How Cable News Anchors and Reporters Are Rigging Impeachment Trial in Trump's Favor

[Mr. Sparkle]

Former President Donald Trump’s Senate impeachment trial for inciting the Capitol insurrection starts Tuesday, but TV news anchors and reporters have been spending weeks helping to rig the results against conviction. Since the House voted to impeach Trump, not even a month ago, variations on the sentiment “Senate Republicans are unlikely to convict” have been uttered hundreds of times by television news anchors, reporters, analysts, and others — according to the Internet Archive. That air of inevitability is exactly what Republicans have taken great pains to project in order to avoid the political consequences of a devastating vote, and news anchors and reporters who go along with it are drafting themselves as propaganda tools.

I’m not going to call them out by name because it is literally almost all of them, but Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar provided an apt rebuttal to this notion in an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper Monday night. “Republican Senator [James] Lankford said today on impeachment, quote: ‘I don’t know of anyone that their mind is not made up.,” Cooper told Klobuchar, and asked “Do you think he’s right?”

The “unlikely” argument isn’t fabricated out of thin air, it’s based on things like public statements by Republicans and a Senate vote on the trial’s constitutionality. And if this were a betting parlor, the smart money would be on an acquittal. But predicting is not reporting, or at least, it shouldn’t be in this case.The public statements — like Lankford’s — and the vote against the trial are as much, or more, political maneuvers as they are predictors of future votes. If at-risk Republicans can create an aura of inevitability, it makes it much easier for them to blend in with the crowd in the event Trump is acquitted in a landslide vote.

But if the vote is a closer affair (or is seen as one) than is currently being projected, it becomes much more difficult to be among the 5 or even 10 votes that allow Trump to skate. And this inevitability coverage obscures what a tough vote this actually is — without, as Klobuchar notes, even a shred of evidence having been presented at trial as yet.

For weeks, polls have consistently shown that a very solid majority of Americans want Trump convicted and banned for life from holding federal office, including a full 30 percent of Republicans who favor the latter penalty in one recent poll. Add to that the fact that Republican leaders in both houses of Congress have already conceded that Trump incited the Capitol insurrection, and a vote to acquit becomes substantively impossible to defend.

Reporting on “expectations” is an already unfortunate intrusion into political reporting, but it is unconscionable when it has a direct effect on the results. Analysts and commentators are one thing, but reporters and anchors are affecting the outcome of the vote by shielding Republicans from the very political pressure that could lead them to follow their consciences. They should stop.

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https://www.mediaite.com/opinion/how-cable-news-anchors-and-reporters-are-rigging-impeachment-trial-in-trumps-favor/

[Karadeniz]

1. So true!

[msfiddlestix]

2. Yeppers, I completely agree with this analysis

[global1]

3. Yep!!! If That's What They Expect Us To Do......

that's what we'll do. We'll vote to acquit. They are all saying it - so we must do what the news anchors and reporters are saying we'll do.

[Silent3]

4. While I think the media is often guilty of slanted narratives...

...if anyone had asked me in a TV interview if the Senate was likely to convict Trump, I'd have said it was unlikely too. Not because I'd have been trying to push a narrative, and certainly not because that's what I want to happen. I'm hugely in favor of Trump being convicted.

But I'm also extremely cynical, and I think rightly so, about enough Republican Senators being willing to do the right thing. I think we'll get more than one Republican vote this time, but I'd guess it'll be around 5-6 votes. 10 would shock me. 17 is a big, big stretch goal.

Do you think people in the media should lie about their honest opinions, being afraid that honest doubt makes dire predictions more likely, and instead pretend that they think Trump will be convicted, somehow making Trump's conviction more likely by claiming it is likely to happen?

[PRETZEL]

5. I think it's sort of a fine line

between daytime reporting and the more opiniated prime time lineup.

But that's a fine line that has always been drawn, unless your Fox.