The Press Box - How the Attempted Assassination of Donald Trump Was Covered

Episode Date: July 15, 2024

Hello, media consumers! Bryan and David react to the attempted assassination of former president Donald Trump. They discuss the following, regarding the coverage: Reactions to hearing the news (0:36) The photographers and the amazing photos they captured (4:30) Interviews that took place immediately after the shooting (10:40) Social media conspiracy theories (20:12) Host: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Producer: Brian H. Waters Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This is Bill Simmons. I am thrilled to announce our newest YouTube channel. It's called Ringer Movies. If you're a fan of our movie coverage here at The Ringer, then you're in luck because every episode of the rewatchables and the Big Picture, now on YouTube. Like Bill said, Ringer Movies will feature full episodes of my show, The Big Picture, the Rewatchables,

as well as special live episodes, deep dives into movie history and a bunch of other fun stuff featuring other movie-loving Ringer personalities. Search Ringer movies on YouTube and experience the joy. Chris Ryan impersonating Wayne Jenkins on camera. Hello, media consumers. Welcome to Pressbox, Brian Curtis, David Shoemaker, and producer Brian Waters with you. David, here are some words that feel utterly strange to say. On Saturday, there was an assassination attempt against Donald Trump.

It happened in Butler, Pennsylvania, north of Pittsburgh, where Trump was having a rally. Trump, in his own words, was, quote, shot with a bullet that pierced the upper part of my right ear. one person at the rally, Corey Comptor, who was 50, has died. Two other people who attended the rally were seriously wounded. The shooter was killed as well. This is a story we were all collectively processing on Saturday afternoon. Are you able to describe what it felt like to hear the news?

I mean, disbelief, but not in the, I think the way that I would normally use that were. I mean, someone sent me the link. I watched it briefly without sound. I was just sort of like, I just kind of didn't understand what I had seen and just sort of went on with my day for about 30 minutes before I circled back around and realized, you know, I mean, at that point, to the extent that we knew, what had happened, you know?

And, yeah, I think it took the better part of a, you know, an hour to sink in. that you know that just kind of the degree to which this was as serious as it was i was sitting on a plane in philadelphia and the woman behind me says donald trump's been shot and immediately got this feeling in my stomach where it was like my stomach was just dropping kind of queasiness and sickness and then of course we're able to immediately learn that trump was okay which was was a relief, but there was also this strange feeling, and I don't know if you experienced this, where seconds after hearing the shocking news, most shocking news, perhaps, you're able to pick up your phone and watch a video of the incident just instantaneously.

Yeah. What a strange world we live in where something is not, you know, oh, there's some unclear reports coming out. There's no, no, oh, we're just going to pick up a. phone and of course we're all we're all curious right we all want to know we want to see what happened yeah um i just found that to be such a strange strange feature of the world we live in it's true on one hand it feels like something that happens in another time in american history it's 1981 when reagan was shot by john hinkley mm-hmm but as i saw a lot of people

point out yesterday including jake tapper political violence has not unusual in this time Yeah. It was Gabby Giffords. There was Steve Scalise. There was Paul Pelosi. There was, of course, January 6th. We've seen lots of acts of political violence. It is strange when you make the list like that, but it was just so striking to see that list yesterday.

We're going to devote today's podcast, David, to the events from Saturday. And I'd love for us to talk about a couple of things about the coverage and the way we all process this. Mm-hmm. Number one was the news photography at the scene there in Butler, Pennsylvania. Yeah. Saw Jason Farago make this point in the New York Times that even though there was video footage instantly available, it was the still photographs taken at the rally that told the story of the event. The photographers were right there in front of the stage. That section is called the buffer area. so they were a few feet from Donald Trump.

One of them was Doug Mills, who's worked at the New York Times since 2002. He was at the AP before that, Pulitzer winner, and he took this series of three photographs. In the first one, you can see a bullet passing by Donald Trump. Second one, Trump is grabbing his ear,

and then in the third photograph, Trump is looking at his hand. and seeing blood. Former FBI agent tells the New York Times, catching a bullet on a side trajectory as seen in that photo would be a one in a million shot and nearly impossible to catch even if one knew the bullet was coming.

