The incurious investigative reporter

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Eric Lipton of the New York Times Thinks You Should Think Donald Trump Is Doing Great

THE NEW YORK Times investigative reporter Eric Lipton, less than two weeks into posting on Bluesky, decided it was time for him to deliver a message to the rest of the site's users today. He shared a link to a CNN story with the headline "CNN Poll: Most Americans approve how Trump is handling his return to the White House," and added his own commentary:

FYI Bluesky folks. Keep this in mind. CNN "Most Americans approve how Trump is handling his return to the White House" Important to keep perspective. This site is an echo chamber of sorts. Just like Twitter has become.

The Times' social-media policy declares that "our journalists must not express partisan opinions, promote political views, endorse candidates, make offensive comments or do anything else that undercuts The Times’s journalistic reputation." One side effect of this policy is that it neatly showcases which political opinions the Times staffers consider safe to publish, presumably because the staffers do not even recognize them as political opinions. 

For instance, Eric Lipton was expressing the view that, collectively, Bluesky users have a distorted or incorrect view of Donald Trump—that they view Trump too negatively. By viewing Trump negatively, in this account, they are putting themselves at odds with the American people. Trump's numbers in the CNN poll, then, are not just descriptive but normative. Trump is doing a good job. 

Craig Harrington of Media Matters for America quickly flagged that Lipton didn't even have the facts about the poll right: 

FYI NYT folks, this poll shows Donald Trump is running the second-least popular transition in the history of the question, beating only his own first extremely unpopular transition.

For comparison, he included a link to the full poll and a picture of the numbers for past presidents-to-be, going back to Bill Clinton. By "most Americans," what CNN meant was that 55 percent of the poll respondents said they approved of Trump's transition. Even George W. Bush, coming off the shock and acrimony of the Florida recount and Bush v. Gore, scored better than that, with approval numbers above 60 percent. Barack Obama was up around 80 percent.