Dan Rather has had an illustrious career as a journalist. He is now blogging at Steady. He was annoyed that CNN gave Donald Trump a platform to repeat his lies, to bulldoze the interviewer, and to play his usual demagogic role. After Trump was elected in 2016, CNN was widely criticized for giving Trump so much air time, more than any other network or cable station did. CNN sometimes covered his rallies live and at length, a courtesy not extended to other candidates. By some estimates, CNN gave Trump $2 billion of free on-air time.
He writes:
Donald Trump is a liar. He is a bigot, a misogynist, and a deadbeat. He has just been found by a jury to be a sexual abuser. He faces multiple other serious criminal investigations. He spurred a violent insurrection. He has repeatedly demonstrated complete disdain for the foundations of American democracy. The list of traits that makes this man unfit for the presidency fills pages.
And yet despite these debased qualities, or maybe (depressingly) because of them, he is immensely popular with many Americans. They cheer on his worst impulses. They bask in his hatred. They are fueled by the danger he poses to this nation. They have propelled him once again to be the favorite for the Republican presidential nomination.
And although many Americans don’t want to believe it, at this moment, he is a real threat to return to the presidency.
Among other things, Trump is and always has been a performer, and performers, no matter how vile their message, crave and thrive in the spotlight.
Last night, CNN gave Trump not only a spotlight, but a platform and a rabid crowd of cheering supporters. He made the most of it, as chiling and distressing as that might be.
Those who have made up their minds on Trump — those who love him and hate him — undoubtedly found plenty of justification for their opinions watching, ignoring, or doom scrolling his performance.
But what about the casual observer, the disaffected, the persuadable? Trump knows how to command a stage. He knows how to go on the attack. And the format CNN gift-wrapped for him allowed him to score a mark.
There is a school of thought that Trump is so toxic that the more America sees of him, the less they like him. And there were moments last night that could easily be plugged into effective attack ads against him. But what we should have learned from 2016 and the years that followed is that people as shameless as Trump do not measure their success by metrics of civility. It’s about demonstrating primal dominance, and that instinct delivered him the presidency once before. And even though he lost reelection, he remade American politics in ways with which we are still contending.
Trump played the part CNN surely knew he would play. What did they hope to get from normalizing this demeaning and dangerous demagogue? Ratings? Relevance? A tack to the mythic “middle” in line with new ownership and direction? Trying to become some new version of Fox News? Is any of this worth endangering the health and security of our country?
When CNN announced that they would give Donald Trump more than an hour of free prime time for a “town hall” (more like a town maul), it was clear what was going to happen.
Trump would lie, and bully, and insult, and lie, and lie, and lie some more. That is who he is. It is who he has always been.
There is no moderating a discussion with Trump. It is nearly impossible to engage in dialogue by asking probing follow-up questions. Because he will just ignore them. And lie and lie and lie. And this is especially true when he has an audience that seemed hand-picked to double as a campaign rally — hooting and hollering with approval the more he launched into his mendacious invective.
The press will have to figure out how to cover Trump as he stomps his way toward renomination. Liars should not be given open mics in formats where they can filibuster falsehoods unchallenged. Edit what he says with context. Do not sugarcoat how untrue many of his rantings are.
America rejected Trump in 2020. He is further weakened by the court cases he faces. But he remains a potent force. He will get his message out. Let us hope the press will analyze it, not amplify it.
The future of not only American journalism, but of America itself, will be shaped by how Trump is covered going forward.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
CNN did this for one reason: Ratings. Grifters gotta grift.
Agreed. Since the advent of the internet and social media gone ballistically insane, the traditional media is thrashing around in confusion, desperate to survive.
Along the way, the rules of journalism that existed before the internet are being trashed.
CNN shows that they have lowered themselves to compete with the worst of the worst on social media.
The likes of Alex Jones and FOX showed them that broadcasting lies pays off and CNN decided to jump in that toxic sandbox and join in the lunacy… to survive and keep the paychecks coming in.
CNN also has a new CEO.
Chris Licht
His salary is said to be around $3 million per year. Licht got a degree in broadcast journalism and political science from Syracuse University’s S.
Licht, who took over CNN last year after the network was acquired by Warner Bros. Discovery, has had a rocky tenure, and some journalists there have bristled at his public comments that the network had veered too far into an anti-Trump stance when Mr. Trump was in the White House.
