On Sunday night, Ben Smith, the editor of Semafor, introduced his weekly media newsletter with the words “there isn’t always a media angle.” This struck me as a strange thing to write on a weekend when a shooter tried to assassinate Donald Trump and Trump’s allies lined up to blame it on the media and its coverage of his threats to democracy, and Smith quickly appeared to contradict himself. He noted calls from leading politicians, including President Biden, to “lower the temperature” of the national discourse, and added that “you can see journalists trying.” The real-time coverage of the assassination attempt, Smith observed, “was careful to a fault.”
As Sunday turned to Monday, that dynamic appeared to recur in other corners of the media business. The Daily Show with Jon Stewart scrapped its plans to broadcast from the Republican National Convention, which was just about to kick off in Milwaukee, and canceled Monday night’s episode entirely. The New York Times did run an editorial calling Trump unfit to be president in its Sunday print edition—but Kathleen Kingsbury, the opinion editor, explained that this was because the print deadline had fallen before the assassination attempt, and that the piece would not otherwise have been printed when it was. (The editorial had already been published online as part of an ongoing series about Trump; following the shooting, Kingsbury said that “we have held off on further online publication for the time being.”) Then, on Monday morning, MSNBC’s flagship panel show, Morning Joe, failed to air. A source told CNN’s Oliver Darcy that it had been preempted in case a guest said something that could be used to bash the show or the network as a whole.
MSNBC “emphatically” denied Darcy’s story, saying that it had preempted Morning Joe to prioritize news coverage; The Daily Show said that its schedule change was a result of logistical considerations, while Kingsbury, for her part, stood behind the Times editorial’s actual conclusions about Trump. Still, various media critics saw the decisions as evidence of cowardice, or something like it. (Parker Molloy accused the Times opinion section of “Orwellian, obeying-in-advance nonsense.”) These specific criticisms chimed, perhaps, with a selection of broader commentary warning journalists (and others) against shying away from forthright coverage of Trump in the wake of the shooting and the resultant Republican blame game. “Nobody seems to have language to say: We abhor, reject, repudiate, and punish all political violence, even as we maintain that Trump remains himself a promoter of such violence, a subverter of American institutions, and the very opposite of everything decent and patriotic in American life,” David Frum wrote in The Atlantic. Rolling Stone was blunter, writing in a headline: “Trump Allies Try to Bully Dems, Media to Shut Up About His Fascist Plans.”
Rolling Stone suggested that this reflected a conscious Republican strategy to capitalize on the aftermath of the shooting. Other outlets reported that, as part of that strategy, party leaders, including Trump, were planning to publicly change their tone and pivot to a message of unity. On Sunday, Trump himself told the Washington Examiner that he had ripped up the speech he’d planned to give at the convention: it was “going to be a humdinger,” he said, but “it’s going to be a whole different speech now.” And yet there were also indications that party officials did not want the shooting to overshadow the political message of the convention. “Letting the shooting win the day means overshadowing the party’s message attacking on the border, economy and crime,” Politico wrote. Later, we learned that a vice-presidential pick was imminent.
But first, late yesterday morning, the news cycle intervened—or, rather, Judge Aileen M. Cannon of the Southern District of Florida did, by publishing an extraordinary ruling in which she threw out the criminal case against Trump over his alleged mishandling of classified documents on the grounds that Jack Smith, the special counsel prosecuting the case, was appointed unconstitutionally. On CNN, Dana Bash introduced a panel segment by promising to get to the Trump shooting right after they’d discussed the documents ruling; Bash’s colleague David Chalian noted that her setup reflected “the story of this campaign, right? We’ll get to the massive story after we deal with the massive story.” Trump, for his part, put out a Truth Social post in which he insisted that “we move forward in Uniting our Nation” by also throwing out other “Witch Hunts”—including the “Hoax” January 6 case—that he characterized as an “Election Interference conspiracy against Joe Biden’s Political Opponent, ME.” HuffPost’s S.V. Dáte shared the statement. “Looks like that New Tone lasted… seven minutes?” he wrote. “Six?”
A few hours later, Trump posted again to announce his running mate: J.D. Vance, the Republican senator for Ohio, most recently seen blaming the Biden campaign for the Trump shooting and assailing CNN as “ghouls” for its cautious coverage of the aftermath. The Vance pick quickly met with some sharp media coverage, including—perhaps surprisingly (then again, perhaps not)—on Fox News, where talking heads pointed to his past criticism of Trump and wondered whether he’d gotten the gig by sucking up. The otherwise-off-air Daily Show tweeted “INSPIRATIONAL: This Ohio man overcame the debilitating burden of his own principles”; the Times ran a series of stories that more soberly addressed the same theme, while an old Atlantic essay in which Vance called Trump “cultural heroin” did the rounds online. So, too, did a new piece by Vox that ran down Vance’s authoritarian positions, including his claim that he would have moved to overturn the 2020 election if he had been vice president, and the time he called for a criminal probe of a Washington Post op-ed writer. A CNN pundit called Vance a “firebrand.”
And—less than forty-eight hours after a Republican congressman called the New Republic “bastards,” in the wake of the shooting, for having compared Trump to Hitler—the comparison was all over the news: thanks to Vance, who himself reportedly ventured it in a text to a friend in 2016. In the two hours after Trump announced Vance, the word “Hitler” came up at least four times on CNN. By my count, the word “assassination” only came up five times. The news cycle comes at you fast.
