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    Trump calls for ‘termination’ of 60 Minutes in fresh attack on US media

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    Donald Trump has called for the “termination” of 60 Minutes, a long-established fixture of US journalism, in a fresh onslaught against the media that also included baseless claims that money from the country’s beleaguered foreign aid body had been illicitly funding news organisations.The demand that 60 Minutes be taken off the air came in a post on Trump’s Truth Social platform. It was the latest salvo in his long-running dispute with the CBS program over its editing of an interview with Kamala Harris, last year’s defeated Democratic presidential candidate, over which Trump has lodged a $10m suit alleging “election interference”.“CBS should lose its license, and the cheaters at 60 Minutes should all be thrown out, and this disreputable ‘NEWS’ show should be immediately terminated,” Trump wrote, alleging that the program and the network had “defrauded the public” to an extent “never seen before.”The diatribe followed 60 Minutes’ release of an unedited transcript of Harris’s interview to the Federal Communications Committee in an effort to parry Trump’s accusations. The transcript was also posted on its website.“[The transcripts] show – consistent with 60 Minutes’ repeated assurances to the public – that the 60 Minutes broadcast was not doctored or deceitful,” read an accompanying note on the site.The original controversy arose after the transmitted interview featured a different segment of Harris’s answer to a question about Israel from the version screened as a trailer. Trump’s supporters claimed that the final version was more polished than the original, which was mocked as a “word salad”. Trump followed up by accusing the show of editing Harris’s answer to portray her in a more positive light, thus boosting her election chances.Employees of 60 Minutes have denied claims of bias and say such edits are standard practice. However, CBS’s owner, Paramount Global – which is currently seeking an $8bn merger with Skydance Media – has opened negotiations with Trump’s lawyers over the $10m lawsuit amid reports of pressure from the newly appointed FCC chair, Brendan Carr.In an interview with Fox News, Carr said he shared Trump’s opinion about the 60 Minutes interview with Harris.“This is a rare situation where we have extrinsic evidence that CBS had played one answer or one set of words and then swapped in another set. And CBS’s conduct through this, frankly, has been concerning,” he said.Trump – who frequently branded journalists “the enemy of the people” in his first term – broadened Thursday’s attack to other outlets by amplifying false claims that USAid, the currently shuttered foreign assistance agency, had been funding Politico and other news outlets to the tune of $8m.“With the new Democrat scandal that just arose with respect to USAID illegally paying large sums of money to Politico and other media outlets, the question must be asked, was CBS paid for committing this FRAUD?” he wrote.The accusation – denied by Politico and subsequently debunked – was first made by Trump-supporting social media influencers , who tried to establish a link between a glitch that caused a payment delay to Politico staff and the freezing of USAid’s funding by Elon Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge), whose agents have accessed the federal government’s payments system.It was later repeated by the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt.In fact, payments to Politico’s subscriptions services have been made throughout the vast government bureaucracy – including from staff of Republican members of Congress, the Washington Post reported. Politico said in a statement that just two separate subscription payments totalling less than $43,000 came from subdivisions within USAid in 2023 and 2024.In a statement to staff, Politico’s chief executive officer, Goli Sheikholeslami, and editor-in-chief, John Harris, wrote that the site “has never been a beneficiary of government programs or subsidies – not one cent, ever, in 18 years”. More

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      MSNBC faces uncertain future amid Comcast sale and Trump election win