Just to underline how remarkable that image was. Doug Mills himself tells the Times, I've always feared being in this situation. I always wondered what I'd do. in this situation. I hope I get the right shot. I hope I'm not shot myself. Mm-hmm. Just an amazing picture to see, again, almost instantaneously after the events on Saturday. Also near the stage was a photographer named Evan Vucci. He has Doug Mills's old job as chief photographer in Washington for the AP. It's been a photographer in war zones. And if you looked

at the video yesterday after the shots were fired and the Secret Service was pulling Donald Trump to the ground, you could see Evan Vucci running in front of the podium to try to get a photograph. And the one he got is the one that has become sort of the memorable photograph of this whole awful incident in which a bloody Trump is standing raising his right fist with the American flag in the background. Evan Vucci explained what the moments after the shooting were like to CNN's Casey Hunt. And everything was completely normal. Then over my last shoulder, I heard, I heard, you know, pops, and I knew immediately what

it was. And then I just kind of went into work mode. And the Secret Service rushed the stage, and I jumped up, and I got there as quickly as I could, and I'm photographing them covering President Trump. And then I was thinking in my head, okay, what are they going to do next? How are they going to get them off the stage? where is he going to go? How is this going to unfold?

So you're trying to make all those decisions in the moment. And so I ran to the other side of the stage thinking that that would be their evacuation route. And as a president was standing up, he started pumping his fists and saw the blood on the side of his face. And I, you know, you know that that was kind of the moment of what was, you know, what was happening. It was. What did you make of that photograph as somebody who deals with? art and somebody that deals with photography here at the ringer when you first saw it yesterday. Well, I mean, it was an iconic photo. It was, you know, a defining moment in that day in this

period in our history when we look back. You know, it's, it's rare, I mean, especially with, you know, I mean, sure there were a lot of photos taken in those moments. but relatively speaking probably not a ton compared to a lot of other like huge moments and you know our country's history and and yeah I mean it's it's it's it's a stunning photo and pretty incredible that it

I mean you talk to me as an art director I mean it's you can pour over all the photos of some big moment never see anything that kind of is as iconic you know is that as well well composed and everything else.

And, you know, you mentioned the first, the first photos, the bullets, the bullet sort of whizzing by his head, how that sort of is more informative than the video is. I mean, certainly I think that this photo will live on in a way that the video won't, if it hasn't already, sort of supplanted it. So third photograph by Anna, Anna moneymaker of Getty. She was able to take a shot of Donald Trump on the ground and shot it between the legs of one of the Secret Service officers that had pulled him down and was protecting him there, which was unbelievable. Donald Trump said this is the Washington Examiner after the incident on Saturday. It's hard to describe what it felt like, but I knew the world was looking.

I knew that history would judge this. and I knew I had to let them know we are okay. So that's Donald Trump in the moment. Thinking as he says about how history would look on this thing that has just happened to him. And standing up, putting his fist in the air, he's chaining fight, right? Performing these, you know, doing this thing that then turns into that photograph from Evan Vucci. Another just fascinating moment buried in all, inside all of this. Did you see the BBC interview Saturday?

So this is again, minutes after the shooting. There's chaos all over the place there in Pennsylvania. Reporters are going to work. And there was an interview by Gary O'Donohue, who is the BBC senior North American correspondent. a fascinating reporter in his own right. Gary O'Donoghue has been blind since he was a child. He's had all kinds of big jobs at the BBC. After the shooting, he was outside the security perimeter,

which I think is key here because a lot of the reporters, of course, are locked down inside this pen there with the rallygoers and with Donald Trump. O'Donohue was outside and he was able to find this witness. whose name is Greg Smith, and just listen to how remarkable this interview is and how remarkable it was to hear this just minutes after. We noticed the guy crawling, arm, you know, bear crawling up the roof of the building beside us,

50 feet away from us. So we're standing there, you know, we're pointing, we're pointing at the guy crawling up the roof. And he had a gun, right? He had a rifle. He could clearly see him with a rifle. Absolutely. We're pointing out them. The police are down there running around on the ground. We're like, hey, man, there's a guy on the roof with the rifle.

And the police were like, huh, what? You know, like, they didn't know what was going on. You know, we're like, hey, right here on the roof. We can see him from right here. We see him. He's crawling. And next thing you know, I'm like, I'm thinking to myself, I'm like, why is Trump still speaking? Why have they not pulled him up the stage? I'm standing there pointing at him for, you know, two or three minutes, secret. service is looking at us from the top of the barn. I'm pointing at that roof, just standing it like this. And next thing you know, five shots right now. The interviews moments after a shocking event are almost very caveat mTOR as a reporter.

