Media Overcorrect after Wall-to-Wall Trump Coverage, Try to Shield Viewers from Former President’s Influence

Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks, a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we look at the media’s missteps in covering Donald Trump, call out misleading CBS report from the border, and hit more media misses.

Media Coverage of Trump’s Iowa Win Offers a View of What’s to Come in 2024

More than eight years on, the media still can’t figure out what to do about former president Donald Trump.

After turning over their airwaves to Trump in 2016, broadcasting what seemed like his every rally in its entirety, the major networks are overcorrecting, shielding their audiences from Trump’s views and the views of his voters on the mistaken belief that doing so will erode his malign influence.

Coverage of Trump’s roughly 30-point win in Iowa last week provided an early glimpse at this strategy. Pundits responded to the former president’s dominant performance by bashing his supporters, downplaying the significance of his win and hypocritically claiming his “untruths” are unworthy of airtime.

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow refused to air Trump’s victory speech in Iowa, insisting the decision was not made “out of spite,” but rather that the network could not air the former president’s “lies.” She claimed airing Trump’s “untrue” statements would hurt MSNBC’s pristine brand.

“But there is a cost to us, as a news organization, of knowingly broadcasting untrue things. That is a fundamental truth of our business and who we are. And so, his remarks, tonight, will not air here live. We will monitor them and let you know about any news that he makes,” she said. (This despite Trump having taken on quite a subdued demeanor in the speech, espousing a message of positivity and unity and evening offering kind words to his challengers).

Conservatives, including Washington Free Beacon media reporter Drew Holden, were quick to rehash Maddow’s record of peddling misinformation.

Among Maddow’s greatest hits: her 2017 claims that Trump colluded with Russia to influence the 2016 election and her claims that the Covid vaccines “work well enough that the virus stops with every vaccinated person.”

“The Trump campaign didn’t just benefit from Russia interfering in our presidential campaign, the point of this is they colluded, they helped, they were in on it,” she said in March 2017.

And in October 2021, she said there were “covert communications” between Trump’s team and Alfa-Bank that both sides were “trying to hide” before the 2016 election.

Maddow’s claims were ultimately debunked in a 300-page report by Special Counsel John Durham.

And in January 2019, Maddow theorized during a polar vortex that China “could shut off the natural gas pipelines” and Russia “can just shut off the electricity,” in the U.S. at any time, claiming the two countries “have that ability now.”

“It is like negative 50 degrees in the Dakotas right now. What would happen if Russia killed the power in Fargo today?” Maddow asked. “What would happen if all the natural gas lines that service Sioux Falls just ‘poofed’ on the coldest day in recent memory and it wasn’t in our power whether or not to turn them back on.”

Republican media figures, including radio host Erick Erickson, criticized MSNBC’s decision not to air the speech.

“The smugness of MSNBC, which allows on Joy Reid, Al Sharpton, Mehdi Hasan — although, not anymore with him — and others to say they’re not going to air the former President of the United States’ victory speech in Iowa because he may say untrue things,” Erickson said. “Have you people watched Joy Reid’s show? Have you listened to Mehdi Hassan, or the other shows on MSNBC?”

“It has nothing to do with him and everything to do with your audience,” Erickson said. “Ironically, you help Donald Trump by not broadcasting him. . . . It’s dishonest, but it’s also rather silly.”

Over on CNN, host Jake Tapper cut into Trump’s victory speech to accuse him of spreading “anti-immigrant rhetoric.”

Meanwhile, MSNBC host Ali Velshi claimed the network had received viewer feedback that “people don’t even want to watch clips of Donald Trump on our shows,” and said Trump has been treated by the media as a “quirky abstraction,” rather than the threat to democracy that he is.

Washington Post columnist and MSNBC contributor Jennifer Rubin told Velshi the mainstream media has tried to make Trump seem “not so bad.”

In Rubin’s telling, the media has empowered Trump by failing to fight back against him with sufficient force.

“Well, I think two things are going on. One, this speaks to how badly the mainstream media has covered him. They have normalized him, they have cleaned up the rhetoric so he sounds in a clip or he reads in print much more coherent than he actually is. It’s only very recently that the mainstream media has been reporting on his really shocking totalitarian claims. But of course, he’s been this way all along,” Rubin said.

“And I think because they have done such a bad job, because they have made an effort to treat the Republican Party like the Democratic Party, this notion that he’s not so bad, that he’s just kind of a cartoon character has set in. And that’s on the mainstream media, that’s on the failure to be honest and to side with truth rather than having this false balance,” she said, before going on to claim Trump’s supporters are part of a “fascist cult.”

