Scott MacFarlane, the CBS News correspondent, wasn’t quite sure what was going on Saturday night. He was covering former President Donald Trump’s rally in western Pennsylvania when he heard noises that reminded him of firecrackers. They were gunshots.
Suddenly, MacFarlane realized he was in potential danger — and a nearby rival was trying to keep him safe.
“Rachel Scott pulled me down,” says MacFarlane, referring to the ABC News veteran. She “grabbed me by the arm, told me to get beneath the bleachers.” On Sunday morning, MacFarlane tells Variety, “I gave her a big hug.”
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As TV news outlets try to pivot from one of the rarest of events — an assassination attempt on a former U.S. president — to coverage of the Republican National Convention, such goodwill may be in short supply. MacFarlane, who has remained in Pennsylvania to cover some of the investigation into what has been described as an assassination attempt on Trump by a 20-year-old man, has been surprised by some of the invective that has been hurled his way.
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“I can tell you I’ve noticed more people yelling at me over the past 24 hours,” MacFarlane says. “The language is fierce, more corrosive.” He’s heard people telling him that “I hope you die,” that “this is your fault.”
“That’s different than ‘fake news,’” he says.
No mainstream media outlet is going to back off coverage of the RNC, a milestone marker on the road to the White House. But there are growing concerns about sensitivity at a time when the national audience, already polarized, seems even more raw. People within news networks describe plans for RNC coverage as “fluid,” given the import of tracking reaction to and investigation of this weekend’s political violence.
“This whole thing has taken on a different tone,” says Martha MacCallum, the Fox News anchor who regularly leads the network’s election coverage with Bret Baier. “The nation is stunned by what happened, and whether people do or don’t support the former president, I just feel that it’s focused everyone’s attention in a way we never anticipated, obviously.”
There are already signs of media companies taking the audience’s collective temperature. NBCUniversal opted to pre-empt regular MSNBC programming on Monday, and keep the cable network on a shared “special report” feed that has also aired on the live-streaming outlet NBC News Now at least for the early part of the day. That meant not showing “Morning Joe” on the first day of the Republican National Convention. And Comedy Central opted to scrap its planned telecasts of its satirical “Daily Show” from Milwaukee, where the RNC is being held. Indeed, the program will go dark Monday, the night Jon Stewart typically leads.
Audiences seem deeply interested in the latest developments from both sides. More than 24 million people watched President Biden’s press conference during the NATO Summit Thursday, an unusually high number for such an event (and a possible reflection of Biden’s choice to not do many of these types of exchanges with the media).
So plans remain intact to cover the RNC in substantial ways. ABC News plans to stream an hour at 9 p.m. on ABC News Live, followed by an hour on the ABC broadcast network on each evening of the RNC. Both will feature David Muir and Linsey Davis, and more streaming programming is slated at other hours.
Fox News plans to air special coverage at 10 p.m. each night, led by MacCallum and Baier. CNN’s Monday plans include coverage of the opening roll call at 2 p.m. led by Anderson Cooper and Jake Tapper, with Erin Burnett and Wolf Blitzer taking on late-evening duties before Tapper and Cooper return for primetime. CBS News plans multiple hours of coverage on its CBS News 24/7 broadband outlet, with an hour of coverage at 10 p.m. on Monday through Thursday. Norah O’Donnell will anchor three hours of primetime coverage across streaming and linear. MSNBC’s full complement of programming is expected to get underway Tuesday, when Rachel Maddow and a phalanx of the network’s opinion hosts and analysts take to primetime.
NBC is poised to get a boost from an interview between Lester Holt and President Biden, slated to air at 9 p.m. Monday. Holt and Savannah Guthrie will co-anchor an hour of primetime coverage across NBC News Now and NBC on Monday and Tuesday, and two hours on Wednesday and Thursday.
The challenge to most news organizations is that they have multiple storylines to cover, says Marc Burstein, senior executive producer of ABC News’ special-events coverage. Most will keep tabs on the investigation into the Trump rally shooting and President Biden’s standing in the Democratic party, as well as the story of the convention itself, and whether Trump will try to unify voters, as he has recently vowed to do. “We have got to weave all three” into coverage, Burstein says.
There will also be much scrutiny on Trump’s vice-presidential nominee, says MacCallum, since the former president told Fox News he expects to make an announcement imminently. “The story is moving very quickly,” she says. “It just feels as if we are in an historic moment in many ways. It’s very compelling.”
Security remains an issue on many executives’ minds, says Burstein. “There is an expectation that there is some animosity toward the press,” he says, particularly after the attack on Trump. “It got worse over the weekend, and we are prepared for that.”
Many news outlets produced hours and hours of programming this weekend they had not expected to, and now they must cover an election-year event that has suddenly taken on new relevance. So there is another factor at play: Can the press keep up its current pace?