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      For years, the cable news channel MSNBC has been a reliable liberal voice in the US media landscape, but amid the return of Donald Trump to the White House and its own business upheavals the network is now in crisis.The world’s richest man, and close Trump ally, Elon Musk has even – possibly jokingly – repeatedly publicly touted the idea of buying MSNBC after the parent company of the channel, Comcast, recently revealed that it would spin off the cable news network.Audience fatigue with Trump’s re-election and high-profile MSNBC hosts’ potential missteps in reaction to that event could make it difficult for the new company to boost the channel’s ratings, which were already declining before the election, and continue providing a leftwing perspective on global events, US media analysts told the Guardian.The negative reports about the channel over the last month are just the latest examples of an established US media company struggling to find its footing as people continue to drop cable television packages and instead use streaming services.But the particularly sharp recent ratings decline and reports of Musk perhaps buying the network could make it especially difficult for high-profile programming such as Morning Joe and The Rachel Maddow Show to continue providing a progressive alternative to Fox News, the analysts say.During Trump’s first term, “MSNBC really stood as a center for resisting and critiquing Trump,” said Kathryn Cramer Brownell, associate professor of history at Purdue University and author of 24/7 Politics: Cable Television and the Fragmenting of America from Watergate to Fox News.“It remains to be seen if they are able to forge an identity and a political viewership in opposition to Trump or not,” she added.In 2016, an average of 4.2 million people tuned into CNN, Fox News and MSNBC, according to the Pew Research Center. In 2022, that number decreased to 3.8 million.MSNBC briefly saw a significant ratings increase during the 2020 tumult of the Covid-19 pandemic, Black Lives Matter protests and presidential election, but they later again declined.In October, the Comcast president said the company was considering spinning off its cable networks, including CNBC and MSNBC into a separate company. Then last week, the company made an official announcement.Since election day, MSNBC has averaged about 521,000 viewers each day, a 38% decrease from its 2024 average before 5 November, according to data from Nielsen.Then Morning Joe hosts Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough visited Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort to speak with him about “abortion, mass deportation” and his threats of “retribution against political opponents and media outlets”, Scarborough said on air about the meeting.“We didn’t see eye-to-eye on a lot of issues, and we told him so,” Scarborough said, but they agreed to continue a dialogue.Afterwards, the hosts faced a significant backlash and ratings decrease.“They made a fundamental business error,” Jeff Jarvis, a journalism professor and author, said. “There is now a large new ecosystem of independent media, and people left the Washington Post and they are leaving MSNBC, and that worries me.”Brownell said she was not surprised by the morning show hosts meeting with the president-elect.“Media businesses frequently rely on cultivating relationships with political leaders and presidential administrations. It’s part of how they remain relevant,” she said. “But you can see the backlash with a show that kind of leans left and relies on those critics of Trump as their audience members.”The future of such shows is also uncertain because of Comcast’s decision to spin off the cable news networks along with channels such E!, USA and the Golf Channel into a separate company.“When you look at our assets, talented management team and balance-sheet strength, we are able to set these businesses up for future growth,” said Brian L Roberts, chairman and CEO of Comcast.After the announcement, Donald Trump Jr, joked on X that Musk should buy MSNBC, to which Musk replied: “How much does it cost?”A spinoff does not mean the company is for sale. Musk, who owns X, was one of Trump’s biggest backers this election and is now reportedly part of his inner circle, had previously described MSNBC as the “utter scum of the Earth”.CNN reported that billionaires with “liberal bona fides” have also expressed interest in buying MSNBC.“I fear that [Musk] could try to buy MSNBC, and I fear that Comcast could be immoral enough to sell it to him,” Jarvis said.Even if one of the liberal billionaires buys the network, its ability to be profitable in the long-term while providing left-leaning news and commentary is uncertain as people stop subscribing to cable.But after the 2016 election and the victor’s constant attacks on the media, many news organizations, including MSNBC, got a so-called “Trump bump”.Could that happen again once he takes office?“If there is a Trump bump, I suspect it will be delayed,” said Marty Kaplan, who holds the Norman Lear Chair in entertainment, media and society at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. “It may take a few beats for doomscrollers to get past the nausea. On the other hand, a media fast may be a popular new year’s resolution.”Even if the cord-cutting and recent events do lead to MSNBC’s demise, Brownell said she sees podcasts doing great journalism and thinks “the diversifying media landscape opens up a lot of possibilities”.“The challenge is the economic issue. How do you fund and sustain some of these other alternative journalistic projects?” she said. “You can have nonprofit organizations step in, foundations. It’s an opportunity to be creative … [and rethink] economic approaches to funding really good and hard-hitting and necessary journalism.” More

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      Fox News’s interview of Kamala Harris was grievance theater, not political journalism | Margaret Sullivan

