On MSNBC, Angelo Carusone explains why national TV news cannot allow live coverage of Trump to turn into “narrative dominance”
Carusone: “The biggest lesson is you cannot allow him to have narrative dominance, to have these moments sort of short circuit not just a few hours, but for days of coverage.”
Published
Citation
From the August 11, 2024, edition of MSNBC's The Sunday Show With Jonathan Capehart
JONATHAN CAPEHART (HOST): Donald Trump's disgrace of a press conference on Thursday may have given you a sense of déjà vu or dredged up repressed memories of his first presidential campaign. The major news networks ran the former president's unhinged musings from his Mar-a-Lago home for an hour, and most of the reporters in the gilded venue left the myriad lies he told unchecked and unchallenged. My colleague Lawrence O'Donnell was correct when he described the entire charade as 2016 all over again.
...
Joining me now is Angelo Carusone, President and CEO of Media Matters. Thank you for coming to The Sunday Show. So let's just get right to it. What lessons should the media take, from how Trump was covered in 2016?
ANGELO CARUSONE (MEDIA MATTERS PRESIDENT): I think they've set the bar a little low. Their point is now, “As long as we're not covering empty podiums, somehow we're doing a better job and we've learned our lessons.” But that's not true, I mean because what happened -- and you sort of talked about it -- is they still cover this press conference without a lot of context. They didn't do the kind of fact checking. So the first thing is they probably didn't need to. You can report on things newsworthy. You don't have to be live. And so, I think the damage there is that they hyped it, and that's the real challenge here. So one lesson is not just catering to him -- I think they sort of had half a grade here. They didn't give him narrative dominance, and that's the biggest lesson is you cannot allow him to have narrative dominance, to have these moments sort of short circuit not just a few hours, but for days of coverage. So that's why I say it's half bad at the conference. They did a lot leading up to it, they overhyped it, they gave him a lot of runway to spread lies, but they didn't do the narrative dominance thing that they normally do, so at least that's something. But the bar is really low.
CAPEHART: One of the things that was said was well, why didn't networks have a scroll, a crawl at the bottom where you fact check him or put stuff -- At this point, when the guy is doing 162 lies and distortions, that's a lot of lying to do all of that. Is that realistic?
CARUSONE: It's not realistic and it's not sufficient and it's not adequate. If someone is that disreputable that you have to literally rework what the entire screen looks like, and your operation, in order just to manage it day-to-day, then you actually need to go back to the drawing board when you think about how to cover it. And the only way to do that is not give him the live coverage he so demands.
CAPEHART: What about the contention that well, Vice President Harris' rallies have been shown live, and that he needed equal time? And so, let's put him on for an hour.
CARUSONE: Yeah, I've studied this quite a bit.
CAPEHART: Is there something to that?
CARUSONE: There would be, to a certain point. I think that if they were doing this for weeks or months and just covering Harris' campaign rallies live, door-to-door, that would be an imbalance and unfair, but that's really not what the story is here. What they're really covering with these rallies is the enthusiasm, is the massive shift that has happened. There was months of coverage talking about how unhappy, unsatisfied, unengaged Democrat's were, and this is a massive narrative shift, and it's also seismic. This is a major historic moment that's a few days of coverage, a week of so they're covering the rallies because the crowd size is extremely notable and significant.
If they are doing this weeks in the future, yeah then there would be an imbalance and you'd have to balance out those scales, but Trump has gotten plenty of free coverage. I don't think one or two weeks of covering rally sizes is going to offset that.
CAPEHART: One of the things that Lawrence pointed out, and he showed it. The treatment of Trump at Mar-a-Lago by many of the members of the press there, and the treatment, for instance, of President Biden when he gave remarks at a press conference or the treatment of the press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, and the yelling and things, at both of them. Why don't you think -- why do you think the press -- why is the press so deferential?
CARUSONE: I think they've internalized fear, that somehow they will be retaliated against, or they will lose access, or they will lose something that's important to their jobs, which is to get information and to get access, and I think it part of it also -- to close the loop -- is the reason they hype these press conferences is because they want it to be 2016 all over again. They want that engagement, they want people to think the trainwreck is going to happen, they want to get people's attention. That's what the news industry is, to some extent, is attention. So I think a lot of it is fear. They don't want to be retaliated against, they don't want to lose that potential connection of access.
CAPEHART: And in the thirty seconds that we have left, what do you make of this contention that Vice President Harris must sit for the press immediately?
CARUSONE: This is bias, this is the biggest one and here's why. You have to compare apples to apples. In the two weeks after Donald Trump became the presumptive nominee, he only went to Fox News. He did not do a real news interview. He hasn't done a real news interview in months. They weren't -- no body was clamoring for Trump to sit down with a major news network.
So, two weeks out, that's just not fair. There's a lot of other stuff going on, and you have to have some strategy here. They're controlling the comms. But she has already acknowledged that she is going to do a sit down interview, and she will. So this is a made-up story that they are doing to try to pressure it sooner, but it's a perfect example of media bias. Trump has certainly not given them more access.