Reporters covering the presidential election from a myriad publications including The New York Times and NBC have expressed negative opinions about Republican nominee Donald Trump in writing, a Daily Caller investigation reveals.
The journalists all expressed their thoughts about Trump over the past year on Twitter. New York Times political reporter Ashley Parker referred to “Peak Trump” in a retweet of someone saying the GOP nominee had gone “apeshit.” A fellow New York Times reporter Jeremy Peters dismissed Trump’s run as a publicity stunt and connected the GOP nominee to racism and xenophobia a month after his announcement speech. “What Trump sought to bolster by running for president — his brand – is now tarnished by associations with xenophobia and racism,” Peters tweeted in July.
Fellow New York Times reporters Alex Burns and Jonathan Martin have mocked the GOP nominee relentlessly on Twitter. Politico’s political reporters are a little more openly biased towards Trump than those at The New York Times. Politico’s chief political correspondent Glenn Thrush wrote “exactly” in a retweet that referenced Trump that said, “so black people are to blame because they oppose a racist? It’s the voters fault and not the candidate’s? Ok.”
Politico political reporter Eli Stokols said in September, “Trump’s constantly contradictory rhetoric requires a lot of cognitive dissonance-but only if you presume he means anything he says.”
In another tweet, Stokols referred to Trump’s “racist birtherism.” NBC News and MSNBC political reporter Benjy Sarlin has also been open about his disdain towards Trump. “You listen to how Trump talks about [waterboarding] and how crowd responds and it becomes clear it’s about bloodlust not safety,” Sarlin tweeted in June.
“The revisionist history in a few years of the racist elements of Trump’s run is going to be epic,” the NBC/MSNBC reporter said in February tweet. CNN reporter Dylan Byers seemed to excuse anti-Trump bias in one tweet. “Conservatives say media is biased against Trump. Given everything that he’s said & done, it’s actually remarkable how fair they’ve been,” Byers wrote on Wednesday.
Washington Post reporters have been a tad-bit more careful than their colleagues in other media outlets to not be so openly against Trump. Political reporter Dave Weigel did though compare Trump’s rhetoric to a kindergartner. “Jesus, watching this debate after sloggin through all the Trump debates is like moving from kindergarten into grad school,” Weigel wrote during the first Democratic primary debate.
Meanwhile, Washington Post national political correspondent Philip Rucker has fawned over Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton on Twitter. When praising an article by colleague Dan Balz, Rucker wrote, “Clinton was confident & crisp, though not poetic, in arguing it takes a village, not a strong man.”
Rucker also wrote, “it’s cinematic” when he retweeted Washington Post writer Chris Cillizza saying the stage at the Democratic National Convention was “leaps and bounds beyond what the GOP did last week.”(RELATED: No Visible American Flags Present At The Democrat Convention)
The Daily Beast and BuzzFeed used to be on Trump’s “media blacklist” and a look at their journalists’ Twitters shows why that isn’t a surprise. Daily Beast journalist Olivia Nuzzi wrote in May, “Trump says creepy things about Ivanka being hot because, to him, hot is the most valuable thing a woman can be.” Her fellow Daily Beast reporter Gideon Resnick wrote in June, “The presumptive Republican nominee is telling his supporters to actively be more racist.”
Samantha Allen, a staff writer at Daily Beast, wrote in July, “At least we’ll have all these cool memes to look back on after we give a racist, misogynist wannabe dictator the keys to our country, right?” And to wrap up the coverage of Daily Beast bias, reporter Brandy Zadrozny wrote in August, “If his racism, misogyny, or xenophobia doesn’t cost him the election, Trump’s unpreparedness just might.”
BuzzFeed “reporters” express a similar bias on Twitter. Andrew Kaczynski, infamous for falsely accusing an innocent Muslim of being behind the Boston bombing, has made fun of Trump’s finger size before on Twitter. In August, Kaczynski also wrote, “Trump went to the Broadway opening of ‘American idot.’ I don’t have anything to say about that.”
BuzzFeed senior technology reporter Joe Bernstein wrote during the Republican convention, “big fat lol at the ‘ted cruz is unleashed’ takes this am. he said ‘vote your conscience’ not ‘donald trump is a fraud a liar and a bigot.'” Another technology writer Charlie Warzel wrote during the unveiling of the short-lived Trump-Pence logo, “lol to all of us tho for thinking that after a year of racist, vitriolic campaigning that trump gives two shits about a logo.”
Hayes Brown, BuzzFeed world news editor and reporter, wrote in September, “Donald Trump’s policy proposals are almost entirely made up of racism, tautologies, and racist tautologies.” BuzzFeed is so biased that they turned down a $1.3 million in advertising from RNC because they thought Trump was “hazardous” to their employees.
The level of anti-Trump resentment gets even higher when one looks at Slate’s chief political correspondent Jamelle Bouie. He wrote in June, “in all seriousness I think watching that [Trump speech] activated my body’s fear response.” There are plenty of similar examples including Bouie saying Trump could bring fascism to the United States.
Looking at the tweets of Huffington Post reporters is pointless because at the end of every Trump article is this: “Editor’s note: Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is aserial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims — 1.6 billion members of an entire religion — from entering the U.S.”
Justin Caruso, India Ingersoll, and Annabel Scott contributed to this report.