It’s becoming a familiar playbook.
Two months after exhaustively covering the arraignment of former President Donald J. Trump in a Manhattan courtroom in a separate case, the news media on state television went back to work in Miami on Tuesday afternoon.
ABC, NBC and CBS, the three major broadcast networks, interrupted their regular afternoon programming to report the news. NBC sent evening news anchor Lester Holt to Miami, and CBS sent Norah O’Donnell.
Cable news networks turned to top news anchors. Jake Tapper and Anderson Cooper oversaw coverage for CNN, while Brett Byer and Martha McCallum led coverage for FOX News.
Similar to Trump’s visit to a Manhattan courthouse, all six major broadcasters and cable news networks will travel about 20 minutes in the Trump motorcade to downtown Miami, where the former president was arraigned. The situation was reflected in a bird’s-eye view shot.
The wall-to-wall coverage symbolized another day when Trump dominated the airwaves. Many of the panelists who attended the interview discussed the momentous nature of the day.
“There’s always tension when politics and law collide, because they’re both places where fighting takes place,” said CBS’ John Dickerson, from a makeshift set on a balcony overlooking a Miami courthouse. Told. “Politics is a bar fight, and the law is like a boxing match, with some rules.”
Unlike April’s arraignment, there was a distinct lack of informative footage. There was no footage of Trump entering the courthouse or his convoy entering the garage, nor was there footage of the interior of Federal Capitol. The network instead relied on images of demonstrators outside the courthouse.
Fox News aired live footage of what its anchor described as former First Lady Melania Trump, but within minutes the station announced it wasn’t actually her. “On a day like this with so many people coming and going, it’s easy to confuse them from a distance,” said Foxcaster John Roberts, who was actually Trump’s top aide, Margo Martin. revealed that it was
Earlier that day, Fox News reported a press conference outside the Miami Courthouse by Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, in which he asked other candidates to promise Trump a pardon. Five hours later, Mr. Ramaswamy had a live Fox News interview with Mr. McCallum, this time in his New York studio. “You’re moving around quickly today,” she observed, after which he denounced “politicized prosecutions.”
Throughout the day, MSNBC seemed to be looking ahead, displaying a graphic in the lower right corner of the screen featuring images of Rachel Maddow, Nicole Wallace, and Joy Reid, and an 8 p.m. was promoting the program. “
The news about Trump had a positive impact on MSNBC’s ratings. Last week, the network topped the cable news network for total primetime viewership for the entire calendar week, the first time in more than two years. The network averaged 1.52 million viewers for him, narrowly beating his 1.51 million viewers for FOX News and beating CNN’s average viewership of 677,000.
It was also the highest weekday prime time viewership on MSNBC since Trump’s arraignment in April.
