Van Jones wasn’t the only one to jump the cable news shark last night over Donald Trump
You saw signs of it coming last night, even before Donald Trump opened his mouth. Cable news had already decided that forty consecutive days of painting him as a chaotically failing president had gone stale, and it needed a new angle to keep viewers from getting bored and tuning out. That new narrative: Trump was shockingly getting his act together and settling in. Didn’t matter if it was true. Didn’t matter how the speech went. That was the narrative that cable news was going to sell us last night – and it did.
CNN commentator Van Jones is taking the brunt of the fallout this morning, with him having been the liberal commentator who raced to declare that Donald Trump’s speech was presidential, and that it was time for his fellow liberals to accept that he’s the president. Based on what, exactly? Jones didn’t really say. It wasn’t entirely clear that he had even watched the speech. For all we know, he instead spent that time sitting in the corner and weeping over the integrity he was about to throw away in the name of ratings. But Van Jones was far from the only cable news figure who jumped the shark last night.
An hour before Trump’s speech, MSNBC host Chris Matthews quoted a single outlier poll to try to make the case that Donald Trump’s approval rating was suddenly strong and growing. Nevermind that even the outlier poll he quoted didn’t support the case he was making; he tried to cover for this that Trump’s polling numbers are soft (in reality, the final pre-election polls were only off by two percent, safely within the margin of error; Trump has always polled more or less accurately). But it didn’t matter to the cable news world last night that Trump’s average approval rating is the lowest of any new president ever, or that it’s still slowly trickling downward further.
Facts like that don’t matter in the cable news realm, you see. I give CNN and MSNBC credit these past two weeks for trying to hang in there with the Trump-Russia scandal as long as they reasonably could. But while there are important new developments on Trump-Russia every day, they’re not always made-for-television developments. At some point, “Trump in chaos yet again today” stopped being a ratings friendly narrative when repeated daily for the umpteenth time. So now we see cable news trying out a new narrative of “Is Trump finally getting his act together?”
Nevermind that this new narrative is based on nothing at all. Across social media it’s easy to see that Trump’s speech played fairly poorly with everyone outside of his small-ish base, and that the moment involving the crying widow made most Americans cringe. Read a newspaper and you’ll be clued into all the reasons why Trump’s speech last night did nothing to help his sinking presidency. But when the pressure of keeping people glued to a television all day long is involved, none of that matters. If only to break up the eternal same-ness of the past five weeks, cable news is now deciding to go the other way for bit.
It’ll be difficult for cable news to push a “Trump is improving” narrative at a time when he’s more unpopular than ever, and he’s still saying and doing embarrassing things daily. But considering the fatally flawed format that cable news is trapped in, it does have to shake things up for a bit. If you oppose Trump, don’t worry: in three days, or a week, cable news will decide that Trump is suddenly falling apart again. Because if you’re going to serve up something as dry as political news within an entertainment format like television, you have to keep throwing in unexpected twists and turns to keep up the suspense – whether they’re real or not.
The great irony is that Van Jones’ desperate, dishonest and cravenly ratings-driven praise of Donald Trump last night on CNN did nothing to give Trump any credibility as a president. Instead it merely gave Trump a smidgeon of belated credibility for all those times that he’s tried to tell us CNN isn’t real news. Then again, cable news never has been news. It’s political entertainment, and if you’re lucky, maybe a whiff of news on occasion. And whether they thought it’s what they were signing up for or not when they took the job, on most nights cable news figures like Chris Matthews and Van Jones are merely contestants on a news reality show. This may be the 21st century, but those who want to know what’s really going on still have to read the news to find out. Help us investigate Trump-Russia!