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      Bret Baier started off his Wednesday evening interview with Kamala Harris with a barrage of combative questions about immigration, designed less to elicit substantive answers than to prove what a tough guy the Fox host could be.His aggressive approach was understandable, in a way, since Baier had been under pressure for days from the Donald Trump faithful; they were convinced he was going to go easy on the Democratic nominee for president, and maybe even allow her campaign to edit the interview or see the questions in advance.So, Baier came out guns blazing, barely allowing the vice-president to finish a sentence before jumping in with objections and arguments.After 10 minutes of playing immigration “gotcha”, Baier pivoted to the obvious next subject, airing a video clip in which Harris expressed support for transgender people in prisons.Immigrant hatred. Transphobia. And later, Joe Biden’s age. Baier was running through the Fox News greatest hits playlist.This was grievance theater, not political journalism.But Harris got in her licks. She had her moments.Chiming in afterwards in what some saw as corporate damage control, Baier’s colleagues on Fox News gushed their approval. Martha MacCallum termed Baier’s performance “masterful”, while Dana Perino analyzed the interview as “super good”.I can’t imagine that too many viewers agreed. If they came to it expecting to learn more about Harris’s policies or get a true sense of her character, they would have been disappointed. That wasn’t the gameplan, and it wasn’t the result.But Harris accomplished something anyway.Merely by sitting down with a Fox host, she made a few statements.First, that she is unafraid and is willing to speak to all voters. It’s hard to imagine Donald Trump, these days, submitting to an interview with, say, Rachel Maddow of MSNBC; just this week, he turned away from a CNBC interview, and earlier canceled a CBS News 60 Minutes agreement.Second, Harris did manage to introduce a few snippets of reality to dedicated Fox viewers who probably haven’t been exposed to some of the most troubling criticisms of Trump.“That he’s unfit to serve. That he’s unstable. That’s he’s dangerous,” was how she characterized what millions of Americans are feeling. “And that people are exhausted.”She even was able to mention, at some length, the harsh view of the former commander-in-chief from Mark Milley, who served in two top military roles – including chair of the joint chiefs of staff – during the Trump administration.Milley has called Trump “fascist to the core” and has said that no one has ever been as dangerous to the United States.So maybe this was what one leading expert on Fox News, Brian Stelter, called the Harris campaign’s “Google strategy”. On CNN, Stelter speculated that viewers might hear these comments and go searching online for more, thus piercing the information bubble they’ve been living in.No doubt, the vast majority of regular Fox viewers have their minds made up – they’re sticking with Trump. No matter his mental decline. No matter his felony convictions. No matter the threats he makes or the threats he poses.But there may be a small percentage of the millions who tuned in who – despite all the noise and interruptions – managed to hear a reasonable, intelligent and stable alternative to Trump. Maybe some of them live in the key swing state of Pennsylvania, where the interview was recorded, or in Wisconsin or Michigan.In this coin flip of an election, even that tiny adjustment might make all the difference.

      Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture More

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      in US Politics

      The Kamala Harris campaign has Fox News grasping at straws – literally | Margaret Sullivan

