The wall-to-wall coverage of Trump’s arraignment demonstrates how quickly the lessons of 2016 have been forgotten.
The Trump Show is back. The former president’s arrest on felony charges of falsifying business records related to a hush-money payment to the adult film actor Stormy Daniels inspired cable-news networks to return to wall-to-wall Trump coverage, once a staple of their programming.
The first-ever arraignment of a former president on criminal charges is a massive story, no question about it. But by itself that doesn’t really explain minute-by-minute broadcasting of his private plane arriving in New York Monday or the blanket coverage of his speech yesterday evening. That kind of saturation approach suggests the networks could return to a model that simply allowed Trump to monopolize coverage.
Despite Trump’s public hostility to press outlets that failed to imitate the fawning style of the right-wing media, the Trump years were a massive boon to news organizations of all kinds, because the former president’s behavior attracted an audience. This was especially true of cable news, where finding programming to fill 24 hours of coverage was much easier when the president was saying something boorish every day.
“It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS,” the former CBS CEO Les Moonves said of Trump in a moment of candor in 2016. “I’ve never seen anything like this, 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.”
This goes beyond questions of individual personal preferences; most news organizations are for-profit enterprises—they need readers, viewers and listeners to be attractive to advertisers. It is possible to balance the tension between profit motive and public interest, but news organizations cannot ignore it entirely. Whatever ideological objections they may harbor—and wealthy news executives have fewer than you might think—Trump is good for the television news business, and the rapid return to Trump TV illustrates how much the networks missed the guy. Boring old Joe Biden hasn’t been nearly as lucrative.
One exception last night, at least, was MSNBC, which declined to carry the speech. Rachel Maddow told viewers, “There’s a cost to us as a news organization of knowingly broadcasting untrue things … If he does say anything newsworthy, we will turn them around and report on that right away.
