Hey, that’s not what I said.

Tom Rosenstiel is out with an very smart piece explaining how journalists should — and should not — react after the election of Donald Trump upon a wave of resentment, including a lot of anger at the press.

What he has written has many virtues. It is calm. It is the voice of experience. (Rosenstiel is a journalist, a former political reporter, in fact, but also a student and maker of change in journalism, as executive director of American Press Institute.) His counsel is wise. And it is insightful about how much the world has changed for people in the press. The changes are, as he says, “structural.” They involve the environment into which journalism emerges. Thus: “It is no longer enough to simply gather and report good stories.” So true. I thought this part especially sharp:

Journalists need to understand the way that information flows. We need them to understand the information platforms that will carry their reports and the networks of people who will share that information. It is not enough to build the ships. We need to understand the ocean they will navigate. That is precisely what those who want to pass along propaganda and falsehood are doing. Uninterested in gathering facts, they have spent their time instead studying instead how information moves.

Exactly! The whole essay is thoughtful and worth your time. I urge you to read it. [Pause.]

Then there’s the part in which I figure. I have a complaint about that, and while I know it is a small matter (tiny, really) it still matters to me because what I said was misrepresented, first by Michael Oreskes, Senior Vice President of News at NPR, and then by Rosenstiel, relying on Oreskes.

The context: a campaign appearance by Trump at a Black church in Detroit. “The pastor called Trump on the carpet for attacking Hillary Clinton when he had promised not to be partisan. Trump later attacked the pastor and misstated key facts about what actually happened,” Oreskes wrote, citing this report by NPR’s Scott Detrow. Oreskes observes:

We should not be telling you how to think. We should give you the information to decide what you think. Scott did that and we are proud of him. Now a number of people have asked us why we didn’t call Trump a liar. A professor named Jay Rosen actually asked why we didn’t call Trump a “lying son of a b****.” Others, like Amy Bradley-Hole, a fashion editor and blogger, asked the question more calmly.

I didn’t do what Orsekes said, as I will show you in a minute. Tom Rosensteil, relying on Oreskes, put it this way:

That same week, NPR took fire for a story in which it said that Trump had misstated facts about a meeting in Detroit with a black pastor. New York University’s often emphatic professor Jay Rosen berated NPR for not calling Trump a “lying son of a b****.”

I didn’t do what Rosenstiel said, either. They’re both referring to a tweet I posted on Sep. 15. This is the tweet:

This is what NPR says instead of: “Trump, you are one lying son of a b—-.” https://t.co/VESR2LS4VJ — Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) September 15, 2016

I didn’t ask NPR why they refused to call Trump a lying son of a bitch, as Oreskes claimed. I didn’t berate NPR for not calling Trump a liar, as Rosenstiel claimed. I made a factual statement: This is how NPR talks. This is their voice. This is how they render it. And I explained it that way when people responded to me on Twitter:

@juniper9119 I don’t know that it would. But the phrasing and framing tells you something about NPR. — Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) September 15, 2016

Now I do think there’s a culture of timidity at NPR and I have said that many times. But I didn’t berate NPR for not calling Trump a lying son of a bitch, or ask why they declined that phrasing.

One more point and I will conclude my complaint about this exceedingly tiny matter. Oreskes didn’t quote me, link to the tweet he was referring to, or embed it. That matters because he was jamming me into a rhetorical space where the fit is not quite right, “pushing off” from my extreme claim to make room for himself in the reasonable center. Rosenstiel didn’t quote me, or link to the original, either. Not fair.

I am currently writing something in which I plan to point out that Sean Hannity has argued that the mainstream press corps should not be allowed to cover Trump until they admit they colluded with the Clinton campaign. There is no way I would include that bit of information without linking to where he said it. That should be standard practice. What Oreskes did is bad practice.

UPDATE: Oreskes apologized on Facebook for this, graciously adding that the focus should be on Rosenstiel’s essay and not this kerfuffle. “You are correct. I wrote more than the tweet said. I apologize. Moreover, I’d like to say I do not consider Jay Rosen extreme.” So: happy ending!