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      Watching Fox News these days is like being at open-mic night at a marginal comedy club.Rightwing pundits, like a lineup of amateur comics, are trying out their new material and hoping it kills. So far, not so much.Take Jesse Watters (please). The primetime successor to Tucker Carlson was grasping at straws – yes, literal straws – the other day as he looked for a way to put down Tim Walz. How best to mock the popular Minnesota governor who is Kamala Harris’s running mate?“Women love masculinity and women do not like Tim Walz, so that should just tell you about how masculine Tim Walz is,” Watters said on the roundtable talk show he co-hosts, The Five.With that setup, he tried to prove his point.“The other day you saw him with a vanilla ice-cream shake. Had a straw in it. Again, that tells you everything.”The joke, or whatever it was, didn’t really land. Most people know that Walz is the opposite of a wimp. He’s a famously regular guy – America’s dad – who will use his newfound power to demand that all Americans own jumper cables and know how to use them.The straw-grasping is getting a little desperate these days as Harris and Walz spread their forward-looking message, and as their rivals – the felon and adjudicated sex offender Donald Trump and his running mate, JD Vance – prove themselves less appealing by the day.“Fox is really feeling the loss of Tucker Carlson right now,” theorized Matt Gertz, a senior fellow at Media Matters, the progressive media-watchdog non-profit, who watches a lot of rightwing cable news as part of his job.“He was very effective at lifting something from the rightwing fever swamp and making it into a coherent message” that could spread through the conservative ecosystem.Failing Tucker’s contributions to the commonweal, Fox and its pundits are floundering. They keep trying new approaches to replace their well-honed attacks on Biden – his family’s supposed corruption (“Biden crime family”) and his age (“senile”).Over the past week, Fox tried to gin up controversy over Harris’s “code-switching” – the use of a different accent or speaking style when speaking to Black audiences. Fox’s White House correspondent Peter Doocy pressed the question at an official press briefing.“Since when does the vice-president have what sounds like a southern accent?” Doocy demanded. The press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, dismissed him and moved on after posing a query of her own: “Do you think Americans seriously think this is an important question?”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMaria Bartiromo focused on this “southern accent” scandal on her Fox Business show, using a clip of Harris speaking to an audience in Detroit about how unions have helped win benefits for all Americans, like paid sick leave and a five-day work week, by repeating the phrase: “You’d better thank a union member.”The pro-Trump cable network didn’t help its own cause with that one. “The funny thing about Fox News being mad at Harris for code-switching,” one observer noted on X, “is they had to play the clip of her talking about how great unions are over and over again.” You can’t buy that kind of media exposure.The well-circulated photograph of Tim Walz’s family members wearing pro-Trump T-shirts fizzled, too, though it got a good ride on Fox for a day or two. Soon enough, it became clear that these were mostly distant cousins, a Nebraska branch of the family. Walz’s sister told the Associated Press she didn’t even recognize them. Walz does have an older brother who favors Trump, but most Americans are familiar with family disputes over politics.Gertz told me that Fox pundits were sent reeling by Harris’s ascension and are “very shook by the ‘weird’ narrative” that Tim Walz has popularized. That’s the idea that Trump, Vance and their ilk are deeply strange people – way out of the mainstream with their nasty putdowns of “childless cat ladies” and their outlandish conspiracy theories. It applies all too well to the Fox personalities as well as the politicians they promote.There’s time, of course, for Fox to come up with an effective message. Until something hits, we’re going to see a lot of painful tryouts.The alternative, of course, is obvious: just don’t turn it on.

      Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture More

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      in Elections

      Voting equipment company Smartmatic settles defamation lawsuit with far-right network

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      The voting equipment company Smartmatic has agreed to settle a defamation lawsuit with the far-right One America News Network (OAN) over lies broadcast on the network about the 2020 election.Erik Connolly, a lawyer for Smartmatic, confirmed the case had been settled, but said the details were confidential. Attorneys for Smartmatic and OAN notified a federal judge in Washington on Tuesday that they were agreeing to dismiss the case, which Smartmatic filed in 2021.Smartmatic sued OAN in November 2021, saying the relatively small company was a victim of OAN’s “decision to increase its viewership and influence by spreading disinformation”. Smartmatic was only involved in the 2020 election in a single US county, Los Angeles, but OAN repeatedly broadcast false claims that its equipment had flipped the election for Biden. Trump allies Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell played a key role in advancing the outlandish claims.Defamation cases are difficult to win in the US, with plaintiffs having to clear a high bar of showing that defendants knew the information was false and published it anyway. The settlement comes months after OAN lawyers apparently accidentally turned over documents showing that the network had obtained a spreadsheet with Smartmatic employees’ passwords. It’s not clear if the passwords were authentic, but Smartmatic lawyers said in court filings that the network may have committed a crime.The settlement also means that internal documents from OAN showing how the network weighed and evaluated claims about the 2020 election will not become public. Before the voting equipment company Dominion reached a $787.5m settlement with Fox last year, those kinds of internal documents offered smoking gun evidence that key personnel at Fox knew election claims were false.The settlement is the latest development in a series of defamation cases that have sought to hold media outlets accountable for spreading false information about the 2020 election. In 2022, OAN settled a defamation case brought by Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, two Atlanta election workers it falsely claimed were involved in stealing the election. The network issued an on-air report saying there was “no widespread voter fraud” by Georgia election officials and clarifying that Freeman and Moss “did not engage in ballot fraud or criminal misconduct”.Smartmatic still has a pending $2.7bn defamation lawsuit against Fox.Earlier this month, a Delaware judge set a September trial date for Smartmatic’s defamation case against Newsmax. Both Smartmatic and Dominion also have ongoing defamation cases against Powell, Giuliani and Mike Lindell.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionLegal scholars are carefully watching the cases to see whether defamation law can be an effective tool in curbing misinformation. More

