The Donald And His Media Circus

A Trump indictment—or three—means he’s back in the news…a lot

It pains me to have to write about him again. Last week I enjoyed—well, maybe that’s not the word—writing about the idiotic, ideologically-driven firing of a principal because she allowed history’s most famous sculpture to be shown, in of all places, an art history class. Had I not known better, I’d have sworn I was writing about Florida.

But The Donald got indicted, so here we go.

Newsrooms are really funny places, assuming you appreciate gallows humor. A terrific little play on words when some blowhard won’t shut his trap is that the attention freak is “unavoidable for comment.” So it is with the Former Guy. They had to cover the unprecedented indictment. Presidents and candidates for the nation’s highest office must be covered. Therein lies the dilemma. The question for news directors everywhere is how not to fall into the 2016 trap of letting him dominate the news.

Speaking of former guys, the now-disgraced former CEO of CBS, Leslie Moonves, infamously said of Trump, “He’s bad for America, but good for CBS,” proving the point that transformational journalist Edward R. Murrow made when he noted, “We are in the same tent as the clowns and the freaks—that's show business.”

And Trump makes the point in spades. He is a creature of media, and while his governing skill-set may be nonexistent, he knows how to get attention. To the degree that when they won’t cover him for free, he pays for it, as in his 1989 full-page NY Times ad insisting that the “Central Park Five” be reincarcerated. (History: five young Black and Latino men were wrongly convicted of rape and subsequently exonerated by DNA evidence.) Dismissing the actual facts-in-evidence, he wrote: “What has happened to the respect for authority, the fear of retribution by the courts, society and the police for those who break the law, who want only to trespass on the rights of others?...How can our great society tolerate the continued brutalization of its citizens by crazed misfits?”

I know, I know—irony is also a funny thing.

It is clear that we must stop talking about him—but how? Linguist George Lakoff writes of framing issues. He cautions us that even when you negate the frame, you are promoting and enabling it. The writer Doug Porter correctly observed: “When you repeat Trump, you help Trump. 

I’ve worked—and not in the George Santos (if that really is his name) sense—as a consultant to NBC, CBS and ABC news divisions, and as an informal advisor to Fox News Radio. I mention these resume points to lend perspective to the current state of affairs in the national news media. At ABC, CBS, and NBC, the brand is news. At Fox, the brand is Fox. There was hell to pay when they announced—correctly—on election night in 2020 that Biden had won Arizona. There were weeks of meetings and teeth-gnashing over that early correct call. They had spent millions on state-of-the-art election prediction software that drilled down to the precinct level. Better software than any of their competitors had. The discussion—I kid you not—was about whether they should ever again place news over audience expectations. In other words, if the truth is likely to upset the audience, why run it? That’s why they were the last to call the national election for Biden. It wasn’t that they didn’t have the info first—they did—it was that they feared an audience, and thus revenue, disaster.

So they backtracked and put the blame on Dominion Voting Systems machines, earning themselves a $1.6 billion law suit for defamation. If you’re an exclusive Fox or right-wing news consumer, the lawsuit may be news to you. Internal Fox emails and texts show they knew Dominion machines weren’t hacked, and there was no discernable fraud. Yet, they persisted. Most newsrooms lead the audience; Fox follows it.

I asked The Wall Street Journal’s Julia Angwin for her take. She said she learned from her father that real journalists are never attached to the outcome. They tell the whole truth, come what may, and can’t afford to carry the baggage associated with a predetermined outcome to an investigation.

Back in the courtroom, Judge Merchan politely asked Trump to refrain from inciting violence. In response, Trump called him a “Trump-hating” judge; the NY DA a “criminal,” the Georgia DA a “racist,” and the Federal Special Counsel a “lunatic.” By now we know his game—it’s all about his victimhood, everyone who catches him is a liar, and anyone trying to hold him accountable is out to destroy the country.

This latest screed dominated front pages and screens everywhere. He’s living rent-free in every Managing Editor’s head, and there seems no end to The Donald’s Media Circus.  

©2023 Jon Sinton