Boy, do we need TV now.
I’m talking about TV coverage inside the courtroom whenever special prosecutor Jack Smith finally gets to confront Donald Trump on the ex-president’s attempts to overthrow the government he’d previously sworn to protect and defend.
Whatever the outcome, TV coverage of that trial is the only way people will believe what happened.
That’s how divided we are now in America.
If you have any doubt, just consider all those Republican die-hards still insisting the monstrous events of Jan. 6, 2021 never really happened the way our own eyes told us they happened.
We were a nation of eyewitnesses to those awful hours, and they still can’t stop lying to our faces.
But the Capitol insurrection only went on for those few hours.
The insurrection case against Trump is expected to go on for weeks. We need — as a nation, as an electorate – to be able to witness the details, to absorb the narrative, to read the looks on the faces and hear the vocal intonations of those whose lives are on the line.
If we leave it to our newspapers (what’s left of them) and our web sites (which “borrow” their analyses by reading newspapers) and our TV networks (which won’t carry the trial, lest they be forced to break into important game shows and soap operas) and the cable news stations, we’ll be left with the usual: dueling interpretations of bits and pieces.
If you think not, just reflect on the events of last week.
We had a former president indicted on criminal charges. Nothing like this has ever happened before in all of American history, except to Trump.
Naturally, CNN and MSNBC were all over it – to the extent that, as usual, they missed almost everything else that was going on in America last week.
And Fox?
Well, Fox couldn’t get enough of Hunter Biden.
From their vantage point, which is located in Donald Trump’s back pocket, maybe the geniuses at Fox didn’t notice the world collapsing all around the ex-president.
Or maybe they didn’t care. Fox is still the ratings leader among the big three cable news outlets (which is easy enough to explain: CNN and MSNBC split viewers from the political left and center, while Fox has a monopoly on right wing viewers) and they don’t want to upset their audience with any inconvenient truths.
They tried that, when they announced Trump had actually lost the 2020 election. And, until they righted their ship, they lost a bunch of viewers to outlets even more loyal to Trump. So, they stick to the script now: if Trump’s having a bad day, find somebody else to cover.
So, we need TV cameras inside that courtroom where Trump will finally face the truth about his attempts to overthrow his own government. Fulltime cameras, gavel to gavel, day after day.
There are rules against TV cameras inside federal courtrooms, but so what? We used to have rules against presidents committing federal crimes.
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