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      in US Politics

      ‘Political germ warfare’: rightwing media fervently defend Trump

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      After he was indicted for the third time, Donald Trump reacted with his now-standard, twin-pronged approach: first, expressing outrage and denying the charges, and second, asking his many loyal supporters for money.But the former US president, who faces four charges over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, also found defenders among rightwing media in America which has often fervently defended him, sometimes flying in the face of reality to do so.In the minutes after the Trump indictment was filed in federal district court in Washington, conservative commentators rapidly scrambled to his defense. Rightwing pundits lined up to compare the charges to “criminalizing thoughts” and the dropping of “fifteen dozen” atomic bombs – and that was just on Fox News.Rightwing TV channel Newsmax, which has drained some of Fox News’s audience in recent months, brought on Rudy Giuliani, an unnamed co-conspirator in Tuesday’s indictment, who railed for seven minutes about Hillary Clinton’s emails and Biden being a “crooked president”.In America’s rightwing media ecosystem it was a largely united front. News outlets repeatedly pressed the idea that Trump’s free speech was being criminalized: that the former president had done nothing more than talk about the election being stolen.The effort, perhaps deliberately, ignored prosecutors’ allegations that Trump had convened false slates of electors and attempted to block the certification of the election on January 6.“This is like lawfare, they call it,” Jesse Watters, Fox News’s newly-installed prime-time host, railed in the moments after the indictment was announced. “Legal warfare. If this was political, this would be, like, a political war crime. This is overkill. This is political germ warfare. These are political war crimes. It’s an atrocity. It’s, like, not just dropping one atomic bomb, you drop 15 dozen.”Those claims were made on Fox News’s The Five show, which Watters co-hosts. By the time he got to his 8pm show, he hadn’t calmed down.Watters assembled a panel of experts, which included Alina Habba, a former Trump attorney who now works for Trump’s political action committee and Lara Trump, Trump’s daughter-in-law.In the wake of the 2020 election Trump “did exactly what you would want a president to do”, Lara Trump said.“He upheld and defended the constitution of the United States by trying to ensure that we indeed had a free and fair election. That was his whole goal, that’s what he wanted to ensure was going on,” she said.“[And] what about his first amendment freedom of speech.”Sean Hannity, a friend of Trump who was disciplined by Fox News in 2018 for appearing on stage at a Trump campaign rally, brought John Lauro, a Trump attorney, on to his 9pm show.“This is the first time, in the history of the United States, that the Justice Department has weaponized and politicized political speech,” Lauro claimed.Newsmax, meanwhile, went where Fox News – the channel recently settled a lawsuit after repeating the kind of claims that Giuliani lobs out incessantly – apparently feared to tread. The right-wing channel hauled on an emotional Giuliani, who referenced his own book as he criticized Jack Smith, the special counsel who brought the indictment.“You don’t get to violate people’s first amendment rights, Smith,” Giuliani said. “No matter who the hell you are, no matter how sick you are with Trump derangement syndrome.”There were some calmer voices of dissent in conservative media. One anyway: the Wall Street Journal.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn an op-ed the editorial board of the Journal, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch, criticized Trump’s behavior in the aftermath of the 2020 election, but worried that the indictment “potentially criminalizes many kinds of actions and statements by a president”.“You don’t have to be a defender of Donald Trump to worry about where this will lead,” the editorial board wrote.“It makes any future election challenges, however valid, legally vulnerable to a partisan prosecutor.”Away from the non-rightwing media, the interpretation was largely covered in a sober fashion in the US. The mainstream newspapers New York Times and the Washington Post stuck to a undramatic descriptions of the charges, while ABC News reported on the “sweeping indictment” Trump faces – noting it was his third in the last four months.None of that mattered among conservatives.One America News Network pivoted to Hunter Biden – always a source of interest among right-wing news – with an OANN correspondent pushing an emerging conspiracy theory that the Trump indictment was timed to coincide with Biden Jr’s tax charges trial.Elsewhere, a senior editor of the Blaze website suggested that the Republican-led House should force a government shutdown – which could see about 800,000 federal employees furloughed or forced to work without pay – in the hope that the case against Trump would collapse.Perhaps the most berserk take, however, was the one pushed by Trump’s own campaign.“The lawlessness of these persecutions of President Trump and his supporters is reminiscent of Nazi Germany in the 1930s, the former Soviet Union, and other authoritarian, dictatorial regimes,” the campaign posted to Truth Social.On a day when the rightwing media seemed willing to do and say anything to defend their man, none of them was willing to go as far as that. More

