The assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump at a political rally Saturday was a reminder that when breaking news happens — truly breaking news, with events unfolding in real time even as media are covering them — cable and broadcast outlets cover the news in remarkably similar ways.
It's also uniformly good most of the time. Journalists are like everyone else. They're on pins and needles wondering what happened, while also trying to figure out what's going on and bringing accurate news to people. It's an exceedingly difficult job, a true cat-juggling situation.
It's when the developments slow to a trickle and you still have all those hours to fill on cable news networks that things can get a little dicey.
How did CNN and Fox News cover the Trump assassination attempt?
All of this is to say that whenever a big story happens, and they don't get much bigger than an assassination attempt on a former president who is running again, people wonder how CNN and Fox News covered it.
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In the case of the Trump shooting, they both covered it well and, for the most part, they covered it responsibly. The fact that the shooting, in which Trump was wounded and one of his supporters killed, occurred on a Saturday afternoon meant that the big-name reporters and anchors weren't on duty; in fact, most of them were in or on their way to Milwaukee, for the Republican National Convention.
Fox News contributor Jason Chaffetz, a former Republican member of Congress,began to get political during the coverage of the story as it was still breaking, but when he started to lean into talk about free and fair elections, the network cut to replayed footage of the shooting.
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Frankly, there isn't time for that kind of thing while a story is breaking, and this one was breaking all night long. Reporters at all of the networks have their own sources, and when something like this happens they pump them for information incessantly. (Politeness is not a hallmark of breaking-news coverage etiquette). Of course, some of those sources are the same. But on Saturday, neither CNN nor Fox News jumped to irresponsible conclusions. In fact, they didn't even call it a shooting until that could be confirmed, in a show of near-miraculous restraint.
CBS News called out Sen. J.D. Vance
Of course, not everyone was so responsible. J.D. Vance, the Ohio senator and a favorite as Trump's pick for vice president, wasted no time Saturday tweeting that President Joe Biden's political rhetoric "led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination." It was a galling accusation; the shooter's motives still aren't known.
Margaret Brennan of CBS News said Saturday, "We are seeing some Republican lawmakers come out with statements directly drawing a line between the shooter — whose name we do not know, we do not know if he’s a lone actor or with somebody else — but drawing some connection to the government. We have nothing to base that on at this hour."
Brennan was talking with Samantha Vinograd, the former Assistant Secretary for Counterterrorism, Threat Prevention, and Law Enforcement Policy at the Department of Homeland Security, who went even further.
"At this hour leading officials within the U.S. government still don’t know what transpired," Vinograd said. "And it is frankly unpatriotic at this moment to be stoking the flames when we know that we are sitting on a cauldron of tensions. … The counter-terrorism officials and homeland security officials that I’ve spoken to in the last few hours are deeply concerned that this event will be used as a rallying cry to launch attacks against individuals associated with the Biden campaign and lead to broader domestic distress."
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Fox News began leaning into Trump-as-hero stories, CNN called to 'damp it down'
As the night went on, Fox News did begin to lean more heavily into the Trump-as-hero rhetoric. A theme emerged, one that wasn't too far off from what Vance was claiming: that Democratic political rhetoric is somehow to blame for the shooting, even though the motive of the shooter still was not known as of Sunday morning. Brit Hume was especially vocal about this, in what amounted to gaslighting Fox News viewers.
Do Democrats sometimes go too far in their political rhetoric? Absolutely. But the context that is missing here is that Trump and his supporters are the ones who turned the water on boil and walked away from the stove. This is not to say any network should blame Trump in the hours after he got shot. It's to say that without motive and without context, the story isn't complete.
CNN for its part came under fire, particularly from conservatives, after special correspondent Jamie Gangel, noting that Trump seemed to be telling supporters to, "Fight! Fight! Fight!" while being led from the stage by the Secret Service, said, "I think what we're hearing from people is that's not the message that we want to be sending right now. We want to damp it down."
What will be especially telling are the hours and days ahead, when conspiracy theories start flying. How will CNN and Fox News, along with all the other networks, handle that? Stay tuned.
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