CNN to Fox News, Trump indictment coverage could make or break us
LA TimesAnother week, another Donald Trump arraignment Never mind that the third and most recent indictment of the former president portends the highest-profile criminal trial in U.S. history, and, should it result in a conviction, a crime that would make Watergate look like a parking ticket. The cognitive dissonance between the magnitude of the event and the “Oh, it must be Tuesday in Trump’s America” reaction it generated illuminates the challenges a frenetic news media faces in covering our glacially paced legal system. Thankfully, the complicated state and federal legal system that’s produced multiple investigations of and cases against Trump could care less about the needs of CNN or The Times, much less TikTok. The irony is that special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into Trump’s actions around the 2020 election and in the lead-up to the Jan. 6 insurrection has been characterized as “high velocity.” In June, he also indicted Trump, charging him with risking national security by taking classified documents out of the White House. With so much empty space to fill, the right-wing media’s dangerous tendency to concoct alternative narratives and feed conspiracy theories is certain to ramp up, and when every new incident is presented as an affront to Republicans or a mainstream lie, how does a viewer discern between a monumental event in the history of our democracy or just another group grouse with “The Five”?