Lickt made comments that he thought CNN had veered to far into an anti-Trump stance…
I think that’s all we need to know why CNN let Traitor Trump have a national spotlight focused on him for an hour where he was free to spew his lies and hate with total freedom.
The interviews with the Trump voters that CNN held as part of this fiasco were just what one would expect.
Well, I don’t know anything about that.
I’ll vote for him anyway.
Well, that’s not what he says.
And so on.
A nation of idiots, following The Idiot.
And CNN enabling this.
Again.
Not a “nation” of idiots.
Still, borrowing and revising a famous quote from Lincoln.
“You can fool all of the people some of time; you can fool some of the people all of the time, but you can’t fool all the people all the time.” Attributed to Abraham Lincoln in The New York Times, August 27, 1887.
In Trump world, the idiots are the people he fools all of the time. Since there are millions of them, the fact that they are dumber than dumb and easy to fool makes them more than dangerous.
A few days ago, I stumbled on a news bite of Marjorie Taylor Greene giving a rabid speech to a MAGA merch wearing audience and I heard this come out of her mouth: We have to take back our country and throw out the trash.
To Traitor Trump’s rabid MAGA-RINO mob, the real trash, we are the trash if we do not agree with them 100%.
Thank you, Mr. Rather. We seriously need you AT THE HEAD of one of these major news networks.
Dan Rather was fired from CBS for unprofessional conduct regarding the George W. Bush/National Guard story. He has made clear for many years since then that he is a rabid partisan. We need ethical journalists to cover important stories, not cheerleaders for any politician or any partisan cause. ALL the broadcast networks and ALL the cable networks – emphatically including Fox – currently pander to their audiences and slant stories to advance preferred narratives. A pox on all their houses.
I followed that story closely and Dan Rather was fired because of a reporting mistake by his producer. It wasn’t an intentional misrepresentation of the facts – it was the same lack of proper fact checking that happens all the time and is regularly corrected. When the lack of fact checking makes a Republican look bad, heads will roll, and when the lack of fact checking makes a Democrat look bad, it’s shrugged off as an “oopsie”.
CNN got played and it was probably successful Republican misinformation – a dirty trick. Some people thought the the Steele Dossier was a similar disinformation effort.
When a candidate is accused of something very bad, that is likely to seriously damage him, and that something is true!, how can a dirty trick distract people from the truth?
In the National Guard story, the entire premise was supported by a lot of unimpeachable evidence. But in addition to the unimpeachable evidence, there was a letter that turned out to be fraudulent. The CNN producers’ fell for it, didn’t properly vet it (although they did try, just not well enough), and included a reference to it as a small part of the story.
Despite the huge weight of evidence in the story being accurate, the far right cited the “fake” letter to discredit the entire story, and CNN fired a lot of people.
(If this would have been a Democrat, the news media would have minimized that one piece of evidence was uncorroborated and amplified all the evidence that the main thrust of the story was provably true, instead of immediately allowing the entire story to be discredited.)
There were other suspected dirty tricks when Karl Rove was running GWBush’s campaign. Including the Bush debate prep book sent specifically to the Congressman who was helping Gore prepare for debates. The Congressman didn’t fall for it, and got it to the FBI, but it was a win-win for Bush. Had the Congressman kept the book, the Bush campaign would accuse the Gore campaign of cheating. As it was, the Congressman had to recuse himself from all Gore debate prep. The chances that a low-level Bush campaign staffer in Texas knew specifically which former Congressman was helping Gore prepare and would find the mailing address of that Congressman’s current lobbying firm in DC and mail them a package is suspect. More likely someone higher up in the Bush campaign knew who to send it to for maximum effect. Like Karl Rove.
Dan Rather looks like a saint compared to today’s on air reporters. And if that mistake had been made in a story about Gore or Kerry, it would have been presented as just a rounding error. Both were smeared with exaggerated allegations where there wasn’t even underlying wrongdoing!
^^Correction: Dan Rather was never fired. In fact, he wasn’t even implicated or accused of unprofessional conduct. He agreed to step down from CBS Evening news months later.
Dan Rather was fired from CBS for doing responsible journalism.
Pampered party boy GB Jr. went AWOL from the limited service that he did, and then his rich and powerful Daddy fixed the problem for him.
Mike-
CBS (news department run by former Fox exec.), ABC, NBC and CNN “pander” to the corporate structures that own them. It explains why all of their coverage seems similar.
