Jake Tapper Pressed On ‘Wall-to-Wall’ Trump Indictment Coverage: Is It Another ‘Empty Podium’ Moment Hurting the Country?

CNN anchor Jake Tapper joined Charlie Sykes on Tuesday’s episode of the Bulwark Podcast and before diving into a discussion of his latest book, Sykes pressed Tapper on whether or not the media has learned any lessons in handling Donald Trump.

Sykes began his questioning by laying out the “uncharted, political, cultural, media moment” the U.S. finds itself in as an indicted former president leads one of the country’s two major parties and asked Tapper if anyone in media has figured out how to cover Trump. Tapper didn’t name any names in media but offered some lessons he’s learned along the way.

“Let’s talk about what happened last week when he showed up in D.C. We basically had the O.J. Simpson slow-moving Bronco moment, where you had this endless sort of blank time was just showing the empty podium, showing the car and everything,” Sykes then noted, adding:

I want to read you something that my colleague JVL wrote last Friday in The Bulwark. He said, ‘The O.J. Simpson case was the single media evolution of our time that established the template for modern broadcast news. Everything in our media world from the treatment of Monica Lewinsky to the 2000 recount to the weeks of 9/11 coverage. Trump’s 2016 campaign is directly descended from O.J.’ and he goes on to say, ‘I would argue the broadcast media, as much as any other factor, has driven the collapse of American political life, changed the incentive structures for both politicians and journalists. It created a sense of manic obsessiveness in the public, and it acted as an accelerant in our ongoing polarization.’ And then he goes to the wall-to-wall coverage of Donald Trump. You know, Donald Trump getting off the plane, Donald Trump getting in the car.

“So what is your reaction to that? I kind of think of you as a media throwback. And I ask this as a media throwback myself,” Sykes concluded, as Tapper added, “Yeah.”

“What is the right balance to strike and what do you think of the wall-to-wall, empty podium coverage that we got again last week?” Sykes asked.

“Well, it’s a complicated question because I don’t see every one of these things as the same,” Tapper replied, adding:

For instance, like showing Donald Trump flying to Washington, D.C. in the motorcade, arriving for this historic and in some ways tragic event where he was arrested and arraigned at the federal courthouse. That’s news. It’s not positive for him. It’s not celebrating him, it’s not celebratory. It’s news.

Now, is that the same thing as, for instance, the time that we all got rickrolled when he said he was going to acknowledge that Barack Obama was born in the U.S. Right? And that was just, we were all just sitting around. And I don’t know what MS or Fox or anyone else was doing because I was anchoring CNN, or I was part of the team at CNN, but we were just sitting around and watching an empty podium while Donald Trump was about to say something, acknowledging the reality that Barack Obama was born in the US, which is not a proud moment for the media I don’t think.

Because we were being used by the campaign and I mean it’s offensive on its face when you think about the fact that this was even a matter of discussion. Barack Obama was born in Hawaii. I mean, like why were we all sitting around breathlessly waiting for him to acknowledge that he’d been perpetuating a racist lie for a decade, that does not speak well about us.

And then there is another example. For instance, when he was arrested and arraigned in Florida and then he stopped and went into this Versailles cafe, this Cuban cafe, and people sang happy birthday to him and this and that and the value of that, that question as well. So I don’t know that I agree with all of the criticism, but I certainly think that there are nuances and ways to talk about different points of it. I myself didn’t care for the Versailles cafe coverage because I found it was… We don’t do that for anyone. There are no campaign stops that any candidate does that we cover live: Biden, DeSantis, Nikki Haley. So why were we doing it for him? I just think there needs to be more discussions and debates in newsrooms before just running whatever is the latest live feed. Yeah, and that’s the point right now. We shouldn’t just be running live feeds because we can’t. I agree with that.

“Yeah. And you’ve been asked this many times before, but in retrospect, the decision to give him a live town hall meeting?” Sykes followed up, referring to CNN’s controversial town hall with Trump.

“You know, I’m ambivalent about it. I don’t know if that gets into the do you ignore him thing. Are we supposed to ignore him? Are we supposed to pretend he’s not the leading Republican presidential candidate? I don’t know. I mean, obviously, my mind is open. I had nothing to do with that town hall. Like I wasn’t part of it other than just covering it afterward. But Kaitlan [Collins] was fact-checking him,” Tapper replied, before turning the question back on Sykes for his take on how much Trump coverage is too much.

Listen to the full podcast here.