Nowadays, corporate media would have you believe they are appalled by Donald Trump: He’s a liar and a cheat who distorted our democracy and was rotten to the press. I mean, they had to cover him because he was president, but they held their nose the whole time, and now they can’t wait to get back to serious reporting on policy.
CNN (3/16/16) shows Trump’s empty podium.
The only trouble is, if you have a memory longer than a minute, you’ll recall that CBS head Les Moonves (Extra!, 4/16) declared flatly that the ad money and ratings Trump brought the network mattered much more than any harm giving him a platform might incur. “It’s a terrible thing to say. But bring it on, Donald. Keep going.” Or maybe you remember the time that CNN, Fox and MSNBC (FAIR.org, 3/16/16) all aired an empty podium where Trump was scheduled to speak instead of Bernie Sanders actually speaking.
Or maybe you’re just paying attention. As Press Run critic Eric Boehlert (2/22/21) noted recently, just a month into Joe Biden’s term, CNN has unceremoniously stopped airing daily White House press briefings. They didn’t cover Barack Obama’s much; in the last six months of his presidency, just 3% of daily briefings aired live (Media Matters, 5/30/17). But in early 2017, the DC press corps collectively decided that every Trump utterance had to be broadcast live, even if the briefings were “built on deceits [and] designed to foil honest inquiries,” as Boehlert said. Even if he was telling folks to inject themselves with bleach or accusing hospital workers of stealing PPE.
After one freakish display, CNN anchor John King (4/13/20) declared, “That was propaganda aired at taxpayer expense in the White House briefing room.” But the network just kept on airing them.
So the upshot: Obama briefings? Not news. Trump briefings? Always news. Biden briefings? Not news again.
Whatever you make of the fact that a news network’s rule of “Everybody stop what you’re doing, the White House is about to make a statement!” only seemed to hold when they could expect that statement to be akin to a flaming car wreck…just remember that those are the “journalistic” criteria they’re working with all the time.
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Featured image: Trump spokesperson Sean Spicer and Biden spokesperson Jen Psaki.
CNN Email: I am writing to voice my concern about CNN’s duplicitous covering of presidential press conferences. Janine Jackson at Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting writes about that coverage: “Obama briefings? Not news.Trump briefings? Always news.Biden briefings? Not news again.” Jackson says they have taken that form not for their news value, but because of the train wreck that is anything Trump, good for rating, thus advertising. Propaganda as Edward Bernays had it. Jackson writes these are the substantive journalistic criteria you exercise. Don’t you owe it to your viewers and your responsibilities in the Fourth Estate, to improve your standards?
Guilty! I watched the first Psaki news conference and haven’t gone back for even a minute. When she was spouting off as a CNN regular, she had answers to everything. In that press conference, she seemed to be totally surprised at all the questions. I don’t blame the networks for not covering them. Summaries by the neoliberal pundits on CNN are easier to take but a waste of time, too because garbage from the White House in, garbage from the pundits, out. Tv news is comparable to those kitchen battles on the food channel–great for naps.