The Trump campaign has announced that the 2024 Republican National Convention will begin as scheduled tomorrow, after the former President was injured in an attempted assassination. Saturday's shooting will doubtless cast a shadow on the convention, but decades of past coverage suggests that the media coverage will nonetheless showcase journalists’ time-tested criticism of the GOP as an extremist, racist, sexist, mean-spirited mob that must be defeated at all costs.
Thirty-two years ago, when the GOP was re-nominating mainstream conservative President George H. W. Bush, NBC’s Katie Couric suggested Republicans had become “too exclusionary, too intolerant.” Four years later, MSNBC host Bill Moyers fretted about the “theological imperatives being imposed” on the Republican platform.
In 2000, CBS’s Bryant Gumbel suggested “blacks have a right to be suspicious” of many Republican leaders, while ABC’s Charles Gibson doubted whether the pro-life GOP was “really an open, compassionate, tolerant party.”
Viewers heard the same thing in 2012, when CBS’s Scott Pelley claimed that because of its stance against abortion, women might “question whether Republicans have women’s best interests at heart.”
In 2016, MSNBC’s Joy Reid decried the “really angry rhetoric” she heard directed against illegal immigrants,” while her colleague Chris Matthews was shocked by the “festival of hating Hillary” Clinton. And in 2020, NBC’s Peter Alexander fretted the Republicans’ “grim....apocalyptic portrait of America if Joe Biden wins the election.”
This spin is reaches back to the 1980s and 1990s, and thus has nothing to do with the today’s GOP personalities. Below, you’ll see some of the choicest quotes from the MRC’s archives; next month, we’ll look at the media’s very different coverage of past Democratic conventions.
■ “Is there any concern on your part that this ticket might just be a little too conservative? It’s to the right of most Americans in the country right now.”
— CBS correspondent Lesley Stahl interviewing ex-Delaware Governor Pete DuPont during live convention coverage, August 18, 1988.
■ “Do you think the Republican Party has grown, or become, too exclusionary, too intolerant, and that this kind of rhetoric is divisive and counterproductive?”
— Co-host Katie Couric to Vice President Dan Quayle on NBC’s Today, August 19, 1992.■ “You gave the impression that if you’re not a white, heterosexual, Christian, anti-abortion, anti-environment, you’re somehow not welcome in the Republican Party.”
— NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw, August 18, 1992, asking Pat Buchanan about his convention speech delivered the previous night.■ “Are you really comfortable in a party where there are a lot of theological imperatives being imposed upon a political platform?”
— Host Bill Moyers to Steve Forbes on MSNBC’s InterNight, July 19, 1996.
■ “George W. is one thing, but as long as the Republican Party — you noted some of them — is populated by the Pat Buchanans, the Jesse Helmses, the Jerry Falwells, the Bob Barrs, don’t blacks have a right to be suspicious?”
— CBS’s Bryant Gumbel to a panel of black men on the August 2, 2000 Early Show.■ “The platform is, again, very strongly pro-life and rejects abortion rights, and the platform specifically comes out against gay unions, and against legal protections based on sexual preferences. So is this really an open, compassionate, tolerant party?”
— Co-host Charles Gibson to Lynne Cheney, on ABC’s Good Morning America, August 2, 2000.■ “The Republican convention opens in New York to re-nominate George W. Bush and showcase the party’s, quote, ‘moderate side.’ Will voters buy it?”
— Dan Rather opening the August 30, 2004 CBS Evening News.
■ “The President’s team knows that it can’t get back to the White House by taking only hard right turns, so it has, as three of its featured speakers, Republicans who have been successful by navigating the middle of the road as well the right-hand side....Streetwise New Yorkers may call that the political equivalent of a popular con game in this tough town — three-card monte. But then, that’s a game in which the dealer almost always wins.”
— Tom Brokaw ending the August 29, 2004 NBC Nightly News.■ “The abortion platform here is pretty hard right when it comes to the abortion question — with which you have some disagreement, I think, with the party still.”
— NBC’s David Gregory to ex-New Jersey Governor Christie Todd Whitman, MSNBC convention coverage, September 2, 2008.■ “If [Bobby] Jindal had been governor of Louisiana in 2005 [during Hurricane Katrina], everything would have been different, and he would be John McCain’s running mate instead of this wacko right-winger.”
