What I want is for reporters to have a better command of all the facts before interviewing Trump officials, so that they can call out lies in real time.
In this case, the lie was a brazen one. Brian Morgenstern said Trump paid $70 million in federal taxes for the years 2005-2007, when in fact he paid $0, because all of it was refunded in 2010. How did Morgenstern dare to make such a clearly false statement, twice, on national TV? Because he knew Poppy would not correct him, because he knows TV journalists rarely go into that much detail in their research for an interview.
I have seen Trump officials use this strategy in interview after interview during the last 4 years. It always works, and leaves me frustrated and yelling at the screen. I am no journalist, yet I knew this was a lie and Poppy didn’t. (I believe I learned about Trump’s tax refund from this snide article by a Trump sycophant: https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/obama-wrote-trump-a-73-million-check/ .) TV journalists need to do better research before interviews.
Look, Poppy Harlow did a fantastic job overall. But she, and other journalists, would be even more effective if they had a better grasp of the facts. Watch Jonathan Swan’s or Chris Wallace’s interviews with Trump to see what a difference that makes. Wallace fact-checked Trump in a millisecond when he claimed that the Biden-Sanders platform called for defunding the police, as did Swan on the COVID mortality rates. That is the kind of thing I want to see more of.