Since Donald Trump is the firmly established front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, that raises the question: How does the media cover him over the next 18 months?
This issue was crystalized by CNN's decision to interview the former president live before a raucously supportive audience. He ran roughshod over the anchor, Kaitlan Collins, spewing out lies, stirring up the crowd and swatting down every attempt to hold him accountable for his denial and deceit.
Critics from the left savaged the network for giving Trump such a platform. "CNN should be ashamed of themselves," fumed Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez. And even CNN's own media writer Oliver Darcy wrote, "It's hard to see how America was served by the spectacle of lies that aired on CNN Wednesday evening."
Darcy should look harder. CNN made two major mistakes in the format they used, but their basic instincts were correct. As Anderson Cooper chastised his own CNN audience about their aversion to Trump: "Do you think staying in your silo and only listening to people you agree with is going to make that person go away?" Media critic Jack Shafer added in Politico: "A genuine news outlet can't avert its eyes during a campaign just because a candidate is malevolent, duplicitous, cruel and deceitful."
News organizations have long grappled with how to treat Trump, who breaks all the rules by lying incessantly while never correcting his falsehoods or apologizing for them. He might have been an amateur politician in 2016, but he was a professional TV performer who knew instinctively how to keep the camera's red light on.
"He was able to do this because he thought like a TV camera," writes New York Times TV critic James Poniewozik. "He knew what TV wanted, what stimulated its nerve endings."
That made Trump, in his words, a "ratings magnet," and the networks ate it up, carrying many of his rallies live. Eventually, however, the mainstream media began to realize how badly it had been manipulated. The Times started branding Trump's falsehoods as "lies," and CNN head Jeff Zucker admitted that he'd made a major "mistake" in broadcasting Trump's appearances unfiltered.
That vigilant posture only grew more aggressive during Trump's White House years, as the mainstream media felt it had to abandon doctrines that could be called "false equivalency" or "bothsides-ism." As the Times bureau chief Elisabeth Bumiller told me, "We are much tougher about calling out falsehoods from the president. ... Trump has uttered so many obvious falsehoods, so often, that to just report what he said, like we have covered other presidents, seems like a falsehood in itself."
But when CNN's parent company was bought by Discovery last year, its new bosses decided the network had strayed too far to the left and needed to adopt a less adversarial stance toward Trump. That decision led to the town hall, and in some ways, it did accomplish its purpose -- revealing the true Trump. "By daring to commit journalism," wrote Shafer, the forum "produced a bounty of information that just may damage Trump."
To take just a few examples: The former president described the insurrection on Jan. 6 as a "beautiful day"; he derided E. Jean Carroll, the writer who successfully sued him for defamation, as a "whack job"; he hailed the Dobbs decision canceling a national right to abortion as "such a great victory."
Democrats are already mining Trump's statements for campaign gold, and President Biden summed up his core campaign message by tweeting, "It's simple, folks. Do you want four more years of that?"
Still, CNN made some serious errors. The first was to put Trump on live, so his flamethrowing bombast could incinerate the stage. "Live TV interviews will always favor those who prefer mendacity," writes media historian Michael Socolow in Slate. "The format's structure significantly favors distribution of unproven allegations (and even falsehoods) over interjected corrections." The second error was to put Trump in front of an audience that would cheer on his "mendacity" and turn the event from a town hall into a tumultuous rally.
There is a proven model here: "60 Minutes," the program that has dominated TV ratings since 1968. They interview everybody, including Trump, but never live, so there's ample time and space to correct and control untruths. And these sit-downs are always one-on-one, no claque of supporters to distract or distort the conversation.
CNN was right to give Trump its microphone. It was wrong to let him hijack it. That's an important lesson the press needs to learn going forward.
Steven Roberts teaches politics and journalism at George Washington University. He can be contacted by email at stevecokie@gmail.com.
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