It explains why we as an audience aren’t hearing about men like Koch and ALEC. With the the exception of Fox, network news does fact checking and punishes for false stories.
I recommend reading the Guardian or Politico for original content.
Imagine if during Bill Clinton’s impeachment, CNN had put together an audience of the most rabid Bill Clinton supporters and had a “town hall”.
That would never happen.
The problem with the CNN broadcast wasn’t just the CNN reporter. It was that the format was set up so that the entire audience was hand picked to be on Trump’s side, defending him and cheering him.
If CNN had interviewed Hitler in the middle of a Nuremberg rally, it would look something like the forum they gave Trump.
The analogy with Bill Clinton doesn’t work because he is not, was not, an ignorant narcissistic sociopath.
Good point! And despite that, Clinton still would never have been given a town hall with an audience of rabid fans on CNN. I guess CNN only gives that courtesy to narcissistic sociopaths.
CNN’s ‘Trump Show’ was a feeble attempt from a desperate company with low viewer ratings attempting to get high ratings out of Trump’s ‘shock value.’ If CNN were the least bit ethical, it would broadcast a retraction with a fact check on all of Trump’s lies. CNN raked in 3.3 million viewers from this pathetic stunt.
YUP! ….TRUE! “ Trump would lie, and bully, and insult, and lie, and lie, and lie some more. That is who he is. It is who he has always been.”
CNN = 👎🤢👎🤮👎😱!
Could not agree more. The new CEO C. Licht comes from comedy sector. This was all sensationalism. PURE disgusting entertainment. He is making some really bad decisions.
Networks made a big mistake placing news in the entertainment division. It has led to the dumbing down, and trivialization of the news, and they all have to chase ratings to keep advertisers happy.
Reportedly, Tucker Carlson didn’t have to keep advertisers happy. New model, cable companies pay the big salaries for ratings?
And cable TV is often forced on people as a result. For example, at my previous apartment complex, I had to pay an extra $50/mo for cable TV, though I never ever watch cable TV. It made me furious that I am supporting Fox as a result.
Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo reports that “CNN set audience ground rules for the Trump town hall which allowed audience members to cheer Trump but not boo him.”
Then TPM has an excerpt from a different sourcer:
“They did some warm up with the audience ahead of time. One of the questions was, Are there any conditions? And Kaitlan said, No, there are no conditions. And someone asked if [Trump] knew the questions ahead of time and she said he didn’t. I think a lot of people were prepared to ask questions. The floor manager came out ahead of time and said, Please do not boo, please be respectful. You were allowed to applaud. And I think that set the tone where people were going to try their best to keep this between the navigational beacons, and that if they felt compelled to applaud, they would, but they weren’t going to have an outburst or they weren’t going to boo an answer.
I don’t know what it looked like on camera, but when he was talking about certain things, whether it was the paper he took out of his pocket or on the tweets, I do feel as if he lost the audience, especially at times when he was litigating January 6th or the election. It just didn’t seem to resonate with everybody. There was a feeling of bewilderment. Again, there were plenty of people there that no matter what he said, they loved it. But there were plenty of people there with a healthy dose of New Hampshire Yankee skepticism, and were there to either talk, ask questions or to listen.”
First – IF the democrats could get their act together, they could use this broadcast’s blatant lies and disregard for anyone and collect independents and the under 30-year old. And then maybe they might vote, too.
Broken record but at some point they need to hear it and grasp how dangerous he is.
I miss Walter Cronkite and Ed Bradley.
Democrats miss so many opportunities to exploit the GOP’s lies and failures that I sometimes want to scream, “Wake up!”
“And the format CNN gift-wrapped for him allowed him to score a mark. ”
It’s not clear why people give airtime for Trump and friends, and this includes the (mostly liberal!) talk show hosts. Why do they assume that showing and quoting a lot of Trump convinces people about how bad he is? It’s like regularly giving people tobacco or marijuana and expect that they will decide not to smoke. Yeah, some will not smoke, but many will get hooked.
Just see many of the late night talk shows. They seem to be out of material without their daily Trump dosage. They seem to have run out of steam without a monster to quote and hate.
We all need to learn to be interested in and entertained by good and interesting news and people.
When the news channels don’t report the truths, instead, they played party-favorites, leaning towards one political party or the other, then, it’s time for us all, to, turn off the news and, stop, ourselves from, being polluted by the, news media.