Halfway through her interview with President Donald Trump following a shooting outside the White House correspondents’ dinner, CBS’s Norah O’Donnell read from the alleged gunman’s “manifesto” — and elicited the president’s fury.
The confrontational exchange — in which O’Donnell said she was reading “the gunman’s words” and Trump called her and her crew “horrible people” for doing so on air — touched a nerve with media ethicists and critics who have long debated whether journalists should repeat the words and explanations offered by violent attackers.
The interview on CBS’s “60 Minutes” aired less than a day after a gunman opened firein the Washington Hilton hotel on Saturday, disrupting the annual dinner. Trump was attending for the first time as president, and this was his first on-camera interview since the shooting.
O’Donnell began the interview with a straightforward question: “Mr. President, do you know if you were the target of the gunman?”
Trump responded that he didn’t know, then added that he had “read a manifesto — he’s radicalized.”
According to charging documents, suspected gunman Cole Tomas Allen emailed the missive to family members and a former employer — at least one of whom shared it with law enforcement — shortly before attempting to breach the security perimeter at the Washington Hilton. Allen was arraigned Monday in federal court.
“He was a Christian — believer, and then he became an anti-Christian, and he had a lot of change. He’s been going through a lot, based on what he wrote,” Trump continued. “His brother complained about him and I think reported him to the police. And his sister, likewise, complained about him. His family — was very concerned. He was — probably a pretty sick guy.”
Seven minutes later, after discussing the president’s experience in the ballroom and his relationship with the news media, O’Donnell returned to the manifesto and began to quote from it.
“The so-called manifesto is a stunning thing to read, Mr. President,” O’Donnell said. “He appears to reference a motive in it. He writes this quote, ‘Administration officials, they are targets.’ And he also wrote this, ‘I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.’ What’s your reaction to that?”
Trump berated O’Donnell and her crew for the question.
“Well, I was waiting for you to read that because I knew you would because you’re, you’re horrible people. Horrible people. Yeah, he did write that. I’m — I’m not a rapist. I didn’t rape anybody,” he said.
“Oh you think — do you think he was referring to you?” O’Donnell asked in response.
“I’m not a pedophile. Excuse me. Excuse me. I’m not a pedophile. You read that crap from some sick person?” Trump responded. “You should be ashamed of yourself reading that because I’m not any of those things.”
When O’Donnell responded, “Mr. President these are the gunman’s words—” the president said that she “shouldn’t be reading that on ‘60 Minutes’” and called the journalist a “disgrace.”
Some media analysts said Trump’s response to O’Donnell was inappropriate, but raised questions about whether she should have read from the manifesto directly.
“A reporter should never be afraid to ask any question of anybody, including the president, to which the public deserves an answer, so I credit Norah O’Donnell for asking about the shooter’s motivation,” said Stephen J. Adler, director of New York University’s Ethics and Journalism Initiative and a former editor in chief of Reuters. “I’m unsure whether it was necessary to provide another platform for the shooter’s actual statement, which had been widely publicized already.”
He added that regardless, Trump’s response reflected “his pattern of unwarranted personal attacks on journalists doing the jobs the public needs them to do.”
In a statement, White House spokesman Davis Ingle said, “The President rightly called out ‘60 Minutes’ for uncritically repeating deranged lines from the would-be assassin’s manifesto. This was an act of Democrat activism, not journalism.”
John C. Watson, an associate professor at American University who studies media law and journalism ethics, said that it’s the job of journalist to determine the reasoning behind the attack. “The ‘manifesto’ included a wealth of information about the ‘why,’” he said. “O’Donnell had to use those portions of the ‘manifesto’ as a matter of professional competence.”
But Kelly McBride, who chairs the Craig Newmark Center for Ethics and Leadership at the nonprofit Poynter Institute, also said she felt that it was “gratuitous” for O’Donnell to quote the alleged gunman “because it glorifies him and gives him power.”
O’Donnell justified the decision in a segment on “CBS Mornings” on Monday: “I think the president’s responses were certainly newsworthy,” she said. “In fact, within the first minute of our interview, he brought up this so-called manifesto by the alleged gunman. And these are important questions about what happened and why it happened.”
In a statement, CBS News said O’Donnell’s questioning was absolutely correct. “This suspect is being charged with one count of trying to assassinate the president of the United States. It is a basic tenet of journalism to ask questions and seek the truth,” CBS News wrote in a statement to The Post. “It was our responsibility to ask the president about the latest evidence and what we had just learned after obtaining the manifesto a few hours before the interview.”
Multiple public efforts such as Texas State University’s “Don’t Name Them” campaign and the “No Notoriety” movement have sought to shift the focus of violent acts such as school shootings from the perpetrators to the victims, though media outlets, including The Post, still regularly name and investigate the motives of these individuals.
The New York Post published the suspected shooter’s writings — deeming them a “manifesto” — on Sunday morning, hours before the “60 Minutes” interview was taped. Most mainstream news organizations, including The Postand CBS News, have quoted from the writings that Allen allegedly sent to his family moments before the attack. The Post published a PDF of the charging documents, which includes the text of the “manifesto.”
This debate is decades old. In 1995, The Post and the New York Times published a 35,000-word manifesto from the Unabomber — later identified as Ted Kaczynski — after he said he would cease political violence if it was published.
The attorney general and FBI director at the time recommended publication. The Post’s then-publisher Donald Graham saidthat the papers had “no journalistic reason” to print the sprawling screed against industry and technology, but felt like it was the correct choice given the circumstances.
“Whether you like it or not, we’re turning our pages over to a man who has murdered people. But I’m convinced we’re making the right choice between bad options,” Graham said at the time.
News organizations face a different quandary now, asking about the shooter’s motives rather than attempting to allay a possible threat.
And in the days since the shooting, administration officials have zeroed in on the alleged shooter’s words as they build the case against him.
Despite Trump’s distaste with O’Donnell quoting from the “manifesto,” that’s what U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro did in a news conference Monday. “The manifesto also makes clear about his expected rules of engagement,” Pirro said. “He says, ‘I am targeting the administration officials. They are my targets, and I’m prioritizing from the top down the highest ranking from the lowest. And I will not hesitate to get involved in any kind of encounter with anyone who blocks me from the president.’”
Still, Dan Axelrod, chair of the Society of Professional Journalists’ ethics committee, said it’s “totally nonstandard” for a reporter to ask the victim of an attack to respond to an alleged motive — “especially a politician and an assassin.”
“The public needs more investigation of the gunman’s motives, not ‘60 Minutes’ pandering for ratings by joining the journalistic cavalcade speculating about the gunman’s character and motives before enough facts have been reported and verified,” he said. When O’Donnell asked Trump to speculate about the gunman’s motives, she was “completely disregarding” the basic tenets of sound reporting, he said.
Elisa Lees Muñoz, executive director of the International Women’s Media Foundation, wrote in a statement that a reporter’s right to question powerful people is a basic tenet of journalism.
“Criticism that seeks to intimidate or silence journalists for doing their jobs not only threatens individual reporters, but the public’s right to know,” she said. “During this time of attacks on press freedom, it’s critical that newsrooms and the news media industry stand with Norah O’Donnell and all journalists facing attacks for their work.”
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