For the first ten minutes or so of Thursday’s edition of The Lead with Jake Tapper, viewers were greeted by a chyron reading “In Rambling News Conference, Trump Attacks Harris & Walz, Gives Falsehoods About Crowd Sizes and January 6 Attack.”
Former President Donald Trump had indeed just overseen a stemwinder of a Q&A session during which he compared his crowds favorably to the one that showed up for Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech.
So the chyron itself wasn’t inaccurate, even if it was a bit sensational.
But combined with the commentary of one panelist’s unchallenged declaration that it was “lunacy” for Trump to suggest that neither of the wars raging in Eastern Europe or the Middle East would have ever even have started under his watch — “He continues to go out there and just spew lies and nonsense” — it had the whiff of the Jeff Zucker-era CNN approach from which the network’s reputation has never recovered.
It’s not “lunacy” for Trump to submit that his administration would have deterred America’s enemies in Moscow and Gaza; it’s an unfalsifiable argument on which reasonable minds can disagree. In fact, it’s a debate that should be facilitated by the press given the destabilizing nature of these conflicts, and the looming threat of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. Yet that debate was eschewed on CNN in favor of a one-sided assertion that Trump had lied.
As unhelpful as The Lead‘s approach might have been in this instance, it’s far from the most egregious example of CNN’s backsliding in recent days.
On Thursday alone, two supposedly straight-laced network anchors launched a pair of unambiguously partisan attacks on Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance.
In the morning, Jim Acosta called Vance’s walk over to Air Force Two while both he and Vice President Kamala Harris were visiting Wisconsin on Wednesday a “bizarre stunt.” Vance greeted Harris’s press pool to offer them the opportunity to speak to a principal on the record, since Harris had to that point declined to do so since becoming the Democratic nominee for president. Acosta made sure to repeat the adjectives “odd” and “strange” to describe Vance’s behavior during the subsequent discussion so as to reinforce the Democrats’ favorite line of attack on Vance.
The underlying issue of Harris refusing to take questions from the press after being made the nominee was of no interest to Acosta.
Then in the afternoon during a discussion of Harris’s running mate Tim Walz’s alleged exaggeration of his military record, Brianna Keilar stepped in it.
“I also think that JD Vance as a messenger on this may be an imperfect messenger,” she began.
“Because we have — you introduced him as the combat correspondent which was what his title was. But when you dig a little deeper into that, he was a public affairs specialist,” she continued with her eyebrows raised as if she was building a masterful case against Vance. “Someone who did not see combat, which certainly the title combat correspondent kind of gives you a different impression.”
“So he may be the imperfect messenger on that,” she insisted.
Her error here was so great as to compel a veteran currently serving as a public information officer for the DEA to rebuke her publicly, and memorialize the men and women who served in the same capacity Vance did.
🧵The Marine combat correspondent MOS + related visual comms fields (photographer, videographer, public affairs officer) have recently been diminished as cushy PR jobs where combat is avoided and A/C is enjoyed.
— Luis Agostini (@LuisRAgostini) August 8, 2024
Keilar later clarified her comments, saying, “JD Vance said he didn’t see any real fighting. He said that in his book ‘Hillbilly Elegy.’ I had said I wondered if JD Vance was an imperfect messenger for this because of that, not to question his service, because he served honorably and he served in a combat zone.”
Covering Donald Trump is a unique and unenviable challenge. He slips a lie into nearly every breath and his behavior in the wake of his loss in the 2020 presidential election gave reason to believe he represents a unique threat to the American system.
Still, the solution to this problem cannot possibly be to subordinate the full truth to the goal of defeating him. Inserting some derogatory adjective into every description of what he’s done or said is neither good journalism nor even an effective way of highlighting his manifest flaws.
CNN’s ex-CEO Chris Licht, who was deposed in large part over his aim of bringing CNN back to the center a little over a year ago, saw this clearly.
“I think he [Trump] changed the rules of the game, and the media was a little caught off guard and put a jersey on and got into the game as a way of dealing with it,” observed Licht. “And at least [at] my organization, I think we understand that jersey cannot go back on. Because guess what? It didn’t work. Being in the game with the jersey on didn’t change anyone’s mind.”
This perspective proved so offensive to the talent at the network that Licht was run out of town in humiliating fashion.
And now the network is slouching back toward Zuckerism, to the detriment of itself and its audience.
This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.
