It’s hard to overstate how bonkers the news cycle is right now.
Republicans are trying to ram through a train-wreck health care bill without any hearings.
This process is an embarrassment.
This is nuclear-grade bonkers.
The White House is threatening the attorney general to derail the Russia investigation.
So not only does he call Jeff Sessions beleaguered, he says he is not doing his job.
And Trump is actively asking if he’s allowed to pardon himself if it turns out he committed
a crime.
Any one of those stories represents a fundamental breakdown in political norms.
But if you turn on CNN or your local news channel right now, things will probably look
kind of normal.
Let’s discuss all this with our CNN political commentators.
When Jeff Sessions wakes up, what is he thinking when he hears this?
This is not your typical president.
Even boring.
The Senate is trying for a Hail Mary on this health care bill.
What is the latest?
We expect the vote in an hour.
Do we know if they have the votes?
And that’s because our news media isn’t great at conveying when our politicians have
gone truly off the rails.
If you look at some of the most well-respected journalists on TV —
Anderson Cooper, Lester Holt, Wolf Blitzer —
they all kind of talk the same way.
They’re unemotional, even-keeled, and unfazed by the stories they’re covering.
You could watch Wolf Blitzer on mute and not know if he’s talking about the Kardashians
or a nuclear missile launch.
The norm in American media is that journalists shouldn’t get flustered or outraged or even
emotional about the political disputes they’re covering.
They should present the facts, let panelists argue about it, and then move on.
And in normal political disagreements, that’s fine.
But in the Trump era, it’s made political journalism feel totally inadequate.
Take the recent Senate health care vote.
Republicans voted to consider a bill without knowing what was in it.
They tried to pass it in the dead of night with no committee hearings.
And the bill was so bad they made Paul Ryan promise not to pass it, hoping they’d come
up with something better before it was too late.
That’s a gross hijacking of the legislative process.
It’s gambling with the lives of millions of people.
Even conservative commentators called it “disgraceful.”
But on CNN?
Business as usual.
What is the strategy on health care?
What’s amazing, we still don’t know if there are 50 Republican votes.
Can the Republicans come up with something that gets 50 votes?
Can they?
No freaking out.
If the bill is as bad as Senate Republicans say, then they don’t have to worry about
House Republicans deciding to pass it.
Don Lemon just doing his thing.
I mean, when you say the “skinny” repeal, makes it sound like a diet plan.
They want to drop the weight of this bill.
The same thing happened after Trump started looking to get rid of Jeff Sessions and Robert
Mueller, which would effectively trigger a full-scale constitutional crisis.
News outlets treated it like just personal drama from the Trump White House.
The escalating drama between President Trump and the Justice Department.
Another juicy scandal to let commentators argue over.
With friends like these, who needs enemies?
Donald Trump is a bit of a bully.
He is who he is.
That’s the Popeye defense, “I am what I am.”
I am what I am: I’m a blunt-spoken New Yorker.
This is Trump being Trump.
This is what normalization actually looks like.
Journalists feel compelled to treat every news story like the ones that came before
it.
Not official until, until the gavel pounds.
And again, until this gavel comes down, it’s not official.
They just can’t admit that something abnormal is happening.
Think of those people who ignore hurricane evacuation warnings.
What do you mean you’re not leaving?
Well, I’m hoping it’s not going to be as serious as they’re saying.
And it’s important to recognize this as a form of bias.
Call it “normalcy bias.”
And that normalcy bias ends up making for misleading news coverage.
A huge part of the way that we process news is by nonverbal cues,
how a story is framed and delivered and compares to every other news story.
So when Anderson Cooper is laughing during a segment about Trump derailing Mueller’s
investigation, audiences perceive that it’s not a big deal.
That this is normal.
When a segment about Trump pardoning himself looks and sounds like every other segment,
it’s easy to assume that everything is fine.
When TV anchors are just casually updating you on the status of the health care vote,
they’re not conveying how dangerous what happened is.
Certainly some drama as this thing comes down to the wire.
It’s not like everyone’s pretending everything is fine.
You know, we get tired of saying, “It’s shocking, it’s unusual, it’s not normal,”
but it’s shocking, it’s unusual, it’s not normal.
But this shouldn’t be the job of commentators or guests dropped into otherwise normal-looking
segments.
One of the central responsibilities of journalism is to tell us when something really abnormal
is happening.
It’s why Shep Smith goes viral any time he gets frustrated.
Why is it lie after lie after lie?
If you clean, come on clean.
It’s why Anderson Cooper’s best moment was when he got emotional covering Katrina.
There are people who want answers, and there are people who want someone to stand up and
say, “You know what, we should’ve done more.”
Some stories are too important, too dangerous to be treated like everyday political disputes.
But until news networks adapt their behavior for this administration, it’s worth remembering
that our politics are a lot scarier than what they look like on TV.