Republican Convention Review: Cable News, Making America Dumb Again
“Make America Safe Again” was the announced theme for the first night of the Republican National Convention, with one of the featured speakers, Joanie Loves Chachi star Scott Baio, adding — perhaps a tad repetitiously — “Let’s make America America again.” But for breathless foolishness and cynical misdirection, it was impossible to top the cable news coverage of the event.
Related: Stephen Colbert Discovers Trump’s Trumpiness at the RNC
The headliner of the night was Melania Trump — introduced by the candidate, her husband, Donald Trump, entering, like him, to “We Are the Champions” as the ghost of Queen’s Freddie Mercury strained to escape from Cleveland. Hours before Trump’s speech, CNN correspondent Jim Acosta gave us this hot reportorial scoop: “I’ve been told he’s going to show some warm, genuine, loving affection toward his wife.” One more seductive adjective there and Acosta might have been mistaken for Barry White. CNN contextualized speaker Antonio Sabato Jr., had this chyron running beneath his convention speech: “His Calvin Klein billboard hung across the Trump Tower in the 1990s.” Chris Cuomo tried to set up high expectations for Melania Trump with praise by condescension: “She’s very intelligent and very accomplished!” he yelped with an earnestness colored by disbelief.
Related: Get Complete Coverage of the RNC at Yahoo Politics
CNN was, as usual this convention season, trying to run down the middle of the road between objectivity and subjectivity, panting with pandering. (The exception, again as usual, was Jake Tapper, who remains the channel’s most on-deadline-articulate and thoughtful of CNN hosts.) By contrast, Fox News had a firm narrative spine to its coverage starting with The O’Reilly Factor and continuing with The Kelly File: Over and over, respective hosts Bill O’Reilly and Megyn Kelly brought up the recent murders of police officers, regardless of what topic was being discussed on the convention floor, and both hosts inveighed against Black Lives Matter, which has now become a ceaseless obsession for O’Reilly and Kelly out of all proportion to that group’s influence.
Kelly got into a heated argument about the deaths of police officers and young black men with Malik Shabazz, a man whose history of appalling anti-Semitic remarks ought to make any sensible news organization shun him rather than book him in prime time. Instead, Kelly sank to questions on the lowly order of, “Do you refer to white people as ‘cracker’?”
O’Reilly, for his part, got Trump to compete against his own convention: Trump called in to O’Reilly during the 8 p.m. hour. O’Reilly asked polite questions that allowed the candidate to repeat campaign lines about “law and order and borders … the wall … the biggest tax decrease.” After that, O’Reilly asserted that what the Republicans were doing with their airtime was creating an atmosphere in which the Democrats, at their convention, would be forced to say, in O’Reilly’s phraseology, “’Listen, Black Lives Matter — you need to cool it.’” Gotcha, daddy-o.
At 10 p.m., the networks broke away from the important cultural work of The Bachelorette and American Ninja Warrior to offer one whole hour of coverage. CBS, ABC, and NBC had their own — strangely, uncannily — unified theme: protesters. As in: where are they, and can we get a camera on one or two of them? NBC’s Lester Holt actually had to pull his network away from its protester obsession by saying, “Rudy Giuliani seems to be firing up the crowd — let’s give a listen. …” Giuliani was saying that we “should be sick of this vicious campaign.” Was he talking about Trump’s? No, no: “the media’s” vicious campaign “against Donald Trump.”
On the comedy front, Samantha Bee did a fine job on TBS’s Full Frontal of mock-profiling vice presidential candidate Mike Pence as looking like Mad Men’s “Roger Sterling after an allergy attack” and critiquing his various policy positions.
Stephen Colbert also had a terrific night. But speaking of veep picks, the professional comedians had a hard time competing with the new comedy team of CBS’s Gayle King and Gov. Chris Christie. Down on the convention floor, King won the night by asking Christie the pricelessly phrased question, “Were you livid that you weren’t chosen?” Chris, his face contorted into a remarkable similarity to Jackie Gleason in The Honeymooners in mid-tantrum, said, “Of course I am!” His barely suppressed anger symbolized much of the tone of the opening night, both on the floor (signs held aloft reading “Hillary for Prison”) and on the stage.
