After ICE Killed a Woman, Too Many Newsrooms Chose Government PR Over Actual Journalism

Journalism under Trump 2.0 is becoming an increasingly oxymoronic prospect. Even as the industry continues to shrink at depressingly fast speeds and reporting loses ground to social media and AI slop, it remains a profession full of people who want to do real journalism—to tell the stories and share the perspectives that the powerful don’t want told. (Everything else is public relations, as the hacky axiom goes.) But we’re increasingly seeing the dominance of the worst type of journalist: someone who’s in the business for clout and power. Naturally, these are the people who’ve risen to the top of the newsrooms, and, to varying degrees, they’ve made it clear that the Trump administration should be treated just like any other presidential regime. 

That may in part be merely smart business; Trump is trigger-happy about filing lawsuits against outlets he claims have defamed him. But it also contradicts the fundamental point of journalism: to truthfully and reliably inform the public. Somewhere along the line, these media leaders appear to have absorbed Trump’s messaging, which is preventing their newsrooms from consistently informing the public of the reality of what’s happening.

I am obviously speaking about the big names here: the New York Times and the Washington Post. CNN, NBC, ABC. NPR. CBS, of course. All outlets that have faced significant pressure from Trump and his cronies in recent months and years; many of which have given Trump exactly what he wants. ABC settling a lawsuit Trump filed by giving him over $15 million can reasonably be interpreted as a bribe, while Bari Weiss’s speedy destruction of CBS is taking the form of Tony Dokoupil doing a Marco Rubio hagiography instead of the evening news. These examples are bad, of course. But what is more pernicious is how fear of conservative opprobrium has apparently seeped into decision-making at these outlets.

The point-blank killing of a U.S. citizen by an ICE agent on Wednesday in Minneapolis has become the ur-example of this problem. Within hours, social media was filled with recordings clearly showing: a driver being yelled at by an ICE goon to “get out of the fucking car”;  the woman turning her car to leave the exceedingly stressful situation; another ICE agent circling around the front of her vehicle, pulling out his gun, and firing multiple times directly into her windshield and open window. As she lost control of her car (because she had been shot multiple times), it sped forward and came to a stop only after crashing into another car. The ICE agent who shot her slowly walks toward the car, then finally tells his colleagues to call 911. A bystander who asks to check her pulse, identifying himself as a physician, is screamed at by the remaining ICE agents. The video showing that interaction also shows the driver slumped over and covered in blood. It’s horrible. 

The multiple videos from multiple angles provide overwhelming evidence of what happened, and were almost immediately available—but you wouldn’t know that from the coverage in the Times, which reported what Trump officials said happened (lies about the victim using her car as a weapon) on equal footing with what the videos showed actually happened. “The woman who was fatally shot was Renee Nicole Good. By the time her identity was revealed publicly, she had already been declared a domestic terrorist by one side and a murder victim by the other,” is how one of the Times’ first stories—headlined “Video of ICE Shooting Becomes a Political Rorschach Test”—concluded.

These videos were not a “Rorschach test”; they were, taken together, the truthful account of what happened on the ground. And the way this narrative played out over the airwaves and on social media in the following hours was not merely “a familiar ritual,” as the Times reporter writes; it was the Trump administration lying through its teeth, in some cases, it seemed, not even bothering to even glance at a video, because what they claimed was so far from the truth.

Of Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin’s lies that Good was targeting ICE agents and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey describing it as “an agent recklessly using power that resulted in somebody dying,” the Times’s liveblog reported that “neither description of the encounter could immediately be verified independently.” (The liveblog entries have since been edited and updated, as is somewhat standard—if ethically debatable—practice.) Meanwhile, any person on social media at the time could have independently verified that McLaughlin was lying, as could have many other journalists, given that she is a serial liar. 

It’s easy to rag on the Times, which has become a behemoth in the digital media landscape. It now employs 7% of all U.S. newspaper employees, and its choices have disproportionate influence on the way Americans understand the news. But refusal to call McLaughlin’s and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem’s version of events “lies” was a problem across the media.

CNN went with a horrendous curiosity gap headline: “DHS said a woman attempted to run over ICE officers before being shot in Minneapolis. Here’s what videos show.” HuffPost said different videos “challenge” Noem, rather than what they really show: She’s lying. When asked on a podcast how there can be “two very, very different characterizations of the events that took place,” a BBC journalist merely repeated Trump and his officials’ comments, rather than saying for sure whether one of those characterizations is wrong. (The BBC is currently facing a $10 billion lawsuit from Trump.)

Nearly a full day after the shooting, the Times’s visual investigations team released a slow-motion compilation of videos of the shooting, overlayed with narration detailing exactly what happened, as it happened. The Washington Post put out a similar one. Both are impressive pieces of video journalism, but for those of us who watched the awful videos when they were put online early Wednesday afternoon, they don’t show us anything we hadn’t already known for nearly 24 hours. 

And within that 24 hours, the narrative had already crystallized on the right. According to DHS, the ICE agent was acting in self-defense and Good had intentionally been driving her car at him. The lie was quickly repeated by Trump himself—though he appeared less committed to it once he rewatched the video in the presence of reporters. 

By not making clear that the evidence immediately, fully contradicted Trump’s mouthpieces, the Times has actively played a part in the administration’s narrative taking hold, giving it further power and making it harder for the journalists who want to hold this cruel, lying, anti-democratic administration to account.

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