NBC News shows us how not to interview Trump
A Trump interview is the ultimate legacy media thirst trap.
A Trump interview is the ultimate legacy media thirst trap. Oh, how they desire the ratings, the social media engagement and the chatter a “Trump bump” will give them. And yet isn’t it obvious at this point that probably the best way to do an interview with Trump as news is to tape the interview segment and then edit him, with intermittent factchecks? Unfortunately, such a format would not make anywhere near a ratings splash, because the TrumpWorld media would inevitably boycott such a production.
Legacy media, in the hour of the wolf, craves relevancy. It is not a good time to be a legacy television news network — just ask the staffers at ABC News. Further, the Sunday morning political talk show as a pillar of the forth estate is not what is was twenty years ago — or even ten. Nowadays, Republican candidates have the option of getting their talking points across on Sunday mornings with sympathetic media, not, as they used to have to do, with media platforms like Meet the Press. It would appear that it is easier to steer an ocean liner than for the longest running show on television to course-correct with the times. Trump knows this. It is baked into his stump speeches and rallies. As crude and shameless as Trump is, he is a fairly sophisticated media observer. He is also getting better and better at outmaneuvering old, limp legacy media organizations.
But have we learned nothing from the 2016 campaign? Are we doomed to repeat that debacle? Have beltway journalists not enlarged their collective toolbox in dealing with Trump’s rhetorical tactics since the embarrassing CNN Town Hall? Apparently, not.
It was supposed to be a “refresh,” or a fresh start. It was meant to introduce up-and-coming correspondent Kristen Welker to the audience of NBC’s Meet the Press, the network’s flagship political program. “The interview was pretaped to allow the network to fact-check Trump,” the Philadelphia Inquirer, Welker’s hometown newspaper, reminded us beforehand. Which is all the more reason to highlight the interview’s improvident failures.
Welker should have known and, quite frankly, done better. She has covered the White House for NBC since 2011 and moderated one of the 2020 presidential debate between Trump and Biden. And yet she was overwhelmed by the sheer volume of Trump’s lies and shameless bigotry. Right out of the gate, Trump went after migrants — much like he did on his golden escalator announcement in 2015, demonizing Mexican immigrants as “rapists.” “They come from prisons,” he told Welker of the current migrants. “They come from mental institutions, insane asylums. They say, ‘Sir, please don’t use that term,’ but it’s true. They’re terrorists at a level …”
No, its not true. And where did he read that, if indeed he read that anywhere. NBC News, unfortunately, has learned nothing in the intervening years since the golden escalator moment, when mainstream media organizations were caught so flat-footed. Welker allowed Trump to continue, when she should have fact-checked him that migrants seeking documentation are not terrorists or from “insane asylums.”
Daniel Dale of CNN found 14 unchallenged false claims made by Trump by 6pm that evening. So, where was NBC News, which had the tape for longer than that? One unchallenged claim regarding late-term abortions was that some states that are allowed to kill the child after birth.” This claim is so fabulist — such an obvious creation of a false reality — that it cannot even be properly construed under the category of lie. Its another kettle of fish altogether. Trump further lamented the price of bacon, lying that it had increased five-fold since the Biden administration. From Oliver Darcy at Reliable Sources:
Welker allowed Trump to make a number of statements wholly untethered to reality on a range of critical issues without tenacious, resolute, or meaningful pushback. Trump, a rapid-fire lie machine, did his usual song and dance. He lied about the election. He lied about the insurrection that his lies had spawned. And he lied about pretty much every topic that Welker broached.
Throughout it all, Welker seemed ill-equipped to handle Trump's trademark bravado. Lacking any noticeable fire in her belly, she at times timidly tried to set the facts straight. But Welker lacked the necessary fervor and apparent grasp of the subject material the massive platform requires to effectively counter Trump, who as The New York Times chief White House correspondent Peter Baker later told her, is like a "bulldozer shoveling falsehoods." Trump clearly smelled weakness in the air, taking control of the interview as he ignored Welker's hopeless — yet constant — pleas to "stay on track" and continued flooding the zone with outrageous lies.
"Mr. President, let me just ask this question, please—," she pleaded at one point.
It was a low moment in Welker's otherwise pristine career.
What went wrong? Well, perhaps it was Welker’s preparation, or lack thereof. “NBC chose a ‘zero innovations’ model for how to conduct and present a Trump interview at this stage in his degradation,” is how media critic Jay Rosen characterized the proceedings. “Everything was predictable, nothing was surprising, and new host Kristen Welker did nothing to justify going to the well again with another Trump Q & A.” This is accurate, which leads to the question — why did her bosses at NBC News put her in this position, in her debut at the helm of such a prized possession?