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      Geraldo Rivera quits Fox News after being fired from panel show The Five

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      Fox News mainstay Geraldo Rivera has parted ways with the network as staffing shake-ups at the conservative institution continue.Rivera first shared word of his departure from the channel on Thursday, posting a video on Twitter showing him on a boat off the coast of Long Island while saying that he had been dismissed from a panel show which Fox airs weekdays at 5pm ET.“I’ve been fired from The Five, and as a result of that I quit Fox,” Rivera said in the video.When asked for comment on Rivera’s remarks, a Fox spokesperson provided a statement which said that the network had “reached an amicable conclusion with Geraldo over the past few weeks”. The statement, written on Thursday, added that Rivera’s appearance on the Friday morning edition of the Fox & Friends show would be his last appearance on the channel. Rivera notably joined the show a few months after the September 11 terrorist attacks in 2001.Rivera, 79, was magnanimous when he appeared on Fox & Friends for his farewell segment on Friday, saying: “I’m deeply touched – I’m honored.“I love Fox, I love the people at Fox, I always will,” Rivera said. “I’ll never let anyone separate us, but I am beyond grateful for this. This is so deeply affecting. I love you for it – thank you.”Fox has not said that Rivera’s departure was at all related to the $787.5m settlement that the Rupert Murdoch-owned channel reached with Dominion Voting Systems in April to end a defamation suit over the broadcast of Donald Trump’s lies about voter fraud when he lost his 2020 presidential re-election campaign. But it is among a handful of changes at the network since the settlement was announced.The most notable of those was the firing of host Tucker Carlson within days of the settlement. Fox has maintained that Carlson’s dismissal was unrelated to the settlement, and it has replaced him with Jesse Watters. The network’s ex-star has not commented.Meanwhile, Carlson’s former managing editor Alexander McCaskill resigned in mid-June after a banner headline which he was thought to be behind described Joe Biden as a “wannabe dictator” during a broadcast.The banner – or chyron – also said that the president had “his political rival arrested”, referring to a federal indictment filed against Trump which charged him with improperly storing government secrets at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.McCaskill had also been accused of having “habitually belittled female employees” – among other things – in a lawsuit brought by the ex-Fox talent booker Abby Grossberg which accused the channel, its owners, and its workers, including Carlson, of fostering an abusive workplace environment.Rivera embarked on his career in broadcast journalism in 1970. He hosted a daytime talkshow for 11 years beginning in 1987. And, among other gigs, he was a CNBC news host from 1994 to 2001 before joining Fox, where he worked as a war correspondent, weekend anchor and host of the Cops: All Access series.Generally known to have a flair for controversy and self-promotion, Rivera stood out in recent years for his outspoken criticism of Israel over its attacks on Gaza and other Palestinian targets. With his participation, The Five would often outperform Fox’s other prime-time shows in terms of ratings.In some quarters, one of the most memorable episodes of Rivera’s run at Fox saw the US military boot him out of Iraq in 2003 for broadcasting details about American troop movements there.Two years before that, in an on-air flub he blamed on “the fog of war”, he claimed to have been at the scene when three American military members had been slain by friendly fire in Afghanistan before the Baltimore Sun later established that he had been more than 300 miles away. More

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      CNN’s Trump debacle suggests TV media set to repeat mistakes of 2016

