I'm going to take you through some hypothetical situations in which imagine that the stories about the president were reported just factually. Just factually.

Take for example, let's go all the way back to the housing discrimination story from the '70s. Here's a factual way to report that. We don't know what President Trump, then citizen Trump, was thinking or whether he was involved in any of those decisions consciously. That's not in evidence. What we do know is that the Democrats he hired to do the work discriminated against black people. Now, were they Democrats? Well, probably. I don't know. The president himself was a Democrat then. So is there any evidence of the president being a racist after he became a Democrat? In other words, or after he became a Republican.

So during the time that the president was a Democrat there are some stories of him being a racist, but we don't have evidence of what he was thinking. We only have other people's interpretation of what that all meant. There's no evidence of what the president was thinking. There is only evidence that people who work for him, who were probably Democrats, were discriminating against black people. And that's bad.

All right, let's move forward in time. Let's take the president's announcement that he was running for president. If it were reported as just facts with no opinion phase, it might have looked something like this: The president announced that he's running for president. He says one of his signature issues is going to be immigration and he thinks that there are too many criminals coming in with the nice people and that we could do with less crime. We like nice people but there are too many criminals coming in with the nice people.

Would that be factual? I believe that would be a factual statement of what he said. The way it was reported is he doesn't like Mexicans. But that came from here. That wasn't the event. That wasn't in the event. So people think they formed an opinion about the event but they didn't really. They adopted the opinion that was assigned to them.

Let's take the Judge Curiel situation. Here's how it could have been reported if you just reported the facts, and it would look like this. In a legal context when you're talking about laws and lawsuits and the court, it's important that the judge and the jury not have bias. And lawyers go to great lengths to make sure the jurors they pick don't have bias. Likewise if it's a judge trial you want to make sure that the judge does not have any experience that would lend even the impression of bias. So it's not just that they have bias or don't. You don't ever want to be in a situation where there's even the impression that you do.

Now in this particular case, the Judge Curiel case, Judge Curiel has a Mexican heritage. And because of the way President Trump's immigration policy had been reported and because of the way they had assigned opinions to the public — and Judge Curiel is part of the public — is it worth noting that the judge is in the aggrieved class? In other words, is the judge part of the population that the news has told you should be disliking this president for racism? Well, he is.

Now that says nothing about Judge Curiel's qualifications as a judge. It does say that in this specific case there was something about the judge's situation, his Mexican heritage, which suggests that he would be in the class of people likely to have bias because that bias has been assigned to everyone in that class and he's in the class. Now that's the lone explanation, but the point is in the legal context it's normal, appropriate, and even advised — your lawyer will tell you to do it — to call out any trace of potential bias.

But even better than that, if you've done that and the judge does not recuse, you've created a situation that's very positive for the accused. And the positive situation is you've set up the judge to have to go out of his way to make sure that he's not looking biased. And sure enough, when a decision came up that was in this gray area where the judge could either have the trial before or after the election — and normal treating everybody the same, nobody's special under the law — if he had just treated it the normal way it would have been before the election, which would have been terrible for candidate Trump. But instead Judge Curiel ruled in this gray area in a way that was very favorable for the president.

Why did he do it? Well, we don't know what the judge was thinking. Maybe he would have done that anyway. But we do see that Trump's strategy of calling out the potential bias got him to a place where when the gray area happened, the judge was under the microscope and he went in the direction that was good for Trump.

So if you had reported this without the bias filter, it looks like somebody in a legal situation who handled it exactly the way you would handle it. You would handle it by calling out an actual or even potential bias because you're either going to get rid of that judge or you're going to cause that judge to bend over backwards to show they're not biased. And maybe that's what happened.

All right, let's take Charlottesville. Here would be a factual way that Charlottesville could have been reported. There was this horrible event. There were neo-Nazis or I guess white supremacists — I'm not sure what the difference is — white supremacists marching, saying anti-Semitic things, and somebody got killed by one of them. Terrible situation. That's awful.

The president, when talking about it — an event which was organized around people who wanted to keep statues, the Confederate statues, and people who didn't — the president said ambiguously there were fine people on both sides. Some people said, "Hey, are you trying to say that the neo-Nazis, the white supremacists, are fine people?" Well first of all that would be ridiculous because no president would do that. And if they were crazy enough to do it they would certainly stick with the story because crazy is crazy. I mean it's not the sort of thing you'd say once unless you were gonna stick with it. It's kind of a big commitment.

But when they asked him to clarify he said, "No, no, the white supremacists are bad. I condemn them." So there was some ambiguity in what he said and then he clarified it. And he clarified it to everybody's satisfaction because we're all on the same side that the white supremacists are to be condemned and the president did. We're all on the same side. So that's the way it could have been reported, but it wasn't.