The Existential Anxiety of Cable News After Trump

The Existential Anxiety of Cable News After Trump

July 31, 2021

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“There Is This Absence”: The Media’s Life After Trump, Part II

In the weeks since I wrote about what the transition from the Trump presidency to the Biden administration has entailed for White House reporters, I’ve gotten some questions about what the change has been like for the people on our television screens. After all, the Trump era was so painfully perfect for television, especially the 24-hour cable news industry. While some of us may have been overwhelmed by the sheer volume of outrage sludge gushing from the White House, it was ideal for cable news, as if there were custom-made sluices channeling all that bile right to the studios across town, up by Capitol Hill. The giant maw of cable must be fed at all times, and it requires a very specific kind of diet: eyeballs, of the loyal and addicted variety. And what feeds the addiction? Drama. Fear. High stakes. There’s a reason for the cliché that networks like CNN love covering plane crashes: it’s true.

Donald Trump was the daily equivalent of fifteen plane crashes. Every day felt like it could be the last day of the Republic, but also like the season finale of the messiest season of Real Housewives. The eyeballs were pouring into the maw in record numbers and the ratings reflected it. As one reporter told me for that first article, “Trump has been good for many journalists professionally, myself included.” It was great for the producers, too: content was plentiful and the line-up of every show was obvious, no need to scramble to fill holes. It was great for the anchors, who became celebrities for their stern sermonizing in defense of the most basic tenets of civilization. It was great for the White House reporters, whose faces appeared constantly, leading seemingly every show, thereby reminding their corporate bosses just how indispensable they were and how highly compensated they should be.

And then he was gone. What would cable news do without him? How would it fill all that airtime? “I think the difference in the Biden age is there’s a lot more time to fill,” said one cable news host. “Trump’s abuses could have filled every hour of every newscast—and they often did. So I feel that absence in terms of planning a program. There is this absence, there’s no doubt about it.”

Others are finding the adjustment difficult in other ways. It was easy to point out how the Trump administration, with all its norm-busting outrages, was transgressive. With the Biden administration, you have to work harder to find possible misdeeds. Not only are they fewer and further between, they are also less obvious, more deeply buried. “It has been a challenge to try to maintain the tone of accountability and the tone of rigor with the Biden administration because you don’t have the surface rhetoric,” said another cable news anchor. “With Trump, there was such low-hanging fruit,” the anchor went on. “With Biden, it’s behind the scenes and you have to dig into it to find it. The Trump administration was so easy to cover—the tantrums, the tweeting, etc.” (Said yet another cable news anchor, “Sometimes the Biden administration tries to slide by accountability, because Oh, they’re not as bad as the Trump administration.”)

“I don’t miss it, for the sake of democracy, I don’t miss the unpredictability,” said one television reporter. “But I don’t have trouble finding folks who tell you they’re bored. On the twelfth infrastructure story, you’re like, okay, can we do something else?” During the Trump era, the reporter was on air several times a day. Now, whole days pass when they never appear, the kiss of death for a television career if it goes on too long. This doesn’t make them nervous, they claimed.“I don’t measure my career by the number of hits I do.” But I have to wonder.

“There are some anchors who just can’t quit Trump,” said another television reporter, though they declined to name these offenders, limiting themselves to saying they’re “primetime anchors both at CNN and MSNBC.” But Don Lemon, Erin Burnett, Chris Cuomo, and Rachel Maddow are hardly the only ones; they’re just the most visible.“If Donald Trump is reading this,” said MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan, “he’ll be delighted to know there’s still interest in him.”

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When I began talking to people for this story, I assumed that there would be a fair amount of the same cynicism that I heard from the print White House reporters who skyrocketed to fame during the Trump era. By and large, those journalists resented Trump for every obvious reason, from inciting an insurrection to making them work on Sundays. But many also fully recognized that he had transformed the economics of their careers, usually for the better.

I assumed I would encounter a similar admission from TV journalists. Trump’s presidency reversed a long erosion of the industry, and turned MSNBC and CNN, in particular, into cash machines. Fox News, while hardly comparable as a journalistic organization (I did not interview anyone who worked there), historically spun off more than a billion in profit. During the Trump years, though, both liberal-leaning networks nearly caught up. And while CNN has boasted of hiring hundreds of people to staff its new streaming effort and Chuck Todd is doing a press tour to promote the news value of Peacock, the NBC streaming service, it’s hard not to imagine a future where executives, producers, anchors, and correspondents are renewed for less or replaced by younger, cheaper talent. Consumer behavior is changing fast, and a new compensation model is likely to follow.

Yet I did not hear this fear—or these calculations—from the people I spoke to. Instead, most expressed a sense of personal relief and professional liberation. “I think there’s opportunity for journalists to cover all the stories we missed while we were talking about Trump,” Hasan told me. “I’ve tried my best to bring foreign policy back to my show because there’s a lot happening in the world that isn’t Trump. We devoted a whole hour to the war in Gaza. We’ve covered Pegasus, Navalny, Saudi. We’ve covered Egypt, India.”

Hasan has always had an interest—and specialization in—foreign policy, a topic that is said to be (cliché alert) uninteresting to navel-gazing Americans. But he’s been pleasantly surprised to find that his viewers have bucked these expectations. “All of our stuff on foreign policy flies,” Hasan said. “There’s a hunger for these things and it all depends on how you tell the story. The opportunities are there.” As for the idea that journalists miss the Trump story? “It’s funny, and it’s a little bit true, but it’s also insulting to the thousands of people who are out there covering all these incredible stories,” Hasan replied. “I’m embarrassed by all the stories we missed.”

