3/26/20
The nation’s television news outlets, especially the three major cable-news networks, are grappling with a nagging paradox as President Donald Trump continues to orchestrate his White House briefings on the novel coronavirus pandemic. On the one hand, their ratings have never been higher, and viewers’ appetites for the live sessions have shown no signs of dwindling. On the other hand, journalists and executives at MSNBC, CNN, and the often Trump-friendly Fox News—which scored an impressive 6.2 million viewers for Sunday’s installment of the Trump show, according to Nielsen—are increasingly facing the likelihood that they are becoming an uncritical and unvetted transmission belt for propaganda and misinformation. Despite internal hand-wringing among producers and journalists as the week unfolded, however, the bosses at MSNBC, CNN, and Fox News once again decided on Thursday to broadcast every moment of Trump’s self-congratulatory and largely fact-free cheer-leading live as the United States achieved the dubious milestone of becoming the world’s No. 1 coronavirus-infected country—surpassing even China’s 81,000-plus cases by more than 2,000, with twice China’s death rate.
“These White House sessions—ostensibly meant to give the public critical and truthful information about this frightening crisis—are in fact working against that end,” wrote Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan, summarizing such concerns. “Rather, they have become a daily stage for Trump to play his greatest hits to captive audience members. They come in search of life-or-death information, but here’s what they get from him instead: Self-aggrandizement… Media-bashing… Exaggeration and outright lies.” Going forward, they said, they will be ready to cut away from the briefings when newsworthy facts and figures—usually shared by federal public-health officials such as Dr. Anthony Fauci—give way to unsupported presidential speculation and outright falsehoods. “We might take it from the top and then cut away after the first lie, and return when the lies stop,” said one cable-network producer. “They’re so full of misinformation. Someone has already died from it,” a different MSNBC insider said, citing the story of an Arizona man who ingested fish-tank solvent, chloroquine with phosphate, after hearing Trump tout that key ingredient in its prescription-drug form at one of his press conferences.
