Attention to the Unseen

The New York Times reports: CNN and MSNBC thrived during the Trump years, reaching new heights in ratings and revenue while devoting countless prime-time hours to criticizing a White House antagonist their viewers just could not quit. Now faced with a Trump-less future, top executives at the rival cable news networks have summoned star anchors and producers to private meetings in recent weeks, seeking answers to a pressing question: What’s next? People at both networks know that viewers who abhorred…

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The New York Times reports: Flanked by aides in the Oval Office on Wednesday, President Trump dialed up a friend in the news media with a message: Keep up the good work. “He said that it’s just incredible, the ratings you’re getting, and everyone’s talking about it,” recalled Christopher Ruddy, the owner of Newsmax, a niche conservative cable network that has yet to declare a winner in the 2020 presidential election. Based in Boca Raton, Fla., the network features lo-fi…

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The New York Times reports: Presidents come and go. Rupert Murdoch remains. For those who wondered how Mr. Murdoch, the octogenarian media magnate with a conservative streak, would react to the electoral defeat of President Trump, the past few days have brought a complicated answer, well-suited to the mercurial nature of Mr. Murdoch’s world. The New York Post, the Murdoch tabloid that attacked Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his son Hunter before the election, splashed a beaming Mr. Biden on…

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The Daily Beast reports: For Fox News, breaking up with Donald Trump will be hard to do. Their sometimes stormy (not Daniels) marriage began nine years ago, when the right-leaning cable channel’s founding chairman, the late Roger Ailes, gave Trump a weekly segment on the popular morning show Fox & Friends, thus launching the reality television star’s improbable trip to the White House. However, since Tuesday night—when the top-rated outlet’s Decision Desk, all alone among the nation’s major cable and…

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The New York Times reports: It was just after 12:30 a.m. on election night, and Fox News was under fire. “Arnon, we’re getting a lot of incoming here, and we need you to answer some questions,” the network’s chief political anchor, Bret Baier, said pointedly. “Shoot!” Arnon Mishkin replied, his face breaking into a smile. Roughly an hour earlier, Mr. Mishkin’s decision desk team at Fox News had made a bold call that instantly changed the tenor of the night:…

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Vivian Schiller and Garrett M. Graff write: Americans think about elections wrong; they aren’t only about tallying votes to declare a winner. Elections in a democracy are just as much about convincing the loser that he or she actually lost—and that the process was free, fair, and secure enough that the loser can accept the result as legitimate. Now, only weeks before Election Day, there’s a growing realization that the complexity of this year’s electoral landscape—from pandemic-related social distancing and…

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Margaret Sullivan writes: You might think that 2000 would have adequately prepared the media — and the American public — for the complete unpredictability of what may happen in November 2020 as a nation votes in the midst of a pandemic with a sitting president who is busy creating mistrust in the system and threatening not to accept a defeat. But there’s not much reason for confidence. Recall the 2018 midterms when some media figures rushed to judgment again. “It’s…

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The Washington Post reports: The Secret Service had asked for a room close to the president. But Mar-a-Lago said it was too late. The room was booked. Would agents like a room across the street from the president, instead? “I do have a Beach Cabana available,” a staff member at President Trump’s club in Palm Beach, Fla., wrote in March 2017 to a Secret Service agent seeking rooms for the upcoming weekend. “Across the street at the Beach Club, North…

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Lyz Lenz writes: On Monday, Iowa was leveled by what amounted to a level-two hurricane. But you wouldn’t know that from reading, listening to or watching the news. While the storm did garner some coverage, mostly via wire stories, its impact remains underreported days later. The dispatches, focused on crop damage and electrical outages, have been shouted down by the coverage of the veepstakes and the fate of college football. Conservatives’ consternation over the new Cardi B single has gotten…

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Margaret Sullivan writes: Can something as dull-sounding as the workings of the Post Office compete with former Trump attorney’s new tell-all book, whose foreword includes lines like: “From golden showers in a sex club in Vegas, to tax fraud, to deals with corrupt officials from the former Soviet Union, to catch and kill conspiracies to silence Trump’s clandestine lovers, I wasn’t just a witness to the president’s rise — I was an active and eager participant.” Can it break into…

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The Washington Post reports: The Department of Homeland Security has compiled “intelligence reports” about the work of American journalists covering protests in Portland, Ore., in what current and former officials called an alarming use of a government system meant to share information about suspected terrorists and violent actors. Over the past week, the department’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis has disseminated three Open Source Intelligence Reports to federal law enforcement agencies and others, summarizing tweets written by two journalists —…

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Soledad O’Brien writes: I left CNN more than seven years ago. But I watch its coverage, and that of other news networks — the panel-driven journalism that sometimes gives voice to liars and white supremacists; the excuse of “balance” to embolden and normalize bigots and bigotry by posing them as the “other side.” When I criticize CNN (as I do frequently on social media), the company attacks me as “more of a liberal activist than a journalist,” a common dig…

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