For news media, a raid is a raid until it involves Donald Trump

NEWS ANALYSIS:

For Donald Trump, there’s no doubt what the FBI was doing when agents made their foray into the former president’s home this week: It was a raid.

He said so in his social media posts. He said so in his fundraising emails.

Some major news organizations, however, have been reluctant to adopt his terminology and instead settled for more anodyne phrases such as “executed a search.”

MSNBC has been leading the pack, with several contributors and guests scolding those who use the term.

“I know Donald Trump is saying this is a raid, but that’s a gross exaggeration,” Dave Aronberg, who serves as state attorney in Palm Beach County, Florida, told the network. “Trump benefits from calling it a raid or a siege because he gets to be a MAGA martyr.”

Frank Figliuzzi, who served as an assistant director at the FBI, told MSNBC that “agents don’t like the word ‘raid.’”

“It sounds like it’s some sort of extrajudicial, non-legal thing,” he said.

Even as he was speaking, MSNBC changed the banner it was running underneath his image on the screen from “FBI raids Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home” to “FBI executes search warrant at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago.”

Yet MSNBC has labeled other search warrants as “raids,” and David M. Shapiro, a former FBI special agent who is now a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, said outlets use the term “raid” for a reason: It works.

“It’s commonly used, commonly accepted, because it conveys a lot of meaningful information,” he said.

He said a longer description also would capture the elements, such as saying authorities paid a surprise visit and forcibly entered a property and executed a search warrant, but “the word ‘raid’ captures all of the meaning together in an efficient way.”

“I think ‘raid’ is really common usage, and to stray from it leads me to believe there are political reasons to avoid calling it a raid,” he told The Washington Times.

FBI agents on Monday went to Mar-a-Lago, the former president’s private seaside club in Palm Beach, Florida, to serve a search warrant, reportedly to investigate whether Mr. Trump was holding classified information that the National Archives said should have been turned over when he left office.

Mr. Trump was not given advance notice. Agents were allowed access to the property by the Secret Service, which still protects the former president.

In the wake of the operation, a government official objected to the word “raid,” NBC’s Kelly O’Donnell said. The official said it was not appropriate in this context because they were “not breaking down doors here.”

Door-breaking is not a threshold for Merriam-Webster, which lists one definition of “raid” as a “sudden invasion by officers of the law.” Another definition is “a hostile or predatory incursion.”

Ken Cuccinelli, a former attorney general in Virginia and an acting deputy secretary in the Department of Homeland Security during the Trump administration, said it was correct to call the FBI’s operation a raid, particularly because agents moved on the former president even though his attorneys were negotiating the fate of the documents with federal officials.

Mr. Cuccinelli said news media struggles over terminology were part of a broader difficulty in covering Mr. Trump.

“It’s just part of the left-wing media effort to shade coverage,” he said. “A ‘raid’ sounds less legitimate than a ‘search.’ But ‘raid’ fits in the Trump case.”

MSNBC and Mr. Aronberg didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Neither did CNN, which also has grappled with deploying the word. It has been shy about calling the FBI’s Trump operation a raid. Instead, it has used “FBI search” in headlines.

Two years ago, the network used the term “raid” to describe another search warrant served in Florida when police showed up at the home of Rebekah Jones, a state health department researcher who was battling Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, over the COVID-19 pandemic.

Indeed, it’s common for media outlets to describe search warrants as raids as long as the element of surprise is part of the service.

Media organizations also have struggled with the term “raids” in the context of illegal immigration. They have slapped the label on U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s at-large operations to find and arrest potential deportees.

During one 2019 call hosted by ICE, a CNN reporter asked acting Director Matt Albence about “routine raids” to arrest illegal immigrant families.

Mr. Albence chewed out reporters for using the term. He said ICE goes after specific targets and doesn’t indiscriminately sweep through communities.

“Calling these raids does a disservice to everybody that’s involved in this process,” he said.

His plea did not sway his audience. Most major news organizations continue to use “raid” to describe ICE’s operations.

Mr. Shapiro said both the FBI’s Trump operation and the ICE operations can rightly be called raids.

“They have the same basic elements: that is the use of legal force by the state, the forcible entry, the hostile action and the surprise nature of it, and the search for illegality,” he said.