The question of how to cover the former president’s current campaign hung in the air as CNN, MSNBC and some streaming outlets started — then stopped — showing Trump’s speech following Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary. There was little hand-wringing at Fox News Channel and Newsmax, networks that appeal to Trump supporters. They carried the former president’s remarks in full. Outlets weigh whether an event’s newsworthiness justifies live coverage when there’s a risk Trump will make false statements that are difficult, if not impossible, to correct in real time — or go completely off script with something entirely unexpected. (Matt Rourke/AP)
With Election Coverage, Local TV News Gets A Last Run At Trust
This year’s election offers television stations an opportunity to rebuild trust with viewers by super-serving them with substantive coverage of the candidates and a forum for debates.
MSNBC’s Katy Tur implores America to pay attention as she takes her show on the road to New Hampshire and continues to contextualize misinformation coming out of the primary race saying, “It’s a battle that we’re all fighting in all aspects of our lives, every day.”
For News Streaming, Election Is Proving Ground
Executives from CNN, ABC News, E.W. Scripps, Gray and Yahoo say the 2020 election provides them an opportunity to build on the audiences surges they’ve seen on their streaming platforms since the pandemic.
Conventions, election night and the campaign trail will look a lot different on TV to political junkies as the 2020 race heats up.
Continuing their commitment to serve their local Spanish-speaking audiences with important news around this year’s elections and create a venue to discuss critical and relevant issues for Latino communities, Telemundo […]
Exclusives
The Price Point | Why Viewers Trust Local Political Coverage
Hank Price: “Every local general manager and news director is well aware of their need to constantly build and maintain viewer trust. Trust is not optional. To lose it is to go out of business.”
State Party Chairman Trav Robertson granted MSNBC exclusive live rights to this weekend’s party convention and other media organizations are not pleased. C-SPAN says it shuts them out of a previously open political event it has covered live for many years. Journalist Roland Martin, former host at TV One, said the “terrible” decision hurts black-owned media outlets. Fox News Channel lodged a complaint.
“A great disservice to the audience.” That’s how ABC News President James Goldston described the inaccurate assumptions that drove flawed coverage of the last presidential election. With 20/20 hindsight, mainstream media missed the story. With 2020 foresight, network news executives are determined not to let that happen again.
CNN, Fox News Are ‘Bad For Democracy’
New York Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet thinks the two cable outlets’ coverage of the election has been “ridiculous. This mix of entertainment and news, and news masquerading as entertainment, is kind of funny except that we now have a guy who is a product of that world nominated as Republican presidential nominee,” he said in an interview, blasting CNN’s hire of Corey Lewandowski and defending his own paper’s Trump coverage.
In speeches, tweets and TV appearances, Mr. Trump and his backers in recent days suggested he would be ahead in the polls if the media didn’t favor his opponent, Democrat Hillary Clinton. “If the disgusting and corrupt media covered me honestly and didn’t put false meaning into the words I say, I would be beating Hillary by 20%,” Trump tweeted Sunday.
The media loomed large this primary season, with accusations of bias being thrown in every direction and one candidate in particular — Donald Trump — showing a willingness to mix it up with big journalistic names in person and on Twitter. But as the dust settles after long struggles in both parties, who are the winners and losers from within the media ranks?
News organizations wonder how to avoid a lopsided view of the election race as Donald Trump seems to relish airtime, while Hillary Clinton does not.
Hard To Find The Money Behind Political Ads
Lots of stories I cover in media make me angry. But few leave me actually disheartened about the role media play in our lives. I have long been decrying the role of dark money, hidden persuaders and stealth media efforts to win votes and shape election outcomes. But I mainly thought about the problem as a national one, focusing on presidential and congressional races. This spring, it got local and personal for me.
Veteran political journalist Mike Sacks will lead the station group’s national coverage from Washington as part of Scripps’ commitment to air 100 minutes of political coverage each week in the 45 days leading up to Election Day on all of its stations.
Megyn Kelly will interview Donald Trump in her Fox special Megyn Kelly Presents that’s slotted to air on May 17. This will be Kelly’s first one-on-one interview with Trump since their fiery encounter at the August 2015 GOP Presidential primary debate.
Three years ago — in the far less political year of 2013 — political news accounted for 816 million monthly minutes of usage, according to Comscore. In February, 2016, it accounted for 2.364 billion minutes, almost a tripling. February has been a high-water mark, but political news hit one billion minutes in June of 2015 and has grown steadily since.
The stunning, surreal, headline-making, no-one-saw-it-coming 2016 campaign has been a boon to cable news, but the broadcast evening newscasts aren’t seeing the same kind of viewership lift — in fact, no lift at all.
Katz Election Report Reveals Key Voter Findings
Wanted: Less Terrible TV Political Coverage
Everyone knows there’s a problem with televised political coverage. The big question is how to fix it. Whether it’s cable news or the Sunday morning talk shows, something just doesn’t seem right. One gets the sense that they’re flailing, that the world has changed, but they haven’t. That they’re trying to figure out how to make it work, but so far it’s not coming together.
Rosen: Journos Need POV To Stay Relevant
New York University Professor Jay Rosen about how journalists can handle polarization when covering politics: “Instead of trying to stay in the middle between polarized extremes and avoid criticism, political journalists and their bosses could recognize that there is no escape from charges of bias because these charges are just a further aspect of polarization.”
The station group renews its fact-checking partnership with PolitiFact and expands its digital coverage.
In addition to re-upping with the fact-checking website of the Tampa Bay Times, Hearst Television is also launching a series of issues-discussion town halls throughout New Hampshire. “Conventional wisdom may hold that television stations relax political news coverage during non-election years, but the reality is different,” says David Barrett, Hearst Television CEO. “Increasingly, politics never sleeps.”
The group owner says the show, criticized by some as having an anti-Obama bias, was “hard-hitting, but it was fair.”
Columbus TV Set For A Long Election Night
With both the Obama and Romney campaigns in desperate need of Ohio’s 18 electoral votes, all eyes will be on the state tonight. And the three news-producing stations in the state capital — WBNS, WCMH and WSYX — will be tracking and analyzing returns from across the state, watching for problems at polling places and keeping tabs on Republican and Democratic headquarters. “We are preparing for a scenario where we might not know who the president is at 11 p.m. Tuesday night,” said WBNS ND Elbert Tucker.
Television, in short, has pretty much decided the GOP race is over, Mitt Romney has won, the thing is boring everyone to death, and it’s time, at least for now, to move on. The campaign is occupying less front-page real estate in the major papers as well. What happened?
The group owner says its stations gave free time to 151 congressional and gubernatorial candidates across the U.S. during the 2010 elections.