In the hand off with Chuck Todd, Welker noted, “I’m ready because you have helped me get ready ... you have invested in me.” Her style, much like Chuck’s, is the old legacy media approach to guests. To be “right down the middle.” Not to be so contentious as to alienate further possible guests from the opposition party. This approach worked, more or less, in the past because both sides — right and left — operated from the same set of facts. That is, of course, no longer the case. One side now clearly traffics in “alternative facts.”
Welker’s questions seemed calculated to rasp, for sure, but they also allowed Trump much too much room to outmaneuver her. As authoritarian expert Ruth Ben-Ghiat noted, Welker's questions seemed to have yawning chasms in within, allowing the former President to portray himself as a victim of a corrupt government. Which he did, of course, with the gusto of the aggrieved. Why didn’t Welker anticipate this? It is classic Trump playbook behavior. The silence of NBC News speaks volumes about their shame. Welker asking Trump what he sees when he looks at his mugshot is a perfect example of a very bad question.
Bill Carter said it best. “Non-stop confrontation is the only way.” An interviewer has to get on top of Trump when he starts constructing cathedrals of out of lies and fact-check him on the spot, all the while refusing to let the interview proceed until each lie individually has been confronted. “Persistently forensic” is how Peter Clark phrased it on Twitter. Can this actually be done in real time? Jonathan Swan actually did this for Axios. For example, when Trump said that he did more for African-Americans than any other President with the exception of Lincoln, Swan asked if that included Lyndon Johnson, who passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Trump was actually forced to slow down his torrential downpour of bull-feathers to defend his ridiculously obnoxious position. His ego demanded it. And in so doing, he sounded like an ass.
This is how you interview Trump. Either the Jonathan Swan model of the “persistently forensic,” or a pretaped interview with intermittent fact-checks, however many are necessary. The latter is, I imagine, unattractive to news organizations in the interview will be denounced by Trump and Trumpists, limiting their audience. The former, however, solves that problem by providing the viewer a hard-hitting and intense form of programming made for the social media age. Hitting back fast and hard with the facts against Trump “broke the internet,” made Swan a star and garnished media laurels. The problem is that too many broadcasters lack that sort of forensic cross-examining skill set.
Jonathan Swan is something of a rarity. Swan wasn’t trying to “call balls and strikes,” as Chuck Todd often reminds us he tries to do. Swan is definitely of the beltway, like Todd, but he doesn’t seem to play the Washington DC game of showing the President largely in an innocuous light. He doesn’t seem to want to sell his journalistic integrity for a steady stream of invites to state dinners. Being an Australian journalist who cut his teeth at the New York Times served him well. Unfortunately, so many American broadcasters of the old school are physically attractive and project a performative air of authority, but would be decimated by a skilled and shameless propagandist like Trump. The shamelessness and the speed at which Trump lies are the key here to his success. Trump can propagate a half a dozen lies before a broadcaster can hold his feet to the fire on the first one. This, and beltway Establishment journalism work in Trump‘s favor.
I’d like to conclude by making a plea: Let Mehdi Hasan interview Trump and show the beltway how its done. For the sake of the honor of NBC News.
“The scene outside the United Nations on Monday morning was a snapshot of global disorder. As the rain poured on Turtle Bay, delegates and dignitaries from around the world jostled between checkpoints and security barriers. Umbrellas poked into turbans and dripped onto suits. Bodyguards to foreign ministers fumed as their security details got caught in the soggy scrum to proceed into the U.N. complex.” (Ishaan Tharoor/WashPost)
Biden seeks expanding UN Security Council permanent members to offset Russia (i24)
What do we do about the Security Council? (The Corsair)
Brazil’s Lula pitches his nation — and himself — as fresh leader for Global South (AP)
“That speech was Lula staking his claim to be the true voice of the Global South, a mantle he aspires to share with Modi … The speech was very ambitious, more so I thought than 20 years ago when Lula focused on hunger & inequality. Today he also touched on climate, democracy, big tech, war in Ukraine & more -- appealing to conscience of the rich world to do more.” (Brian Winter)
“Every twentieth-century U.S. president urged the members states of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to spend more on defense, but Donald Trump in particular hammered at this, haranguing their leaders to dedicate at least 2 percent (or 4 percent) of gross domestic product to defense spending, and even considering pulling the United States out … As right as Trump was about the need, his demands didn’t actually do much to ramp up our allies’ defense spending. But during Joe Biden’s White House tenure, several countries have done just that. This isn’t necessarily the result of a more successful strategy from Biden; it instead speaks to how unsafe a lot of Europeans are feeling in the wake of Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine …” (PressPass)
Perfect