— Co-host Mort Kondracke talking about Sarah Palin on FNC’s The Beltway Boys, September 6, 2008.■ “There’s a phrase I wonder about, ‘community organizers.’...Is this the new ‘welfare queen?’ Is this a new symbol, that we’re talking about here?...I think what they’re getting is urban, downtown, trouble, tough neighborhoods. ‘Community organizer’ is not a winning phrase for a place like Scranton....It seems to me that the use of the word, ‘community organizer,’ is almost like a bullwhip.... Are they saying that, that Barack Obama is Al Sharpton? Is that what they’re saying?”
— MSNBC’s Chris Matthews to various guests on Hardball, September 8, 2008.■ “A lot of women look at the Republican platform on abortion, contraception, a number of issues, and ask the question whether Republicans have women’s best interests at heart?”
— CBS anchor Scott Pelley in an interview with Ann Romney shown on the August 28, 2012 Evening News.■ “Could you ask the Secretary — her speech was so overpowering, and positive, but was it kind of a rejoinder to all the birtherism and the narrowness that she’s heard in her party?”
— Chris Matthews interrupting Andrea Mitchell’s interview of Condoleezza Rice during MSNBC’s live coverage, August 29, 2012.■ “They [Republicans] knocked themselves out producing a convention that was a colossal hoax....[In Paul Ryan’s] speech Wednesday night, the altar boy altered reality, conjuring up a world so compassionate, so full of love-thy-neighbor kindness and small-town goodness, that you had to pinch yourself to remember it was a shimmering mirage, a beckoning pool of big, juicy lies.... Ryan’s lies and Romney’s shape-shifting are so easy to refute that they must have decided a Hail Mary pass of artifice was better than their authentic ruthless worldview.”
— New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, September 2, 2012.■ “I don’t care how many children Pat Smith lost I would like to beat her to death.”
— GQ basketball writer Nathaniel Friedman (aka Bethlehem Shoals) in a July 18, 2016 tweet following a GOP convention speech from the mother of Benghazi victim Sean Smith.■ “Melania Trump’s speech was the first of the night that didn’t have this subtext that....brown people are dangerous which was the kinda subtext of the rest of the night. There was a lot of really angry rhetoric, a lot of talk about murder and death and tying it all back to immigrants, tying it all back an illegal migration and there was a really hard-edged theme...If you’re a person of color, this is a weird place to be.”
— Host Joy Reid on MSNBC’s The Place for Politics 2016, July 19, 2016.
■ “It’s this festival of hating Hillary tonight, this brewing up of almost a witch-like ritual tonight...[Chris] Christie was up there with that very rough justice, I might put it, of Hillary Clinton....and I get the feeling, he wanted — if they had said, ‘kill her now,’ it was almost that bloodthirsty....And the audience always as requested, responded always with the verdict of ‘guilty,’ and they said it in a blood curdling way every time.”
— Hardball host Chris Matthews during MSNBC’s live GOP convention coverage, July 19, 2016.■ “Heading into this convention, the President and his allies promised four days of hope and optimism. But many of those speakers on night one painted a grim picture of the country if Donald Trump loses and warned that Joe Biden is, in effect, an existential threat….Many delivering an apocalyptic portrait of America if Joe Biden wins the election.”
— Correspondent Peter Alexander on NBC’s Today, August 25, 2020.
■ “A lot of people saw a very dark picture painted last night about the Democrats, that there were going to be vengeful mobs storming the suburbs. That doesn’t sound very optimistic.”
— Co-host Anthony Mason to first night speaker and former UN ambassador Nikki Haley as aired on CBS This Morning, August 25, 2020.
■ “It’s a total disconnect…We heard nothing about racial justice and the reckoning with — with 400 years of systemic racism that a majority of Americans, according to polls, are ready to undertake, are ready to talk about and grapple with. This convention is not ready to grapple with any of that. This convention is ready to frighten voters.”
— Washington Post columnist and NBC News political analyst Eugene Robinson on NBC News’s live coverage of the Republican National Convention, August 26, 2020.
■ “As I’m watching this [Donald Trump’s acceptance speech], I’m thinking Fidel Castro, Julius Caesar, Mobutu Sese Seko. That was not an American President giving an acceptance speech. That was a monarch....It was very much like what Castro used to do….He made the White House into the Trump palace. If democracy in America ever falls and we become a complete autocracy with a decrepit leader and his corrupt family moving their trunks into the White House and never leaving….tonight is what it will look like. This is what it will look like to have a decrepit, corrupt monarch. This was a crime. Every cabinet member that was sitting there was violating the Hatch Act….This would be the end of America.”
— Host Joy Reid on MSNBC’s Decision 2020: Republican National Convention, August 27, 2020.
For more examples from our flashback series, which we call the NewsBusters Time Machine, go here.
