“Too much of any­thing is bad, but too much good whiskey is bare­ly enough”. Health con­cerns aside, Mark Twain’s apho­rism is an apt way to mea­sure the report­ing booze-up of the Trump arraign­ment. Too much of noth­ing hap­pen­ing on air for too long dis­tilled the live cov­er­age into a vin­tage more akin to a cheap blend than a fine sin­gle malt.

My sym­pa­thies lie with TV cor­re­spon­dents under the unig­nor­able pres­sure of anchors in their ear­pieces to fill air time when there was noth­ing news­wor­thy to say. One was reduced to bab­bling about how many doors there were that Trump might, or might not, use.
It was only mar­gin­al­ly less excit­ing than the few hun­dred Trump haters and MAGA acolytes milling and shout­ing mind­less­ly at each oth­er across a police bar­ri­er. The best sum­ma­tion I saw was from New York Times colum­nist Michelle Gold­berg: “You could walk a block away and be unaware that any­thing was happening.”
Net­work exec­u­tives might want to con­sid­er how much they spent on blan­ket cov­er­age of  noth­ing hap­pen­ing when the next round of staff cuts to save mon­ey comes up.
The dearth of images was spot­light­ed when the court­room still pho­to of Trump and his legal team was released. Not even repeat­ed zoom-ins to his scowl could make the image sus­tain­able to the point where it enabled what TV can and should do best, pro­vide the sense and dra­ma of the moment.
The unfor­tu­nate result was more time for a pletho­ra of  “experts”, “ana­lysts”, “com­men­ta­tors” and any oth­er des­ig­na­tion that might con­note eru­dite or informed. Some were both. Too many began their star turns with a reit­er­a­tion of what any­one watch­ing already knew, which came down to a ver­sion of: “It’s the first time a for­mer president/presidential can­di­date etc is fac­ing crim­i­nal charges. The first time. Ever.”
One made a valiant if redun­dant effort to stir excite­ment by bap­tis­ing the moment “unique­ly unprecedented’.
Not that pro­lix pun­dit­ry is the spe­cial pre­serve of domes­tic events, or any one network.
Years ago, wired up at a live posi­tion in north­ern Iraq near the front line of the about-to-start  U.S. inva­sion, wait­ing for my cou­ple of min­utes live on the CBS Morn­ing News, I lis­tened to “experts” talk­ing to the anchor in New York. Com­pared to even what lit­tle I real­ly knew of the sit­u­a­tion, it was clear none of  them had ever set foot in Iraq, and maybe not even in the Mid­dle East.

                   AND THEN THERE IS…

But at least they were artic­u­late, which puts them a step up on the anchor of one of the oth­er three major net­works. If the lead-ins, teas­es and pieces on the Trump arraign­ment are any­thing to go by, he either has a less than rudi­men­ta­ry knowl­edge of gram­mar, or thinks con­sis­tent­ly using gerunds in place of a prop­er verb is a way to sound clever.
Gram­mat­i­cal errors are as easy to com­mit on live TV as they are in casu­al con­ver­sa­tion, as I demon­strat­ed more than few times over my broad­cast career. But to make them on pur­pose and to such a degree that cor­rect speech stands out like a miss­ing front tooth in a full-face smile is ridicu­lous, and unwor­thy of seri­ous jour­nal­ism.
So is quot­ing any­one with a demon­stra­bly idi­ot­ic and/or men­da­cious point of view, even if it offers enter­tain­ment val­ue. That applies in spades to acolytes and self-promoters.
By any mea­sure, any news out­let oth­er than FOX and its right-wing rivals could fair­ly have refrained from report­ing the opin­ions of proven fan­ta­sist (to be cor­rect but undu­ly kind) George San­tos and unhinged air­head (to be accu­rate but under­stat­ed), Mar­jorie Tay­lor Greene.
There’s bare­ly even enter­tain­ment val­ue in some­one who thinks Trump can be equat­ed with Nel­son Man­dela or Jesus Christ. (For those who missed it, Tay­lor Greene not­ed that they too were arrested.)
Arguably the most clar­i­on guide­line for report­ing in any news medi­um, was penned in a 1921 essay by the great edi­tor CP Scott, to mark the cen­te­nary of what was then the Man­ches­ter Guardian:
“Com­ment is free, but facts are sacred. ‘Pro­pa­gan­da’, so called, by this means is hate­ful. The voice of oppo­nents no less than that of friends has a right to be heard. Com­ment also is just­ly sub­ject to a self-imposed restraint. It is well to be frank; it is even bet­ter to be fair. This is an ide­al. Achieve­ment in such mat­ters is hard­ly giv­en to man. Per­haps none of us can attain to it in the desir­able mea­sure. We can but try, ask par­don for short­com­ings, and there leave the matter.”
(To read the full essay, which I rec­om­mend, click this link:: https://www.theguardian.com/sustainability/cp-scott-centenary-essay)
Indeed try is all we can do…and bear in mind that when Mae West said “Too much of a good thing can be won­der­ful”, she decid­ed­ly did not have events like the blan­ket cov­er­age of Don­ald Trump in mind, no mat­ter how news­wor­thy it may be.

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