “intense criticism of [Sanders’] physical appearance.” Wolf later confirmed this:
Maggie Haberman @maggieNYT
That @PressSec sat and absorbed intense criticism of her physical appearance, her job performance, and so forth, instead of walking out, on national television, was impressive.But she also has a tendency to hold Democrats to completely different standards than Republicans. When Democrats lie, she’s very open to using the word “lie.”
But when Trump would lie, she would say things like “demonstrable falsehoods”
Those are two very different approaches.
And then there are her articles, which, and this is really frustrating for me… for every damning piece she’d put out catching Trump in some sort of massive lie, there’d be one or two that seemed to function as beat sweeteners. I’m not going to speculate about friendly stories in exchange for access (that would produce unfriendly stories), but it’s hard to see how she can write these thoroughly reported pieces with source after source after source one day… and then churn out a laughably fawning piece about Hope Hicks’ “existential” decision about whether or not to testify.
See also: the piece that downplayed the threat that Trump posed to LGBTQ people that I mentioned in my earlier e-mail.
You can criticize Maggie Haberman, Peter Baker, Patrick Healy (who wrote the infamous “Clinton’s Cackle” piece back in ‘07 as well as a bunch of other pieces worth criticizing over the years), Ken Vogel, and most of the political writers over there. Their work, like all work, is flawed.
What irritates me as someone working in and around media criticism is that there’s no way to actually push back against flaws without either being ignored or dumped on by NYT journalists. The few times it does seem like they’re willing to publicly amplify criticism is when it’s someone being ridiculous. This is done in such a way that it makes it seem as if all criticism is out of bounds. Meanwhile, I’m over here like, “Hey, I’d just like to know what happened with that 2016 Trump LGBTQ piece. There were factual errors throughout it.”
NYT can’t have it both ways. It either needs its reporters to thoughtfully engage with criticism on social media or it needs to bring back the position of public editor so that person can field and reply to criticism of the paper. Don’t get me wrong. I was not a fan of the last public editor the paper had, as Liz Spayd seemed out of her depth in that role and unfamiliar with the internet/social media. Still, the Times as a whole needs to find a way to better address criticism.
Today, after the article came out, I shared some thoughts on Twitter, which I will repeat here:
There's a line in the Washington Post profile of Maggie Haberman that sticks out to me.
This quote from Jonathan Swan is intended to be praise of her work (there’s plenty of praise she absolutely deserves), but is, in my view, concerning. I’ll explain.
“She was the best reporter on the Trump beat from 2016 to 2021 and it wasn’t especially close,” said Jonathan Swan, Axios’s White House correspondent. “I can’t tell you how many times I thought I had a scoop only to Google her stories for the past few weeks and finding she’d deposited this interesting, original detail in paragraph 24. Ugh.”
If a detail is interesting enough for a reporter like Swan to be excited about having as a scoop, why is it buried in paragraph 24 in the first place?
I bring this up because it’s absolutely true that important/interesting details were often buried in Haberman’s stories.
Five days into Trump’s presidency, she published a piece titled, “A Homebody Finds the Ultimate Home Office.”
Buried 12 paragraphs in was this:
Mr. Trump’s wife, Melania, went back to New York on Sunday night with their 10-year-old son, Barron, and so Mr. Trump has the television — and his old, unsecured Android phone, to the protests of some of his aides — to keep him company. That was the case after 9 p.m. on Tuesday, when Mr. Trump appeared to be reacting to Bill O’Reilly’s show on Fox News, which was airing a feature on crime in Chicago.
Keep in mind that this immediately followed a campaign where one of the biggest arguments against one of the candidates amounted to, "Can you really trust her to take information security seriously?"
NYT broke the news of Trump using his old phone, but buried it. For seemingly no reason.
This was just six days after Haberman (and Thrush) reported that they'd been told the exact opposite. (Buried 9 paragraphs in.) It should have been a HUGE story that he was using an unsecured phone and that transition staff was saying the opposite.
