Note: I wrote this column a week ago to quickly address angry emails I was receiving. It published on cleveland.com and in The Plain Dealer last weekend and now is being sent to email subscribers.

The last time someone who had been elected U.S. president was in as much trouble as Donald Trump was with his 34 felony convictions, the headline on the front page of The Plain Dealer was simple:

NIXON RESIGNS

It didn’t say, NIXON RESIGNS BUT SAYS HE WOULD HAVE BEEN VINDICATED

The news on Aug. 9, 1974, was that the first president in U.S. history had resigned. It required the simple and emphatic headline it received.

So, it was a terrible, terrible mistake on the day after Trump became the first president convicted of felonies for our headline not to say:

TRUMP GUILTY

Instead, our headline said TRUMP FOUND GUILTY, SAYS HE’S A POLITICAL PRISONER

Readers rightly bashed me for it. This email is representative:

The front page today, including the headline quoting the former President who is now a convicted felon, is beyond disgusting. Featuring his quote that he is a “political prisoner” in bold print as a headline is beyond disgusting and completely irresponsible journalism. He was convicted lawfully by a jury of his peers. Period. He broke the law. I was surprised it was not a hung jury, but apparently reason prevailed on that jury. I am contemplating ending my decades long subscription to the PD simply because I cannot stomach paying your salary. You are not impartial and you don’t seem to have any real skill at being an editor. I deserve the PD readers deserve better. Take a look at today’s NY Times headline for an example of how responsible journalism is done.

Our Trump headline is an anomaly for us for a big trial. When former Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder was convicted last year of orchestrating the biggest bribery scheme in Statehouse history, our front page headline said: Guilty as charged. It didn’t say, Guilty as charged but Householder still protests his innocence.

Locally, when former Cuyahoga County Commissioner Jimmy Dimora was convicted in 2012 as the ringleader of a massive corruption ring that had decimated the county, our headline was even simpler. GUILTY.

Dimora, like Householder, Trump and Nixon, had spoken plenty about their perspectives in the months and years leading to their big falls. What they had to say on the day of their big news was not the focus of our coverage. With Dimora, Householder and Nixon, The Plain Dealer headlines reflected that. With Trump, we failed.

This is about more than headlines, though. It is about the cancer of false equivalence that has infected American journalism. Our Trump headline gave equal footing to the jury and to Trump, and it should not have.

The jury verdict was the news. Twelve objective people considered the mountain of evidence and found that Trump had intercourse with a sex worker and broke the law 34 ways to keep you from finding out before you considered voting for him. The jurors spoke loudly: guilty on every count. These are not partisans. These are not people with axes to grind. They participated in this nation’s time-tested system for examining facts at trial and made their call. That was the story.

Those jurors, of course, did not hear from Trump. He took the coward’s way out and chose not to testify. Jurors are not permitted to consider that in their deliberations, but the rest of us sure can. If Trump is as innocent as he regularly claimed in his public statements, why not talk to the jury about that? The answer, of course, is that if Trump told the jurors the same lies he has told the rest of us, each lie would be a perjury count – more criminal offenses.

What Trump had to say after the verdict did not have anywhere near the weight of the jury verdict and did not belong in our headline. We understood that in the previous cases I mention here. We forgot it with the Trump headline.

The false equivalence issue is bigger than the headline and was in full bloom following the verdict. The news media bent over backwards to quote one unhinged Republican elected leader after another saying that the trial was part of a Biden administration plot to do in a political rival. Because they are such toadies for the former president, they did not hesitate to savage our justice system with demonstrably false claims, and journalists filled their platforms with the nonsense.

Journalists should not knowingly publish or broadcast falsehoods. We all know that.

The problem, as I see it, is that journalists are about the most traditional thinkers in the land. For many decades, when politicians largely cared about the truth, if journalists got a comment from a Democrat on a partisan issue, they’d want to get a comment from a Republican. That system worked for many years because most people involved participated in good faith.

The rise of Trump changed the game. Trump realized that making outrageous comments and lying would get him on to every news platform, widely spreading his words to big audiences, for free. Other politicians quickly learned from this, and the result is what you saw following the Trump verdict: preposterous claims that undermine our faith in government, published as if they are legitimate.

In our newsroom, we decided a few years ago to stop publishing statements that clearly were false or outrageous for the sake of being outrageous. I have to acknowledge, though, that living up to that decision has been a challenge. Long-held traditions die hard, and we have to be ever vigilant to use our heads before publishing. On some days, we get it wrong.

We got it wrong with the Trump verdict. We’ll learn from that and do better.

I'm at cquinn@cleveland.com

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