'If It's Not True, Don't Put It on TV': A Former TV Exec on How to Save Live News in the Trump Era
Many Americans are disturbed that TV networks air the Trump White House’s misinformation-filled coronavirus briefings live and in primetime. One of those people is Mark Lukasiewicz, a former executive at NBC News who also happens to be an ideal person to consult to try to understand why the networks and cable channels continue to broadcast Trump’s briefings unfiltered.
A 40-year veteran of broadcast journalism, Lukasiewicz spent much of 2000 to 2017 as the executive in charge of NBC News’s coverage of live events and breaking news — election nights, presidential debates, inaugurations. He helped make the all-important decision of when to break into the network’s regular programming and go live with a major announcement, whether it was the death of Michael Jackson or the killing of Osama bin Laden. He was often in the room as NBC News staffers wrestled with how much live coverage to give Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential run, which, by one estimate, reaped more than $5 billion in free airtime.
In 2018, Lukasiewicz left NBC to run the Lawrence Herbert School of Communication at Hofstra University. Now a journalism educator and full-time news consumer, he assessed with fresh eyes whether the networks and cable-TV channels were drifting from their journalistic mission, replacing hard-hitting interviews and painstakingly reported segments with manufactured conflict and easy-to-produce shouting matches that too often ended with the dreaded words “We’ll leave it there.”
Watching the live coverage of Trump’s coronavirus briefings, Lukasiewicz hit a breaking point. He wrote a story for the Columbia Journalism Review in which he made a modest request of his former colleagues in the TV news business: “Let truth-telling be a prerequisite for appearing on live TV,” he wrote. “Repeat offenders who lie or obfuscate with abandon, no matter their position, should not be put on live again.”
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/trump-television-daily-briefing-coronavirus-media-ethics-981310/
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