Cable News’ Relentless, Second-by-Second Coverage of Trump’s Plane Ride Was Absolutely Ludicrous
If you’re a cable news watcher who enjoys the exhilaration that comes with watching a plane take off and land, you were in hog heaven on Monday.
On that afternoon, CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC showed us scintillating images of Donald Trump’s private jet taking off from Palm Beach and arriving in New York, where he will be indicted on Tuesday.
For what, we don’t exactly know, which makes the nonstop coverage of Trump’s indictment over the last week all the more maddening. All that’s known is that at least some of the charges reportedly stem from a hush money payment he made to a pornographic film actress over an affair.
No doubt, a former president being indicted is huge news for obvious reasons, not the least of which is that it’s never happened before. It is understandably the lead story on every telecast.
But, there comes a time when cable news networks can impart no new information or punditry. And by Monday, we were long past that point.
This can mean only one thing when dealing with a big story like this: do the same shit over and over again until every cable news telecast is an unfunny version of Groundhog Day, or for the literarily inclined, Samuel Beckett’s Endgame.
As someone who committed unspeakable wrongs in a past life and has been sentenced to cover the news media in this one, I can tell you that coverage of Trump’s indictment has gotten despairingly stale over the past several days because, again, new information has been scant. Hence the absurd spectacle we witnessed on Monday afternoon, beginning with the very mundane phenomenon of a plane taking off and the equally unexciting act of it landing.
CNN took matters a step further, with its digital outlet publishing a piece titled, “Track Trump’s Plane from Florida to New York.”
The tracker contained therein will look familiar to anyone who knows the eastern seaboard of the U.S.
That is indeed how a flight from Palm Beach to New York goes.
And it wasn’t just Trump’s plane ride cable news covered. No, the networks went “full white Ford Bronco” à la O.J. Simpson being driven on the highways of Los Angeles by Al Cowlings. That’s right, the cable networks provided aerial footage of Trump’s motorcade driving from LaGuardia to Trump Tower.
Hey, did you know millions of Americans are being kicked off Medicaid as we speak?
Whoops, sorry. Not sure how that got in there. Our job is to cover the news networks – not stories they are ignoring.
I’ve never been in charge of a major cable news network. Come to think of it, I’ve never been in charge of any cable news network. There’s probably a good reason for that. And for all I know, coverage of Trump’s plane taking off and landing might be great for ratings. (We’ll know soon enough.) But this kind of nonstop coverage of an event that is yielding no significant new news is unhealthy and consumes airtime that other stories aren’t getting.
This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.
