Breaking the Vote Law
Rule 34
The Manhattan DA's 34-count felony case against former President Donald Trump is strong. Also weak. Also an abject disaster. We clearly have a long, long way to go in this case.
But I'm pretty convinced that while Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg's case is an historic first, it's likely to be a comparatively minor scene in Trump's alleged criminal misadventures. Trump is potentially in a lot of trouble in a lot of jurisdictions. And that means the risk of damage he can do leveraging his and his supporters' rage against the justice system and the democracy is as big as it's been since Jan. 6.
Trump's out of office, so the GOP House majority backing him is taking up the slack, leveraging their power to try to intimidate Bragg and send a message to any other prosecutor who's contemplating placing their leader under the law. The only reason they haven't been louder this week is that Bragg unveiled his indictment during the congressional recess, when lawmakers scattered.
New York Judge Juan Merchan asked Trump to do nothing to incite violence or disrupt the court. It took Trump just a couple hours to publicly trash the judge, his wife, and his daughter. And now, the death threats against the judge and his family are reliably pouring in by the dozens.
If more indictments on more serious charges like election interference or obstruction start to mount, we're in for a(nother) potential spiraling confrontation between democracy and Trump's enraged base. The news media, especially cable TV, showed that it's learned basically nothing about how to responsibly cover Trump at his worst. And yet, there were signs of hope, too.
Trump stakes
I called up NYU professor and media critic Jay Rosen, who had some interesting things to say about a strategic change in how some outlets covered Trump this week.
A lot of the coverage was OJ-esque. Helicopters and SUVs. Trump completely dominated. What do you think it means that seven years later, many outlets are covering Trump in the exact same way they did in the summer of 2016?
Jeff Zucker admitted that CNN had gone way overboard and probably allowed Trump too much free publicity. And Les Moonves said, "may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS." And there was a general recognition that there had been a pattern of excess in covering Trump in 2016. But it didn't seem to matter when this arraignment came around. All reserve was thrown to the winds. We're just at the start of this. And it doesn't seem like the big TV journalism outfits have thought through a change in policy.
That said, by the end of the night, when Trump made his post-arraignment speech, both MSNBC and NPR decided not to carry the remarks live. And that was a change.
Yes, this is something that I wrote about and argued for years ago. Especially during the period when Trump was doing his briefings on the coronavirus, and distributing all kinds of myths and disinformation from the White House podium. I think that was an obvious case where you don't allow that to go across your air live because you may be allowing him to give deadly advice through your channel.
But this time, the argument that won out at MSNBC was that there's not going to be anything new in Trump's speech. He's just going to do his familiar diatribes. It's very likely to just be a propaganda event, or at least a campaign event. The decision was a little surprising. I think it was a good development, but it should not really have been controversial.
CNN covered the speech live and then cut away. Then Jake Tapper issued a justification explaining the middle ground, that they cut away when it turned into a campaign speech. It felt like they were struggling in real time with the Trump coverage question.
Yes, and what Jay Tapper said was that they had spent so much time in live coverage on the indictment and the DA's press conference, fairness compelled them to cover Donald Trump so he could say what he wanted to. I find that pretty striking to worry about the idea of "fairness' to a speaker who has abused the microphone every time he's had it.
On the other hand, he is a defendant who had an entire day of charges being read against him, the prosecutor speaking out. Responsible coverage might say, "let the defendant have their rebuttal."
But it's important to add that no one is saying that there should be a news blackout on his talk. If he says something important, you report it in the news that evening or the next day.
So it's not pretending he didn't say any of that or blacking him out. It's just a question of whether he deserves the status of live coverage for what was probably just a rehash of what he's been saying for years. Nobody's saying 'don't cover the speech.' They're saying, 'you don't need to transmit it live.' Those are two different things.
Trump is in so much legal jeopardy in so many venues that this problem is with us, and it only gets worse, right? Part of the coverage this week was encouraging. So where do you think this goes?
There's a hesitancy to go from the understanding that this guy breaks our system, to the action of deciding on a new way to handline. I think they mostly haven't done that work.
But you could step back and say that a media system where two big networks decide not to carry Trump, one does halfway, and others like Fox and Newsmax carry it all the way, is media diversity and actually a good outcome. They have different newsrooms making different calls. We can survive that. And it's sort of a sign of health that there would be different determinations by different bosses in that situation.
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