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      Donald Trump and CNN were in rare agreement: the former president’s hour of free prime-time television on Wednesday evening, dressed up as a “town hall” with Republican voters, was a triumph.“America was served very well by what we did last night,” CNN’s chief executive, Chris Licht, told skeptical members of his own staff at the network’s daily news conference the following morning.“You do not have to like the former president’s answers, but you can’t say that we didn’t get them.”As it happens, quite a lot of people said that not only did CNN fail to get answers but it was repeating the terrible mistake of 2016 when it treated Trump as an entertainer not a hostile politician by giving him hours of airtime to spout freely because he was good for ratings, and therefore profits.One of CNN’s own reporters, Oliver Darcy, was less enthused than his boss.“It’s hard to see how America was served by the spectacle of lies that aired on CNN Wednesday evening,” he said in his daily newsletter, Reliable Sources.Darcy then listed all that was wrong. The same old “professional lie machine” that is Trump ignoring the question, talking over the moderator, unleashing “a firehose of disinformation upon the country”.“And CNN aired it all. On and on it went. It felt like 2016 all over again,” he wrote.More than a few Republicans shared that view. Matthew Dowd, former chief strategist for the George W Bush’s 2004 presidential campaign, condemned the news network.“CNN was completely unprepared to hold Trump accountable. CNN has done a complete disservice to our democracy,” he wrote. “CNN, you failed journalism and our country.”The New York Times said Trump’s advisers were delighted: “They can’t believe he is getting an hour on CNN with an audience that cheers his every line and laughs at his every joke.”Which raises the question of how television, in particular, should cover Trump as the next election comes into focus. It’s a question even Fox News, which has fallen out with the former president, is now grappling with.Ted Koppel, former anchor of ABC News’s Nightline, asked what the alternative is to television time for a leading contender for a return to the White House.“So no more live political events, because politicians can be nasty? Because politicians can tell lies?” he told the New York Times. “I’m not sure that news organisations should necessarily be in the business of making ideological judgments. Is he a legitimate object of news attention? You bet.”Bob Schieffer, the former CBS news anchor who moderated presidential debates, took much the same position.“We’re in the business of telling people who’s running for what and what they stand for,” he said.But many Americans wondered if it had to be in front of a supportive, jeering audience that evidently included a fair number of his “Make America great again” supporters with little to restrain his torrent of lies, distractions and evasions.Mark Lukasiewicz, former vice-president at NBC News, said of the programme that the mistake was to do it live: “Proving again: Live lying works. A friendly Maga crowd consistently laughs, claps at Trump’s punch lines – including re sex assault and January 6 – and the moderator cannot begin to keep up with the AR-15 pace of lies.”Even Fox News recorded its most recent interviews with Trump.Writing in the Washington Post, Perry Bacon said CNN’s mistake was to say, in the words of its political director, David Chalian, that is it going to “treat Trump like any other presidential candidate”.“CNN should, of course, treat Trump differently from other candidates. His record of anti-democratic behavior makes him a much more dangerous potential president than other candidates,” wrote Bacon.“In 2016, the media not only played down Trump’s chances of winning, but also suggested Trump would not pursue the outlandish and far-right ideas that he was running on if he won. This attitude was summed up by an Atlantic article titled ‘Taking Trump Seriously, Not Literally’. This perspective was entirely wrongheaded.”Part of the problem is that few journalists in the US, striving for ill-defined objectivity and almost invariably deferential to present and former presidents, are a match for a man who views the established norms of interviewing and discussion as a provocation. As Kaitlan Collins proved, as she tried, and failed, to contain Trump, even as he called her a “nasty woman” on her own air.Bacon is not alone in worrying that Trump will continue to exploit CNN’s desperation to win back at least some of the Maga voters it lost when the former president led chants of “CNN sucks” at his rallies.That’s certainly how Trump saw it, writing on his Truth Social site shortly before the programme that CNN was “rightfully desperate to get those fantastic (TRUMP!) ratings once again.“Could be the beginning of a New & Vibrant CNN, with no more Fake News, or it could turn into a disaster for all, including me. Let’s see what happens?” he added.As it turned out, what was good for CNN and Trump was viewed by a large part of the rest of America as another disaster in the making. More

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      Dear CNN, giving Trump a town-hall platform is the height of irresponsibility | Siva Vaidhyanathan

