How Cable News Anchors and Reporters Are Rigging Impeachment Trial in Trump’s Favor

Former President Donald Trump’s Senate impeachment trial for inciting the Capitol insurrection starts Tuesday, but TV news anchors and reporters have been spending weeks helping to rig the results against conviction.

Since the House voted to impeach Trump not even a month ago, variations on the sentiment “Senate Republicans are unlikely to convict” have been uttered hundreds of times by television news anchors, reporters, analysts, and others — according to the Internet Archive.

That air of inevitability is exactly what Republicans have taken great pains to project in order to avoid the political consequences of a devastating vote, and news anchors and reporters who go along with it are drafting themselves as propaganda tools.

I’m not going to call them out by name because it is literally almost all of them, but Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar provided an apt rebuttal to this notion in an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper Monday night.

“Republican Senator [James] Lankford said today on impeachment, quote: ‘I don’t know of anyone that their mind is not made up.,” Cooper told Klobuchar, and asked, “Do you think he’s right?”

Klobuchar’s response:

I don’t know about that. I guess, as a former prosecutor, I saw a lot of cases go good or go bad, depending on what the evidence is. I don’t think that — look in politics, did people think we were going to win Georgia? No, I don’t think they did. And we did because people listened and made a decision.

So I’m just not going to concede that right now before we have even seen an ounce of evidence in an official proceeding. This is our job.

And I think Liz Cheney did a beautiful job this weekend of describing this, that you just can’t pretend it didn’t happen. I think that she said, “We’ve got to make sure this never happens again.” And I think that’s really important to note that you can’t have a President who just because he loses, clearly loses an election decides he is going to mess around with our democracy and literally attack a co-equal branch of government that was simply doing its job to certify the votes that had already been certified.

Maybe Trevor Noah said it best when he said on his show, if you get fired from BestBuy, you can’t go and steal a TV on your way out.

So we can’t have the precedent be that you can just go do anything you want in President Trump’s own words “go wild” and wreak havoc on our democracy to the point where people die and police officers are killed and not have any kind of responsibility for it.

So I look forward, as you pointed out at the end of your segment there of carrying on that mantle of accountability, and I think we have to take it very seriously.

The “unlikely” argument isn’t fabricated out of thin air, it’s based on things like public statements by Republicans and a Senate vote on the trial’s constitutionality. And if this were a betting parlor, the smart money would be on an acquittal. But predicting is not reporting, or at least, it shouldn’t be in this case.

The public statements — like Lankford’s — and the vote against the trial are as much, or more, political maneuvers as they are predictors of future votes. If at-risk Republicans can create an aura of inevitability, it makes it much easier for them to blend in with the crowd in the event Trump is acquitted in a landslide vote.

But if the vote is a closer affair (or is seen as one) than is currently being projected, it becomes much more difficult to be among the five or even 10 votes that allow Trump to skate. And this inevitability coverage obscures what a tough vote this actually is — without, as Klobuchar notes, even a shred of evidence having been presented at trial as yet.

For weeks, polls have consistently shown that a very solid majority of Americans want Trump convicted and banned for life from holding federal office, including a full 30 percent of Republicans who favor the latter penalty in one recent poll.

Add to that the fact that Republican leaders in both houses of Congress have already conceded that Trump incited the Capitol insurrection, and a vote to acquit becomes substantively impossible to defend.

And that’s before a week or more of nationally televised hearings, during which the American people will relive the horror of that day, and hear devastating rebukes of Trump’s various defenses. What possible basis could any reporter have to form any idea of what the “likely” effect of these completely unprecedented circumstances will have on the political will, not to mention the consciences, of 17 Republican senators?

Reporting on “expectations” is an already unfortunate intrusion into political reporting, but it is unconscionable when it has a direct effect on the results. Analysts and commentators are one thing, but reporters and anchors are affecting the outcome of the vote by shielding Republicans from the very political pressure that could lead them to follow their consciences. They should stop.

Watch the clip above via CNN.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.