Sarah Wasko / Media Matters
In recent days, the American public has been deluged with stories about President Donald Trump. Cable news has given these stories nearly wall-to-wall coverage at the expense of reporting on other important news, including the recent shooting at a Santa Fe, TX, high school.
Donald Trump Jr. met with an emissary for Persian Gulf princes during the election, Trump is reportedly refusing strengthened security on his phone, he’s meeting with South Korean President Moon Jae-in in the run-up to a planned but uncertain North Korea summit, and, perhaps most pressingly, he issued a “demand” via Twitter commanding the Department of Justice to “look into whether or not the FBI/DOJ infiltrated or surveilled the Trump Campaign for Political Purposes.”
Cable news is obsessed with these events. At nearly any point in recent days, one could flip to CNN, MSNBC, or Fox News and immediately hear discussion on Trump’s unconventional decision to demand a DOJ investigation via Twitter; a conversation on the likelihood that there was a “spy” in the Trump campaign; or even a diatribe on the “nefarious deeds” of the FBI (on Fox at least). And while these are undoubtedly important issues to report on to some degree, the coverage in actuality has been constant, speculative, and redundant. As cable news continues to focus on Trump-related sagas, other stories aren’t always breaking through, to the detriment of viewers who are missing out on other equally important news -- most pressingly, that of the May 18 shooting at Santa Fe High School, which is quickly fading from cable news.
The May 18 school shooting left 10 people dead and 10 more wounded, many of them students. The suspected shooter reportedly killed one female student after she had “4 months of problems from this boy” and “repeatedly” turned down his romantic advances. This behavior fits into a pattern of entitled, misogynistic, and rageful men responding with violence to women’s rejections, and it absolutely warrants attention.
The attack was the 22nd school shooting in the United States this year and the 288th since 2009, a number that no other major industrialized nation even comes close to meeting. It serves as yet another reminder that the U.S. consistently fails to keep its children safe and refuses to institute commonsense gun safety laws that would help prevent these tragedies.
Despite the supremely disturbing nature of the shooting and the sickness it reveals in American society, coverage has started to dwindle just a few days after the massacre, fading from the news much quicker than the shooting at a Parkland, FL, high school in February did. While the disparity might be mostly due to the Parkland students’ advocacy, the diminished coverage about Santa Fe allows the massacre to retreat from America’s consciousness, even while the same thing will inevitably happen again elsewhere.
Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time that the media’s single-minded focus on Trump has left other important stories undercovered. Just last week, media outlets all but ignored a pivotal vote on net neutrality, choosing to prioritize Trump-related stories.
The president’s insistence on making unsubstantiated claims about spies and his readiness to issue presidential orders over social media are both noteworthy and significant. The media has an obligation to report on the activities of the president and to resist normalizing what is at best unconventional -- and at worst highly corrupt -- behavior. However, in an ever-dramatic presidency, news organizations must not lose sight of other pivotal stories in order to offer constant attention to the histrionics of a media-obsessed leader.