American Crisis – “The moment I saw Trump’s crazy and dangerous Truth Social post on the morning of Easter Sunday, I could imagine the freakout in newsrooms across the country. The essence of it would be something like this: “How much of this do we publish? How do we report this without breaking with every one of our standards and traditions?”…Based on my survey of regional-newspaper front pages on Monday morning, very few came anywhere near rising to the occasion. Many chose not to feature the story at all on their A1, or to give it much emphasis. The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Los Angeles Times did relatively well, leading their front pages with it. Both used Trump’s full language high up in their front-page story. There’s been a lot of talk — including here — about the media’s disastrous tendency to “sane-wash” Trump. It comes down to this: The press, because of its own conventions and time-honored practices, normalizes him, and thus fails to get across the extreme nature of this president’s behavior. Ten years of sane-washing have had their effect. He remains in power, reelected, undeterred. On seeing Trump’s post, I thought immediately of Mark Jacob’s October piece about how the media is missing the biggest story there is — Trump’s apparent mental illness. Jacob, a former Chicago Tribune editor, wrote: “It keeps getting worse, and the mainstream media keep making the same mistakes in their coverage of the King of Crazytown.” After Trump claimed he “predicted” 9/11, Jacob wrote on Bluesky that “the media need to be writing about his mental unfitness every day until we get rid of him and save our country.” But of course, that didn’t happen then, and it didn’t happen this time. And now, with this horrible Easter morning development, we’ve entered new territory. But let’s get real. If traditional techniques and language (“emphatic threats”) aren’t getting it done, what actually would work? I’ll make three suggestions, and would be happy to hear yours…”