“Let’s be honest, there are a lot of them, but a lot of them does not mean that they are behaving logically or rationally,” she said of the president’s supporters.

The truth, of course, is roughly the inverse of Rubin’s diagnosis: The media only empowered Trump through its hysterical response to his rise. Every time a Trump supporter hears a talking head on cable refer to the former president or his supporters as “fascist,” they harden in their commitment to him.

Rubin was far from the only media figure to insult supporters of the former president.

Salon senior politics writer Amanda Marcotte wrote that Trump “is an avatar for the current mood of white evangelicals.”

“They are done pretending to be ‘compassionate.’ The mask is entirely off. Evangelicals are not the salt-of-the-earth types idealized by centrist pundits. They are what feminists, anti-racists and pro-LGBTQ activists have always said: authoritarians who may use Jesus as cover for their ugly urges, but have no interest in the ‘love thy neighbor’ teachings of their purported savior,” she wrote.

Meanwhile, The Independent’s Alex Woodward accused Trump of advancing “a Christian nationalist agenda.”

And MSNBC’s Joy Reid claimed existing knowledge about candidate electability means nothing “when you believe that God has given you this country, that it is yours, and that everyone who is not a White, conservative Christian is a fraudulent American, is a less real American.”

“Then you don’t care about electability. You care about what God has given you,” she said.

While Trump’s Iowa win was a slam dunk, with him drawing 51 percent of the vote, CNN anchor Phil Mattingly was not impressed, claiming the result was “not exactly great” for an incumbent. But Trump isn’t an incumbent and his margin of victory smashed that of the previous record holder, Bob Dole, who bested Pat Robertson by 13 points in 1988.

Headline Fail of the Week

CBS was forced to update a headline this week after its report, “Texas ‘physically barred’ Border Patrol agents from trying to rescue migrants who drowned, federal officials say” turned out not to be true.

The headline was amended to read, “3 migrants drowned near area where Texas has denied entry to federal border agents.”

And the outlet updated the story with an editor’s note that read: “Update: This story and headline were updated to reflect information shared by federal officials with the Supreme Court on Monday, Jan. 15. In that filing, the Justice Department said the three migrant drownings had already occurred when Border Patrol requested access to Shelby Park to help other migrants, though it did note it was ‘impossible to say what might have happened if Border Patrol had had its former access to the area.’”

Media Misses

• In a New York Times report about the increasing tensions between previously allied black and Jewish activists over the Israel–Hamas war, black activist Nicole Carty seemingly criticized Jews for celebrating Passover. The report reads:
  

  As part of solving the dilemma of assimilated whiteness, accumulated power and how to put both to positive use, white Jews, in Carty’s thinking, should recognize that “Jewish history and relation to trauma and dehumanization has been exceptionalized.” There have been, she said, “so many similar genocides.”

  “I’ve been to a lot of Passover celebrations,” she added, “and it’s so weird that the story is only of Jewish subjugation, even though subjugation is still so present for other people.” She went on: “Black people still haven’t had their histories honored. We are still gaslit about the impact of slavery and the continued impacts of white supremacy.”

• NR’s Rich Lowry defended Nikki Haley’s comments that America has “never been a racist country,” saying during an appearance on CNN that it would be obvious to a “well-intentioned person” that it was clear Haley did not believe that America had no history of racism. But CNN contributor Cari Champion disagreed.  “Well, intentions don’t work for me,” CNN contributor Cari Champion said. “It’s just insulting, quite frankly. You cannot run for the president of the United States and not acknowledge its history clearly, plainly, concretely.” She went on to call the “precepts” of the U.S. “racist.””What precepts? Like ‘all men are created equal’ is racist?” Lowry asked.”All men were not created equal and you know that,” Champion replied.

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Rich Lowry has to educate CNN that the founding documents are not racist. After Cari Champion says "all men were not created equal and you know that" he replies "yes they are" and "the idea was extremely powerful and has done more to define American history than the racism" (1/?) pic.twitter.com/4K1zuOr19i

— Alex Christy (@alexchristy17) January 19, 2024

• NR’s Ari Blaff and Zach Kessel have a report out today detailing how the Washington Post abandoned basic journalistic standards covering the Israel–Hamas war. “While other U.S. outlets have on occasion fallen into the trap of credulously parroting Hamas propaganda, none as prominent have done so with the frequency and brazenness of the Post, which has uncritically cited casualty figures provided by the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry in 148 separate articles published since the October 7 Hamas terror attack, according to a National Review analysis.”