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      With 18 months to go before the next US presidential election, it’s already clear that – barring a physical collapse or two – Joe Biden will represent the Democrats and Donald Trump will carry the hopes of Republicans.This will be the first presidential election after one of the candidates, the president at the time, tried to foment a violent insurrection to overturn the last election. It will be the first election since 1912 in which a former president (in that case Theodore Roosevelt) challenges a sitting president (in that case William Howard Taft). It will be the first election in American history in which one candidate has already been impeached – twice, in fact. It will be the first election since 1800 in which one of the major candidates can reasonably be called a threat to or disloyal to the United States of America (Aaron Burr in 1800 was the first). And Burr had not yet revealed his propensity for treachery in 1800. It will be the first election in which one of the candidates has been indicted on state criminal charges (and possibly federal charges by the time of the election).In other words, it will be a weird election in every way. Yet, despite staring at a growing, violent, nativist, fascist-like movement that doggedly supports Trump, the mainstream American news media seems poised to treat both candidates as if they are viable, reasonable representatives of the traditions their political parties have grown to symbolize.It’s as if they have learned nothing.CNN, the leading 24-hour news network, will host Trump for a “town hall” forum in New Hampshire on Wednesday, as if he were a regular candidate leading the race for the nomination of a regular party. Of course, CNN will probably do the same for the three or four others who are likely to challenge him for the Republican nomination (so far, the former UN ambassador Nikki Haley and former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson are the only viable non-crank candidates).A few more might jump in, but the more challenges Trump faces, the more likely he will lock up the nomination on the first primary day, rather than a month later.Putting a microphone and three cameras on Trump as if he were just another candidate and not an instigator of the violent disruption of American democracy and leader of a conspiracy to overthrow the results of a national election is the height of journalistic irresponsibility.The conservative columnist Alyssa Farah Griffin defended CNN by saying that the host, Kaitlan Collins, is “tough” and won’t let Trump “get away with lying without being called out”. That’s exactly the problem. CNN is in the business of performing toughness and balance, not primarily producing journalism that serves to enlighten citizens and enhance democracy. CNN seems to exist to create tweetable moments of anchor “toughness”, through which the celebrities who appear on air make events and interviews all about them. The CNN faces are tough enough to stand in the wind and rain of a hurricane, and tough enough to call out a politician – even a bully like Trump – for lying. But that’s easy and shallow. Ultimately, it hurts democracy.The issue is not whether Trump gets caught in a lie or “gets away” with something. Trump doesn’t care when that happens and neither do Republican supporters. We have 40 years of Trump shamelessness to demonstrate that – seven years of Trump as a political figure. He has been “called out” time and time again. It makes no difference to his support or to his habits. Exposing Trump as a liar changes no minds about anything.But he will receive the imprimatur of respectability for warranting this platform in the first place. CNN and all journalists must concede that they perform that work, despite wishing and pretending they did not. They have just been too lazy to question doing things the way they had always done things. Every major news organization has done the same. No one has wanted to admit it is a dangerous moment or new environment.So how should mainstream journalistic organizations like CNN cover Trump – or any candidate – through the election? All plans and policies should be based on the realization that democracy is under direct threat from many small factions in the United States, supported by at least one foreign power (Russia), and that they all support the return of Donald Trump to power. Trump himself is immune to shaming and exposure. So that 20th-century assumption about shining a light or exposing or embarrassing a wrongdoer is not appropriate now. The situation is more dire and the political climate in the United States is beyond such tepid, genteel moves.News organizations should do everything differently. No more “town halls” for any candidate, not just Trump. No more interviews in comfortable chairs and good lighting intended to demonstrate both access to power and a certain toughness in approach. No more unfiltered coverage of rallies and speeches as if they constitute “news” before they are ever broadcast or rendered in text.Coverage should be driven by clear editorial choices. Journalists should decide what the candidates will respond to. They should approach each story based on an issue at hand, in the country, in the world, rather than whatever the candidate chooses to say that day. Every report should be couched in deep context, with every quote encased in statements and reminders of the candidate’s record, the facts about the issue, and what the choice is for voters.Reports should be delivered as multimedia packages, accompanied by deep research just a click away from the video, audio or text that invites the citizen into the story. Organizations should begin planning such coverage now so that nothing they do gets hijacked by shenanigans or games by any candidate – with full knowledge that hijacking the normal practices of 20th-century political journalism was precisely Trump’s strategy from 2015 through today. Steve Bannon told us so. Editors and reporters chose not to take it seriously.If a potential story does not serve to inform voters about what is at stake, it should never make it to publication or broadcast. That’s a simple test: does this story enlighten and enable the electorate? Or does this story merely serve to enrage and entertain the electorate? The moment when news organizations began gathering deep and sophisticated data about audience engagement, they began competing for attention against games and pornography and sitcoms and YouTube clips. That’s a fact of the business and a fact of life. But pandering to that fact instead of resisting it is rendering journalism incapable of functioning because journalism can never win the entertainment game.News organizations must accept that they make news by virtue of their choices. They don’t cover things that already exist as “news”. They are political actors. They must choose democracy or risk being used for free by the forces that oppose democracy. The stakes are too high to continue doing business as usual. The stakes are high in a business sense, of course. But they are higher in the sense of our survival as a democratic republic in a world in which democracy is in danger. More