Later, Vance sat for an interview with Sean Hannity on Fox and blamed his past Hitler and heroin comments on the press. “I bought into the media’s lies and distortions,” he said. “I bought into the idea that somehow [Trump] was going to be so different, a terrible threat to democracy. It was a joke. Joe Biden is the one who’s trying to throw his political opposition in jail.” By this point, though, the assassination attempt was once again front and center in coverage. Trump appeared at the convention with a bandage over his ear and, some observers detected, tears in his eyes; major outlets hailed the significance of the moment and its raw emotion. At one point, CNN interviewed Trump’s son Eric about the shooting. “If you have disagreements on political issues, that’s fine, but it should not be demonized,” he said, without facing the slightest pushback. As he spoke, Ron Johnson, the Republican senator from Wisconsin, could be seen onstage behind him, giving a speech in which he described Democratic policies as a “clear and present danger to America.” Amna Nawaz, of PBS, asked Johnson whether this was really a message of unity. He replied that the teleprompter operators had loaded the wrong speech.
The assassination attempt was also front and center in an interview that NBC’s Lester Holt taped with Biden at the White House. (They were supposed to talk in Texas, where Biden had been slated to travel to mark the anniversary of the Civil Rights Act, but the trip was scrapped due to the shooting.) Holt asked Biden about recent reports that he encouraged allies to put Trump in a “bull’s-eye”; Biden said that he’d been referring to the idea of focusing on Trump’s agenda and that his use of the word was a mistake, but Holt pressed on, asking Biden whether he had “taken a step back and done a little soul searching on things that you may have said that could incite people who are not balanced?” “How do you talk about the threat to democracy, which is real, when a president says things like he says?” Biden replied, referring to Trump. “Do you just not say anything because it may incite somebody?” He went on to list examples of Trump’s violent rhetoric. “This doesn’t sound like you’re turning down the heat,” Holt said.
Holt’s line of questioning enraged various media observers, and so the day ended as it had started: with media critics lobbing accusations of cowardice at a program under the NBC umbrella. It also ended with some of the same broader commentary about the need to continue holding Trump accountable following the shooting—including on MSNBC, where Joy Reid addressed concerns that the media would now “acquiesce to trying to convince people that the things they’ve been experiencing for the last five or six years didn’t happen” and allow Trump to “rewrite himself as both a hero and a victim.” The people Reid had been talking to, she said, “don’t accept the rewrite.”
This morning, her colleagues at Morning Joe returned to the airwaves and expressed disappointment and confusion at their bosses’ decision to preempt yesterday’s show. Morning Joe is “the place where you can go to have the hard conversations in a civil way,” Mika Brzezinski, the cohost, said. “And so it seemed like now, more than ever, is a day, a time, that we would like to be on. And I think our viewers agree with that.”
Other notable stories:
- The Republican convention will continue today and run through Thursday, when Trump will give his speech; Vance is expected to speak on Wednesday, while Tucker Carlson will at some point have a speaking slot, according to the Times. Networks have already entered special-coverage mode, but the assassination attempt has reportedly scrambled some of their plans; Semafor’s Max Tani reports that at least two networks have implemented enhanced security measures at the convention, and that CNN “decided to keep some of its highest profile anchors away from Milwaukee for the first days of the convention.” (CNN said that logistics, not security, was the decisive factor.) Meanwhile, Nawaz and Geoff Bennett, of PBS, spoke about how the shooting will affect the substance of their coverage of the convention; the Daily Beast has more details.
- Yesterday, staffers at the Salt Lake Tribune, the Utah newspaper that converted to nonprofit status a few years ago, announced their intention to form a union. In a letter to management, the staffers raised concerns around pageview quotas and requested voluntary recognition; bosses said they would begin working through the request. The Deseret News has more. In other local-news news, Sahan Journal, an innovative newsroom serving immigrants and people of color in Minnesota, appointed Vanan Murugesan as its executive director, succeeding its founder, Mukhtar M. Ibrahim. And the Washington Post’s Elahe Izadi has more on the launch of The 51st, a worker-run newsroom founded by former staffers at DCist, which was shut down earlier this year.
- On Sunday—amid scenes of chaos outside the stadium that was hosting the final of the Copa América soccer tournament in Miami—local police forcibly ejected an Argentinian journalist who was interviewing fans who were struggling to get in; La Nación has more (in Spanish). In other press-freedom news, a court in Russia convicted Masha Gessen, the celebrated US columnist, in absentia on charges of spreading false information about the country’s military, and sentenced them to eight years in prison. And Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal reporter jailed in Russia, will be back in court this week for a hearing in a closed trial that has been denounced as a sham.
- Over the weekend, dozens of journalists rallied in Israel in protest of a shakeup at Channel 13, a TV network that has tapped a reported ally of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to run its news division and that recently scrapped an investigative show whose host, per the Times of Israel, has “long been a thorn in Netanyahu’s side.” That journalist, Raviv Drucker, told an “Emergency Conference to Save Channel 13” in Tel Aviv that “our biggest enemy is the feeling that we’re against a powerful, sophisticated monster, that we are no match for it, and that there is no point to the struggle.”
- And the Denver Post’s Bruce Finley reports on a newspaper war in Colorado that has “veered toward violence with editors armed, lawsuits flying, and threats from riled-up residents forcing the closure of a 140-year-old Main Street newsroom for safety.” The president of the Sangre de Cristo Sentinel has blasted the Wet Mountain Tribune as “extremely liberal” and its editor, Jordan Hedberg, as “Jordy Red Bug.” A Tribune reporter has called the Sentinel “the neo-fascist agitprop pamphlet up the street.”
ICYMI: The cynicism of blaming the media for the Trump assassination attempt
Jon Allsop is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Review of Books, Foreign Policy, and The Nation, among other outlets. He writes CJR’s newsletter The Media Today. Find him on Twitter @Jon_Allsop.