Landing a one-on-one interview with President Trump would put the startup “NewsNation” “in the big time,” an executive for the network crowed before the interview aired in Tuesday’s first hour of the WGN America national cable newscast.
After seeing the questions anchor Joe Donlon lobbed at the president and the unchallenged assertions and accusations Trump was allowed to make in response, it’s safe to say the quest to reach the big time continues.
Not only did Trump not make news during the segment, but it came off as a 15-minute primetime opportunity for the president to repeat campaign talking points without having to answer on matters of fact or logic.
If that’s how “NewsNation” rolls, if presenting an interview seemingly unfiltered is how the network delivers on its mantra of “facts, not opinion,” then Joe Biden, Trump’s Democratic rival for the presidency, should accept the interview offer “NewsNation” said it had made to him and claim his own unchallenged quarter hour.
The Trump interview, conducted Tuesday morning outside the White House, saw the president slag the fitness for office of two-term Vice President Biden, assert that “I’ve had one of the most successful administrations in history,” proclaim “I have been all for masks” during the COVID-19 pandemic and state that the U.S. economy is “coming back faster than any country anywhere in the world.”
In the segments chosen for air by “NewsNation,” the three-hour nightly Nexstar Media primetime cable newscast produced on the northwest side of Chicago, there was no sign of any stringent follow-up by Donlon, one of the newscast’s three lead anchors.
Instead, Donlon at one point called Trump “the most media-savvy president we’ve had… You understand how the media works.” This came after the president had asserted “the press is fake. They don’t write the truth.”
Presumably, Donlon, a member of the press who reads aloud every night words written by other members of the press, does not think he and his colleagues are “fake,” but you wouldn’t know it from the praise of Trump’s keen media comprehension.
The show does get credit for disclosing that the interview came about because of Trump’s previous relationship with WGN America Executive Vice President Sean Compton. Compton produced a regular Trump radio segment more than a decade ago.
That friendship — and Trump’s congratulatory tweet a few weeks back on the launching of “NewsNation” — have left some critics wondering about the true impartiality of the “NewsNation” effort, a concern that Tuesday’s Trump interview will not alleviate.
Granted, interviewing somebody like the president, who is demonstrably loose with the truth, is tricky. You don’t want the 10 or 20 minutes you’ve been allotted to devolve into an argument.
And you can argue that letting Trump talk on with less than laser focus is a way to show viewers a certain truth. “NewsNation” did that with an epic Trump answer, where Donlon asked the president for his “single biggest accomplishment” and Trump offered at least six, some of them more than once.
But you’re not doing your job if just sit there and let Trump say, for example, that he has been “all for masks” when he has publicly denigrated the idea of wearing masks and almost never modeled doing so, turning what should be a common-sense public-health measure into a partisan third rail.
You can’t let him claim, uncontested, economic triumph when our nation cannot reopen schools successfully, while countries that responded better to the coronavirus have been able to do so.
If it doesn’t work out to raise such flags in the interview itself — because of time constraints, because of wanting to maintain conversational flow, whatever — then other parts of a big-league newscast should be ready with a fact-checking, or at least a context-delivering, segment.
“NewsNation” did not do that, not overtly. But to its credit it did report, early on in the newscast, that the nation’s grim milestone in reaching 200,000 coronavirus deaths gives it “the highest (total) in the world” and a number that is climbing by more than 700 daily.
Too bad that when Donlon asked the U.S. president about his handling of COVID-19 it wasn’t so direct. He listened, and viewers watched, as Trump passed the buck along to the Centers for Disease Control and to China — back in the pandemic’s early days — while barely acknowledging the current, ongoing crisis.
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