The very first story I published about the scheduled appearance of President Donald Trump at Wheeler High School this week came with the contentious vibes that carried through his visit and beyond.
It was a quick story for which details would be added; hence I wrote at the bottom of the post, as I usually do on a breaking piece, that “this story will be updated.”
It’s a message I use on a significant story that’s fluid, such as election results, a crash or crime incident, etc.
Before I had a chance to round up initial reaction to Trump’s visit, a reader e-mailed to say he had run my first draft of that story through an AI prompt, and it spit out that “the article shows a mild-to-moderate appearance of anti-Trump bias, primarily through its framing and source selection rather than through any clearly false factual claims.”
All it contained was the basic information about the visit, and a brief comment at the very bottom from the head of the Cobb County Democratic Committee.
This reader suggested that “I’d encourage you to start checking what’s written against an LLM or 3rd party to look for bias that you may not even realize exists.”
He also said the following:
“The fact that you’d report on the plans to host protest events at a Cobb County School and that’s the focus of a group, no matter who the group is or what they are protesting should trouble everyone. Our schools are a place of learning and safety and promoting somebody’s plans to disrupt that is shameful. Please consider this and if any changes need to be made to the article.”
I didn’t see this e-mail until after I had updated the story that was revised with ample reaction supporting Trump’s visit, including a response from the Cobb County School District. But this reader couldn’t wait, or didn’t read the disclaimer at the bottom.
I sent him a link to the updated story and told him to “stick that in your Chat GPT pipe and smoke it.” Don’t come at me with an accusation of bias and say, as this reader did, that “hey, it wasn’t me, it was AI.”
Normally I don’t respond like this to readers, but it wasn’t only the subject matter—Trump is a lightning rod no matter what—but the gall of hiding behind whatever an AI response returns as the undisputed truth.
This reader asked ChatGPT to check for bias in a way that suited his own suspicions, and, quelle surprise, it told him exactly what he wanted to read. (This is one of many problems with AI that are a subject for another time.)
So I knew when Wednesday came, I was going to catch hell no matter what I wrote. I understand that; this has been part of the territory that comes with being a professional journalist, as I have been for more than 40 years.
I received a credential from the White House Press Office to cover the rally inside the Wheeler gym and for the first half of my report I wrote about the atmosphere and the messages from the stage that were decidedly pro-Trump. I focused on the Trump Accounts that were featured and a comment from Scott Bessent, Trump’s Treasury Secretary (who got a very loud applause from the audience) about them.
Likewise from a speech by Rick Jackson, a Republican candidate for Georgia governor, who later reappeared on the stage with Trump. The energy inside Wildcat Arena was upbeat, and I can see the appeal of attending Trump rallies if you like the president—they’re well orchestrated and very entertaining.
Media seating was bad and I could not get any good photo closeups from the stage except a few, and that I published on that original report and am adding here.
The three video clips that I shot and included in that same piece were all from the rally.
I also relied on readers attending the protests to provide photos and any comments they wished to share, since I wasn’t there, and I got a few and posted them with that report.
In fact, I asked readers—pro- or anti-Trump or otherwise—to send photos, and I got plenty from both. At the very end of that story, I thanked those who had contributed and said I would be doing some follow-up stories.
There simply was too much to put in one story, and I knew there would be fireworks the next day at the Cobb Board of Education meeting—as there certainly were.
But I heard from Trump supporters anyway who were furious with what I wrote. It was more than slanted, they said, suggesting I shouldn’t have included anything about the protests at all.
After all, this was the President of the United States visiting our community. Wrote one reader who’s been complimentary of our work in the past:
“If this article were the first article I read from East Cobb News, it would have been the last. I hope you give consideration to the real reason for Trump’s visit by writing a non-biased article without the protest propaganda, and give the President his due respect along with the thousands of Trump supporters that you basically ignored.”
I don’t know how you can read my initial report and conclude that I was ignoring Trump supporters or the messaging that was going on in that packed gym. I there with them for most of the day, and tried to reflect what it was like being at a rally with the president.
But there were protesters, and that cannot be ignored. I quoted one—exactly one—person with an anti-Trump message, compared to multiple quotes from the president and his supporters.
My brother, who’s as big a Trump fan as it gets, told me he thought it fairly reflected all sides, including the protesters. So accuse him of sibling bias if you like.
Journalists are accused of bias all the time—especially liberal bias from conservatives—and some of those criticisms are valid. But this cuts both ways.
There were some readers who didn’t like the fact that I reported there would be anti-Trump “No Kings” protests in East Cobb over the last year.
Others were liberals spitting nails when I covered a vigil at East Cobb Park after Charlie Kirk’s murder, and some of their comments were ever-gleeful in the wake of a horrifying political assassination.
They were as repulsive as anything I’ve seen in all my years in this unforgiving business. Some anti-Kirk readers even mobbed the comments section on the Facebook page of the EAST COBBER magazine, which simply reported about something happening in the community.
Since then, I’ve had to restrict comments on political stories, because of unhinged levels of profanity and abuse. This is what’s new in recent years.
I kept comments on for the Trump visit, holding my breath, and was relieved that most of you who left comments behaved well enough.
But after this past week, I will state here something I’ve understood for a good while now—accusations of media bias come from those who simply want their priors confirmed.
They’re the noisy, all-online people, losing their absolute minds on social media on a constant basis about nearly everything.
I see and read them all the time, and they’re relentless. They’re liberal and conservative, Democratic and Republican, anti-Trump and pro-Trump.
And they’re getting worse.
At the local level, they’re conservatives who blast Lisa Cupid and the Democrats on the Cobb Board of Commissioners, and liberals who seethe with disgust at Superintendent Chris Ragsdale and the Republicans on the Cobb Board of Education.
And they’re all getting worse.
(And if you were adding up the pro- and anti-Trump slants of the photos above—because some of you do—they were three and three, respectively, with the top photo a 50/50 montage.)
Most of the rest of us—the vast majority of the citizenry, in fact—are none of the above. Indeed, we’re not really all that political, even less so in these last few years.
There’s an adage that if you go looking for bias, you’re sure to find it, and this suits the Trump Age to a tee.
I launched East Cobb News nine years ago as a general interest news site, and while I cover a lot of politics, most of what seriously affects and interests people here is something else.
Consider this: A story I published on Thursday about a car crashing into an East Cobb Starbucks and injuring an employee got more clicks and comments from readers than the Trump rally story.
So a little perspective, please, as this long hot summer continues.
Get offline. Touch some grass. Reconnect with the real world.
And most of all, get the heck out of your suffocating political echo chambers.
Because that’s where the real bias exists, and it’s growing like a cancer. Including here in East Cobb.
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