Week of Nov. 21, 2024

From the editor’s desk

This week, I’ve been perusing Project 2025, the 900-page playbook by the Heritage Foundation and more than 100 conservative groups that outlines plans for the second Trump administration. (If you’re curious but don’t have time for a 900-page read, Amazon reviewers generally speak highly of the 100-page summary.)

One topic I wanted to get an overview of was the playbook’s takes on vaccines; I may mention them in the December cover story. A keyword search found 57 mentions, including one that really caught my eye. It was a call to re-onboard any Coast Guard personnel dismissed for having refused the COVID-19 “vaccine.” Yes, “vaccine” was in quotation marks.

But this is not about the possibility of implied vaccine denialism in Project 2025. This is a about the endless series of decisions that journalists make every day when choosing which words and which details to use. The notion of publishing “just the facts” sounds, on its surface, like a complete and tidy approach to writing news. But even the maybe-objective-sounding process of publishing the facts raises a list of questions—among them, which facts to include, how many, and how (and whether) to contextualize them.

One example of many: Any journalist striving to be as fair-minded as possible, when reporting a story with more than one side, still has to decide who gets the last word. Would it even be possible to make that choice in a way that implies zero editorial slant?

The fact that Project 2025 authors put “vaccine” in quotes is a fact. But they also mentioned vaccines 56 other times, not in quotes. While the playbook sends a clear message opposing vaccine mandates, it does not send a clear message denying that vaccines are real, so using “vaccines” would be some first-class cherrypicking. It’s not going in my article.

Well readers, I’m off to make a few thousand more decisions about word choice, which facts to present, and how much context to include, as we finish getting the December print edition to press.

Take care,

—Kris Vagner, managing editor