Donald Trump's campaign manager has reportedly been arrested and charged with battery for allegedly grabbing the arm of a reporter during a campaign event, raising the question of whether Trump's interviewers will ask him about the charges.
Then-Breitbart News reporter Michelle Fields alleged in a March 10 Breitbart.com piece that she was “grabbed” and “yanked” down while attempting to ask a question of Trump after his March 8 press conference. A reporter on the scene identified the alleged assailant as Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, a claim later confirmed by video of the incident but denied by both Trump and his aide. On March 11, Fields filed charges against Lewandowski. After her own outlet questioned whether Lewandowski had grabbed her, Fields resigned.
Journalists have harshly criticized Trump and Lewandowski over their treatment of Fields, yet in numerous on-air interviews with Trump, they've shied away from asking him about the alleged assault.
On the Sunday after the incident, Trump appeared on four of the Sunday morning political talk shows. But the anchors of NBC's Meet the Press, CNN's State of the Union, Fox News Sunday, and CBS' Face the Nation all failed to ask Trump about the alleged assault of a reporter by his campaign manager.
Huffington Post's Michael Calderone reported on March 17 that “Fields' charge hasn't come up once” in “more than a dozen TV interviews [with Trump] amounting to over two and a half hours of airtime” on ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, Fox News, MSNBC and CNN. It also went unmentioned during Trump's March 21 interview with the Washington Post editorial board.
Now that Lewandowski has been charged it is even more important that Trump's interlocutors ask him why he continues to employ the disgraced aide.
UPDATE: All three major cable news networks have the opportunity to ask about Lewandowski over the next two days. Trump is scheduled for an interview tonight on Fox News' Hannity, where the host is so well-known for giving conservatives a chance to clean up their political messes that he spawned the neologism “Hannitization” to describe such softball interviews. Trump is also scheduled tonight for a town hall on CNN anchored by Anderson Cooper, and a town hall tomorrow on MSNBC anchored by Chris Matthews.