Mr. Trump campaigned on a platform of shaking up Washington, but his pomp-and-circumstance arrival began with two jarring concessions to a city he may not inhabit full time: This week, he was forced to abandon his cherished “Trump” 757 for an Air Force jet, and, according to people close to the transition, he has traded in his Android phone for a secure, encrypted device approved by the Secret Service with a new number that few people possess.
I wrote about the inconsistency in the way Trump's infosec disasters were covered compared to Clinton.
It's easy to brush off all criticism of Haberman as being the result of someone "not understanding journalism" or being irrational or whatever... but stuff like that, the way details were buried deep in stories, are legitimate concerns that never, ever get addressed.
Finally, I want to reiterate this point: Maggie Haberman and the New York Times have done some truly excellent work that has been crucial to understanding the past several years in U.S. politics.
That said, I do wish there was more transparency inside the Times. Maybe if we could understand why a detail was buried 12 paragraphs into a piece, fewer people would be so openly frustrated about it.
The one question I didn’t end up responding to was about what Haberman’s legacy will ultimately be. I imagine that she will be looked back on as one of the greatest mainstream journalists of our time and that she’ll be rightly showered in awards. That doesn’t make genuine criticism about her work any less legitimate.
Milo J Monroe This is a copy of the notes that I made in an attempt to help myself remember the things that have happened over the years. I can remember a lot of contact with the corrupt cops, kkk, the Russians , and elements of the DOJ as far back as 1996. The same CIA officer who tried to convince me to move way and leave my family when I lived in Pinewood in 1996 - the same guy is the one who came to my camper in Lobelville in 2014. There was FBI , CIA, Sheriff’s Deputies, and Russians. Ricky Goodman killed himself after I exposed him hacking into my phone with police technology that Hickman County aquired from the CIA. The Police wrote up the report that he fell on his rifle in order so that his wife could collect the insurance. He is the person who subverted my wife into the kkk - Robert Mercer thing and we subsequently divorced. I drank but that is not the true reason for the divorce.
1) There was a video camera mounted on the pole across the road from my mother's house prior to my poisoning in 2010 and someone sent the address of that camera to the radio station in Centerville and also to the Rock radio station in Nashville. It was very much a regular thing to have them describing my vehicle, my clothes, and what I was doing over the air.
2) I met Tiffany Trump on a gaming website called POGO. It was not a coincidence and within a short time there was a large meeting online at pogo.com on the Euchre Tab, in the room Blue Bonnett. Donald Trump, Donald Trump Jr. , Marla Maples, Tiffany Trump, John Kelly, Steve Bannon, Robert Mercer, and several others were in that meeting in 2007 and during the conversation they talked about Trump running for President. Donald Trump Jr. came up with the idea to get the Russians to help and Steve Bannon shut him up quickly. It was a statement of mine to Make America Great Again and Steve Bannon asked my permission to use it. I was angry because our men were still at war and I wanted to bring our men home. The same people who are attacking me now have control of that website and the Euchre Tab no longer exists. They also own Yahoo. MacKenzie Scott , Rose Leslie , The Royal Family , High Ranking elements of the CIA , FBI , and the NSA.
