Trump Shares Racist Imagery. Cable News Reveals Its Priorities

AP Photo/Mary Altaffer

The most revealing part of President Donald Trump sharing a video that depicts Barack and Michelle Obama as apes is not the post itself. It is how clearly cable news has shown where it believes this kind of story belongs, and where it does not.

That distribution of attention not only matters, but is truly revealing.

Start with the facts. Late Thursday night, Trump reposted a video on Truth Social promoting long-debunked conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. Near the end of the video is an AI-generated image portraying the former president and first lady as apes. The post remains live. There is no evidence Trump created the video, and it yes it is entirely possible he did not carefully review it before sharing, though that doesn’t matter What is clear is that a sitting president amplified racist imagery from his official platform and has not acknowledged or corrected it. Full stop.

That fact pattern alone should clear any reasonable threshold for coverage by any network that purports to be a news outlet.

Depicting Black public figures as primates is not ambiguous or culturally contested. It is a historically entrenched racist trope, used for generations to demean and dehumanize. That history is well established. When that imagery is shared by a sitting president, responsibility attaches to the office. Vetting is part of the job. So is responding when it fails.

Cable news did not respond uniformly, and that’s the point. CNN initially covered the story as straight news before John Berman interviewed GOP Rep. Mike Haridopolous. Morning Joe covered it extensively, with Joe Scarborough sharply criticizing Republicans who rushed to defend or minimize Trump’s behavior. Whatever one thinks of Scarborough’s tone, the segment treated the issue as a standards failure and said so plainly.

That matters because it shows this is not a hard story to cover. The tools are there. The language exists. The judgment is not elusive.

Fox News made a different choice. As of time of publishing this column, it has shown no interest in engaging with the imagery or its implications. That decision is not puzzling. CNN CEO Mark Thompson accurately described Fox News as a partisan affinity network. Fox is enjoying record ratings and historic revenue by serving a largely pro-Trump audience. Programming that forces that audience into moral conflict with Trump cuts against the business model. Avoidance protects the product.

The more interesting question is what happens in between those poles. When coverage of something as basic as racist imagery from a president gets compartmentalized into certain shows or networks, it signals that standards enforcement is no longer a baseline expectation. It becomes a niche product, delivered to audiences already inclined to care.

That is how norms weaken. Not through one dramatic breakdown, but through quiet sorting. Seriousness lives over here. Silence lives over there. Viewers absorb the lesson. So do politicians.

This episode does not require hysteria or wall-to-wall programming. It requires clarity. A president shared racist content. That violates basic expectations of public office. The press exists to state that fact, explain its significance, and apply standards consistently. When those standards are treated as optional or segmented by audience, they stop functioning altogether.

Maintaining them is part of the job.

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

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