Good evening, and welcome to this week’s ‘Ragebait.’
Justin Baragona here, bringing you the latest media dispatches from the right-wing industrial outrage complex and Bari World. In tonight’s edition, we talk to journalism ethics experts on whether it is “fair game” for reporters to dig into the nature of Natalie Harp’s relationship with Donald Trump, and how newsrooms should navigate this story. Also, Disney is getting lauded for punching back against the Trump administration, but didn’t they help jumpstart his war against the media in the first place?
Who’s Afraid of Natalie Harp?
“Okay, back to the midterms because the Natalie stuff, I think, is strange. So I’m going to leave it there.”
That was what MS NOW’s Katy Tur said to the New York Times’s Maggie Haberman on Tuesday afternoon following a several-minute conversation about Natalie Harp, the close aide to Donald Trump who has suddenly been thrust into the news cycle after Senator Jon Ossoff (D-GA) name-checked her during a Sunday campaign speech.
Tur’s pivot came after Haberman, whose best-selling book Regime Change (co-authored with Times colleague Jonathan Swan) prominently features Harp, said the 35-year-old staffer had “clearly taken devotion to [Trump] to a very different level” while referencing the “deeply personal letters” Harp had left the president.
Haberman pointed out that those letters, which saw Harp telling Trump he is “all that matters to” her, left the Secret Service “alarmed,” something Swan also revealed to Mehdi in an interview last month.
Still, it was Tur’s reaction to Haberman and desire to move on to another subject that got me thinking, particularly since the story being “strange” is precisely why people want to know more about it.
How should mainstream media newsrooms navigate this particular story, considering the innuendo tied to it? Is it fair game to go through the door that Ossoff seemingly opened and dig into the nature of Harp’s relationship with Trump? And what are the media and journalistic ethics involved here?
To answer some of these questions, I reached out to Eric Deggans, Knight Professor of Journalism and Media Ethics at Washington and Lee University and NPR critic-at-large, and Subbu Vincent, director of Journalism and Media Ethics at Santa Clara University.