Covering up a genitalia remark

Many critics of Donald Trump blame conservative evangelicals for keeping alive the ex-president’s new White House hopes. As a journalist and historian, I also wonder about evangelical and conservative media: Are they letting their readers, viewers, and listeners know how crazy Trump sounds these days?

John Fea on Sunday described the weekend’s big revelation so I don’t have to. Unsurprisingly, the Washington Post and the New York Times had a fine time with Trump’s comments during his Saturday speech that “Arnold Palmer was all man…. When he took showers with the other pros, they came out of there, they said, ‘Oh my God, that’s unbelievable.’”

But as far as I know, this Daily Beast headline is accurate: “Fox News Casually Ignores Trump’s Arnold Palmer-Genitalia Rant.” I also didn’t see anything on Sunday or Monday in publications read by conservative evangelicals such as The Christian Post and The Epoch Times.

The Christian Post at the top of its Politics page yesterday had this headline: “Michelle Obama org enlists drag queens, Cardi B to boost support for Kamala Harris in swing states.” Lower down came this headline: “Imprisoned pro-lifer urges Americans to vote against ‘Jezebel spirit’: ‘You cannot let Kamala get in.’”

The Epoch Times apparently skipped the Arnold Palmer story but highlighted one about how “Former President Trump manned the fry station at a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania on Sunday.” Headlines on its website included “Trump Thanks God, Calls for Unity Amid Witty Remarks at Al Smith Dinner.”

I also looked at secular conservative publications including National Review and The Daily Caller, and saw little. A Daily Caller story reported the CNN interview of Speaker of the House Mike Johnson that John Fea described on Sunday, only to criticize CNN for mentioning genitalia: “Johnson called out the CNN host, stating that he seemed ‘to like that line a lot,’ before defending Trump and highlighting the policies of the Biden-Harris administration that are driving voters to support the former president.”

Some local small city newspapers that conservative evangelicals read covered the story, relying on an Associated Press account with this headline: “Trump kicks off a Pennsylvania rally by talking about Arnold Palmer’s genitalia.”The Lufkin (Texas) Daily News, “winner of the Pulitzer Prize for meritorious public service,” did not cover up the story and included a follow-up from the AP’s Meg Kinnard: It quoted a daughter of Arnold Palmer criticizing Trump’s “poor choice of approaches” to honoring her dad’s memory.

I’ve written several books on journalism history but have not researched whether conservative evangelicals, by commission or omission, have suffered from, and been content with, a campaign-long cover-up. That will make a good dissertation subject for someone. Today, though, we see a partisan press at work.