America’s political press have done a great job in many aspects of this election, but in some very important ways, our political media — specifically network and cable television — are out of their depth this cycle. They don’t know how to handle a reality TV candidate like Donald Trump, they don’t know how to cover conservative candidates playing for conservative voters, and they (we) certainly did not know how to predict such a wild race.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Les Moonves, CEO of CBS said just before Super Tuesday, “and this going to be a very good year for us. Sorry. It’s a terrible thing to say. But, bring it on, Donald. Keep going.”
Moonves was explaining that Trumpmania has whipped up huge demand for political news and more importantly political ads. According to the Hollywood Reporter, “Moonves called the campaign for president a ‘circus’ full of ‘bomb throwing,’ and he hopes it continues.”
Donald Trump is the first reality TV star to run for president, and he’s great entertainment. But our media is supposed to do more than entertain. We’re supposed to inform the public so they can be worthy participants in our republican democracy, that’s why the press gets a special place in the First Amendment. Balancing the need for ratings and the duty to inform has always been tricky. Trump has made it impossible.
When Marco Rubio explained his tax plan, when Bobby Jindal released a health-care reform, when Rand Paul laid out his view of U.S. foreign policy, the networks couldn’t have cared less, maybe because viewers couldn’t care less. When Trump calls Rosie O’Donnell and Jeb Bush names, on the other hand, it’s saturation coverage.
CBS, NBC, and ABC dedicated more than 400 hours of their evening broadcasts this cycle to covering Trump according to the Economist, compared to a combined 100 hours for Rubio and Ted Cruz.
“Trump has shrewdly gamed the media for maximum exposure,” Politico columnist Jack Shafer aptly wrote while arguing that you can’t fairly blame the media for creating Trump. “If you want to blame anybody, blame the public,” which creates the demand for this coverage, Shafer wrote.
Some cable reporters have even had the temerity to blame the other candidates for getting into the mud. At last weekend’s Conservative Political Action Conference, CNN’s Dana Bash complained that she can’t let her children watch this campaign, and asked Marco Rubio, in effect, if he felt bad for “how low things have gone.” She referred to Rubio’s recent stand-up routine, which included crude jokes about Trump.
This was Bash’s main line of questioning in her on-stage interview, she asked three questions in a row about it. Rubio finally said, “I think you’re one of the reasons why” things have gotten so nasty. Rubio knew that to get attention from CNN he had to get in the mud with Trump. Now CNN was criticizing him for it.
“While Rubio attacked Trump,” the Washington Post’s Dave Weigel wrote of one of Rubio’s riffs on Trump, “national cable networks played his speech live — a favor granted constantly to Trump, rarely to anyone else. When Rubio switched tacks to deliver his positive stump speech, the networks cut away.”
But some of the media’s coverage of Trump has shown a clear collapse of standards. Sean Hannity at Fox News has repeatedly hosted one-on-one special “town halls” with Trump alone on the eve of important primaries. Hannity has never been a hardball interviewer, and so these are basically Fox-sponsored rallies for Trump. But again, Hannity is just giving the people what they want. His pre-Nevada Trump rally — excuse me, townhall — garnered Hannity’s highest ratings of the year.
Joe Scarborough and Mike Brzezinski of MSNBC have been uncomfortably close to Trump, reportedly watching election returns in his hotel room. They seemed to give Trump a veto over tough questions. “Nothing too hard, Mika,” Trump said once, when he thought no microphones were on. “Okay,” she responded.
It’s not just Trump. There’s also the problem of a left-leaning mainstream media trying to cover a conservative contest for conservative votes.
Every Republican candidate besides Trump has been fairly conservative. Most GOP primary voters are conservative. This makes it foreign turf for most mainstream reporters.
Dana Bash, a good reporter at CNN, again provided the perfect example in her CPAC interview of Rubio. Before this conservative crowd, she didn’t ask the central question facing them all: “Why should voters back you instead of Ted Cruz?”
She never asked about Rubio’s biggest weaknesses with the conservative electorate—his role in pushing the Gang of Eight immigration bill, or his support for the corporate-welfare sugar program.
This was the problem with the much-derided CNBC debate in December, only one question came from a conservative perspective. Even if a reporter isn’t hard-left liberal, and even if he or she tries his or her hardest to be balanced, the networks are enclaves of center-left opinions, and conservatives like Cruz and Rubio — and their voters — are a foreign species to them.
If either Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio is the nominee, he would be the most conservative nominee in a generation or more. If Donald Trump is the nominee, he would be unprecedented in many ways. Our media still hasn’t figured out how to cover these men.
Timothy P. Carney, The Washington Examiner’s senior political columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]. His column appears Tuesday and Thursday nights on washingtonexaminer.com.
