The Pornographic Coverage of the Trump Trial Is Out of Control

Isaac SchorrMay 17th, 2024, 11:05 am
 

Justice Potter Stewart famously remarked that while he might not be able to define it, he knew pornography when he saw it.

Surely, then, Justice Stewart would have been able to recognize the ceaseless, gleeful coverage of former President Donald Trump’s criminal trial in New York City for what it is.

On weekdays, CNN is fond of running a special program from nine in the morning until four in the afternoon called “Trump Hush Money Trial.” Sometimes they react to live updates provided by reporters at the courthouse. Sometimes everyone holds their breath as the camera pans to Jeff Toobin. Sometimes, as on Thursday morning, a future presidential debate moderator like Jake Tapper interviews such luminaries as Omarosa Manigault Newman, who assures viewers that the sniveling, unscrupulous villain turned #Resistance hero Michael Cohen is “locked in.” Occasionally, Elie Honig provides some valuable legal analysis leaving those with our dignity intact to wonder why the network won’t just let him talk about the trial for 5-10 minutes at the end of every hour.

On Monday, Kaitlan Collins teased a “two-hour special on CNN of the biggest takeaways from Trump’s trial today” on X. Collins was on air talking about the trial for two hours, but CNN’s special coverage actually carried on well past that. Then, starting at 11 p.m., the typically serious Abby Phillip was joined by Laura Coates to oversee one of the more preposterous displays in recent cable memory.

“Tonight, we’re going to take you actually inside the courtroom. We’re gonna page through word for word the most tense, the most revealing and-” declared Coates, CNN’s chief legal analyst with relish,”-really the most crippling testimony for the former president.”

This is what followed:

For the next hour, the network’s Joey Jackson turned in a performance as Cohen while Mercedes Colwin pretended to be the prosecuting attorney asking him questions. It was excruciating — the kind of indulgent, decadent, self-abasing experience that makes an idiot out of all involved. It was the kind of thing that’s truly hard to come back from, although Toobin serves as living proof of CNN’s willingness to bring “talent” back from the brink.

Wisely, Collins eventually deleted her post promoting the episode.

What else happened on Monday?

Secretary of State Antony Blinken came down hard on Israel. The Democratic senator who served as the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee until a few months ago began his trial for accepting bribes from foreign governments. Russian forces closed in on Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-biggest city.

But while CNN might have made mention of such minor developments, it kept its eye on the ball: What really mattered was that Trump was being crippled by the locked in Cohen.

Of course, it’s reasonable to expect that the criminal trial of a former and, at this point, likely future president would draw outsized coverage. Yet the 24/7, single-minded obsession with it — especially considering the petty nature of the alleged underlying crime — is completely disproportionate from its importance to the country.

The “this is an apple” network is hardly the only outlet guilty of Trump trial myopia, but it is an exceptional one. Dramatic readings, loaded language, and an insistence on lionizing leeches like Cohen and Omarosa aren’t edifying to the public. It’s titillating, not informative — something more closely approximating FX’s American Crime Story than balanced news coverage.

Trump is a unique spectacle, so it’s no wonder much of the Fourth Estate is bound and determined to turn this trial into the spectacle of the century. But in so doing, it’s not only degrading itself, but betraying the trust of its audience to peddle what is de facto political pornography.

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

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