3) Alexander Mishkin came into my mother’s house in 2010 and she told me he was a friend of Debbie her boss and he was here to fix the door. In a short period of time I knew that he was not and that he was an extreme communist. I had been drinking out of spite because I could not even get people to look or consider the video camera and the things that the radio station was doing. I had no idea that I was being attacked by the Russians and by the CIA. He put poison in my drink and left without ever fixing anything. It is amazing the things that he was able to do and say with my mother sitting in a chair and she did not recognize that there was something wrong inside of her own home. Before he left he said enjoy your drink. After he was gone I proceeded to finish the beer I was drinking and I noticed something gritty. I dumped it out rinsed my mouth and proceeded to force myself to vomit. Within a very short period of time I could not walk. I lay in the bed for 3 days and my family attributed my condition to my drinking. I believe in hindsight that the Russians were manipulating them and their viewpoint towards me. It has taken a very long time to piece together the clues and it involves all of the elements that I mention. The FBI , CIA, and the NSA all have a full knowledge and have participated in this attack on me. After laying in the bed for 3 days I had mom take me to the hospital and my blood did not show any alcohol. I do not use drugs with the exception of smoking some pot 2 or 3 times a year. The Doctor on duty just happened to have served in Europe and he recognized the symptoms of Novochok poisoning. He asked me many times if I had been taking pain pills or using heroin and that is not something that I have ever done. The following day I met Robert Mueller III and John Brennan. Robert Mueller III had a syringe of antidote and he told me it was a waste of $3 million dollars to give it to someone like me and he wish I would die. I identified Alexander Mishkin from photos that Robert Mueller III showed to me. After Mueller left Brennan had his assistant shoot something into my IV and he told me this will help you forget. After he left there was a man guarding me. I immediately started to raise hell and drinking lots and lots of water to try to flush my system. I woman came in and she was avoiding the cameras and started to shoot something into my IV and I ripped the IV out of my arm. They placed into my record that my condition was caused by a lack of Vitamin B and I left the hospital the next day against medical advice. The following day John Brennan and Gina Haspel came to my mothers house and John Brennan was threatening to have me put in prison for 20 years if I did not sign the paper he had. I have no idea what it was. My life has been a horror show trying to piece together the clues I have found along the way. It involves many members of the Hickman County Police, the CIA, FBI, NSA, the KKK, and the Southern Baptist Church. I write down the events as I remember them but it would be easier if there was some kind to tool that could help with a chronological timeline. These people have absolutely no honor, integrity, or human compassion.
4) The things that I am writing down do fit into a chronological time frame but I am not writing them in chronological order. I am simply writing things down as I remember them. I will start sending this file by email every day or two and send the entire file each time with the updates. There are extremely malicious government people who are working to destroy our democracy and they have the ability to classify the information that I am talking about. Sending me for a psychological evaluation is a farce created by the United States Attorney who knows that I am telling the truth and that there are many so called investigations being used as an excuse to attack me.
5) List of people who have threatened me. Mike Pompeo , Gaetz , Ron Johnson , Lindsey Graham , Steve Bannon , John Durham (Origin Investigator) , William Barr , Roger Stone , General Flynn , Roger Stone studio employees , Roger Stone’s daughter , Julian Assange , A woman from London (Computer Expert working for Prince William , Simmons (Hickman County kkk cop who had me drugged and also shot me with the sound device that he got from the Cubans) etc…Many cops, federal officers, agents, as well as foreign agents. The best way for the Federal Government to cover up the crimes of federal officers and elected officials is to classify the evidence (Loretta Lynch – Eric Holder).
6) People who actually came to the house I built in Lobelville. Nancy Pelosi , Adam Schiff , Rudy Giuliani , Eric Trump , Lara Trump , Donald Trump Jr. , Jarod Kushner , Robert Mueller III , Nellie Ohr , Dana Milbank , Anderson Cooper , Jim Sciuto , John Brennan , Jerold Nadler , Mark Meadows , Richard Burr , Steve Bannon , General Flynn , McCabe (FBI) , Eric Holder , Loretta Lynch , Peter Strotzk , Lisa Page , Lindsey Graham , Dianne Feinstien , Senator Grassley , Kate Middleton , Prince Harry , Prince Charles , Alexandria Ocasio Cortez , Bernie Sanders , Joseph Biden , Nellie Ohr , Barach Obama , Senator Cruz , Jeff Sessions , Whiticker ,
7) Bob Dylan also came to see me – Listen to the song False Prophet – Robert Pearl and his wife live on Russell Creek Road.
This is exactly how I’ve felt about Haberman’s reporting on Trump. I also think that I don’t need to necessarily understand journalism to criticize a story if I don’t feel it’s telling a complete picture.
The Hope Hicks story you mentioned earlier left me disoriented - like I was the one who felt that the main idea here isn’t her will she or won’t she, but what’s right for democracy. I didn’t need to be a journalism major to find that story incomplete at best.
I wish your comments were added to the story - it would’ve made the story more complete (agree it was very well written).