“The Trump show has now been relegated to a side stage,” said the first anchor. “And it’s not as inherently newsworthy because he doesn’t have power right now. So if you’re blocking out an hour of television, you’re less likely to lead with Trump. You’re making news judgment decisions to lead with something else. Sometimes, I don’t know what to lead with anymore. It’s freeing!”

Kara Swisher has called the current ethos “straining to get back to normal,” and it was hard not to hear that same sentiment in these journalists’ voices, even when they were speaking anonymously. “I think that the Biden administration is easier to cover and that would be the case if it were any politician than Trump,” said another network anchor. “It’s just more normal. You get to cover policy instead of assaults on institutions. We get to have more meaningful stories instead of just fire alarm stories. We get to talk to people about how policies are affecting them, whether it’s economic policies or public health policies instead of just fact-checking bullshit all the time. I don’t miss any of it. I do not get a rush from it. Honestly, it was traumatizing.”

“Now there’s so much substance,” said the second anchor. “There’s immigration reform, events overseas, like in Afghanistan and Russia. Whereas previously, all of those other stories had to be pushed to the side. There was such a high bar to break through the noise. Given the unprecedented nature of Trump, I understand why there was the obsession with him. It was such a norm-shattering presidency, and the coverage reflected that. It’s refreshing that we could now take a step back from the day-to-day DC politics and try to look for and pursue the stories that we didn’t get to cover before.”

“Refreshing” was a word I heard from everyone I interviewed. Getting to focus on policy, rather than endless scandal, is refreshing. Having the time and space to report more deeply on a subject is refreshing. Not having to drink from a firehose is, ironically, refreshing. “One of the things that’s been refreshing is I got to go to the border three-four times, doing very in-depth pieces,” said the first television reporter. “If there’s something I really want to dive into that’s policy-related, I can do that. I don’t have to be tethered to the chair or the camera here.”

Another television reporter told me that, in the absence of the chaotic Trump presidency, they’ve been able to travel for stories, getting to know the country that so many of us spent four years puzzling over from the confines of the coasts. Now, they could finally come to understand the America that made Donald Trump possible. Ironically, in the years he was in power, the reporter said, “there’s no way [the bosses] were going to let me out of the city because he was always going to do something crazy, and then we would’ve been shit out of luck.”

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What’s also refreshing is the slaking of intra-network rivalries, between the White House reporters, the stars of the Trump show, and their colleagues who felt eclipsed by it all. The relative calm of the Biden era “allows non-White House reporters to get on TV more,” said the second television reporter. “Under Trump, barring a major disaster, the White House team was the center of the network. They’re still extremely prominent, but there has been an evening out of the playing field, in terms of air time. I do think there were a lot of times when there were issues that would’ve gone to a correspondent that had covered it every day, but there was always a White House/Trump angle to it, so the White House team could always lay claim to a story that would’ve been covered by someone else.”

I asked the reporter, who did not and does not cover the White House, if I heard a certain bitterness in their voice. There are few things more frustrating in journalism than being a television reporter who runs around reporting all day, only to get bumped from the line-up. How long would the bosses keep a reporter whose face they never saw on the air?

The journalist demurred. “There was certainly frustration among some reporters,” they finally said. “There were definitely moments where there were stories that I felt like I should get because they were stories I was covering on a daily basis, but I understood that the news was coming from the White House. There was a bit of resignation that that was going to be the case.”

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I’m not the first person to have noticed, with more than a little schadenfreude, that cable news ratings have gone off a cliff in the last quarter: Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC each lost at least 30 percent of their audiences. CNN ratings were down 45 percent. For all the refreshment of getting to be a real journalist again, were these television personalities at all nervous that far fewer people were watching them now? Their audience already skewed older, a demographic that has passed the peak of its earning potential. The average age of the cable news viewer is 68 and the pharmaceutical ads that run on the network toll for them. How long could the bean counters maintain the current headcounts at the current (wildly inflated) salaries?

“We are back to a 2014 mode of cable news, when there’s not one overwhelming storyline,” said the first anchor. “And people who are stressed out about the ratings declines just don’t remember the pre-Trump era of cable news. These people should take a nap, take a breather. This is cable news. It’s a rollercoaster, it’s up and down, it always will be. The Trump up was more dramatic than most. Are people stressed? Some are. But the average CNN producer is not, because they know that this is just how this is. 2020 was always going to be the peak because of the presidential election, the pandemic, and cord-cutting.” The anchor added that CNN president Jeff Zucker “is so clear about not paying too much attention to ratings and he’s been very clear about that to staff.” (Of course, seven years ago, CNN was in a different place economically, before cable-cutting really accelerated. CNN is highly dependent on dwindling cable and satellite subscription fees, and it’s hard to imagine that its new streaming service can make up the difference.)

The industry insiders I spoke to rationalized the ratings drop-off in different ways. “There’s this simplistic notion that Trump was good for ratings,” said the second news anchor. “I think people genuinely felt that their democracy was threatened and it made citizens more engaged and consume the news differently than in previous administrations. Now that that perceived threat has subsided, I think that people are saying they can take a mental break. Next year, during the election, I think the attention will bump back up.”

“I think there was a captive audience during Covid because they were trapped in their homes and they were concerned about the direction of the country,” said the third anchor. “I am fine with there being a lull. It’s a sign that people are getting back to their usual lives, and that’s a good thing.” The last few years had put a lot in perspective for this anchor. “There are things that matter more than ratings,” they said.

In the end, Washington is flexible, its journalists even more so. Perhaps it’s because they know the Trump story isn’t really over, it’s just taking a nap—and these reporters are just catching their breath at halftime. Trump is still a story, one TV reporter put it, “because he still has Kevin McCarthy’s nuts in hand.”

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That’s all for today, friends. There will be another letter next week, as well as more news about Puck. In the meantime, good night, tomorrow will be worse.

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Julia