It's almost the more glib the person is, the more suspicious you get. But if you check out what Greg Smith said, you know, he knew what the suspect, who we'd later find out was named Thomas Crooks was wearing. He knew he had a rifle. He knew he was killed by the Secret Service. He knew more to the point that there had been a massive security failure in Pennsylvania while the rest of us were still processing that information. Yeah. And you and I know over the years have seen eyewitness interviews like this one. Yeah. Where this person is just selected by history, if that's the right term here, to just suddenly

be on the news giving an interview about something they've just seen. And here's this guy, David, Greg Smith, who's wearing a red Trump visor that is almost a novelty visor that has like Trump's hair attached to the top of this. Yeah. That you can buy online. And he's got a red beard. And there are people on Twitter being like, is that his actual hair? Yeah.

That kind of matches his beard. What an, what is just an unbelievable piece? of footage and piece of television that was. Again, minutes right, minutes after the event. Yeah, really incredible. I mean, we've seen videos like this. And I think, I mean, it kind of goes without saying, but one of the most interesting things about this one is the guy turned out to be right, right? I mean, there's a lot of just like instant reaction videos that could point you in a totally incorrect direction, right? I mean, and yeah, I mean, this was this was the real witness. You know, I mean, this, he, he, he saw everything as it was happening.

And so in a way, he really shaped the coverage, um, all the coverage that followed because he pointed everybody in the right direction, you know, we could have spent the day disputing whatever narrative went out first. Um, and, and, you know, this guy, and, and the BBC kind of pointed it, started us off in the right direction, which is significant. Were you, struck by, I was at how the major news organization. We're trying to process the events in real time on Saturday. It was just unbelievable.

So here's something that none of us could imagine. And all of a sudden, you're trying to write headlines in the moment that capture what has just happened, but also don't mislead readers. So you get headlines like this, and I'll read a couple for you from Fox News. Possible Gunfire breaks out at Trump rally in Pennsylvania. This is ABC. Trump rushed off stage by Secret Service as bangs heard at Pennsylvania rally.

Yeah. New York Times. Trump's safe after what sounded like gunshots at rally. So you're doing what media organizations do, which is they're trying to tell you everything they know with a focus on no. Right? We know this.

Yeah. We're not going with vibes here. We're not going with something we think, but we know this. Yeah. And these media organizations are encircled by people on Twitter who are upset that they are being cautious. Yeah, of course. And trying to sift through complicated events. The actual, I mean, there were memos from these organizations about this caution, you know, that were dictating the sort of caution that were circulating online with people up in arms that they would be so, you know.

I mean, they saw it as dismissiveness, right, of just like, let's not take this seriously. Or downplay it somehow. Yeah. Yeah. And you're like, no, no, no. If you're working for one of these news organizations, your your chief goal other than to report things as as quickly as you can is not to put BS out into the universe. You do not want a headline out there that turns out not to be true. And, you know, it's one of those things. I feel strange doing this on a media podcast because media criticism is often literally what this pot is for. Yeah. Physician heal thyself. But. It's just to me watching this happen real time. You're like, folks, we can just, we can just take a breath here before we launch into media criticism time. Yeah. With news organizations. Yeah.

Well, you know, I mean, there were, obviously, we'll talk about this, but there were attendees of the rally that immediately whipped around after the shooting and started pointing at this assembled press and kind of accusing them of being at fault for it. So, I mean, it's a connection that's going to be. made, you know, in the heat of the moment, regardless of, you know, cooler heads trying to prevail or whatever else. Yeah. I mean, it's like, and look, you know, when you have, you have the specific, you have the specific critique of the media from, let's say, to Trump's fans. But then you also just have this other sort of, you know, I don't know, what you would call

juxtaposition of a handful of news organizations trying very, very hard to get something right. and thousands or millions of Twitter users being like, I don't care about what your standards are. Yeah. It just, it just, it just doesn't matter to me. Yeah. Like, they're not my standards. They're not going to affect what I tweet.

You know, you're just, you're just working with completely different, you know, expectations and rules. Yeah. And we've talked about it many times before, but regardless of how modernized our news media has become, they're still working with an infrastructure that was created in like the pre-digital era right i mean just like the like even at the ringer you know or like fact-checking process is rigorous and time-consuming you know and that and and those things uh just work almost completely to the contrary of the way that we want to be the way that we're used to consuming information and certainly the way that we want to be consuming information at a time like this yeah and the the you know

big New York Times opinion piece declaring that Trump was not worthy of the presidency that some people were pointing at saying how could they do this? You know, like what bad taste? I mean, there's a million ways you can look at this. But to the point of this conversation, these are pages and ink that were printed before this happened. That's the speed at which sort of legacy media operates, you know? and it stands out at a moment like this.

The thing about Saturday was too, was that the video was there available for everyone. It's not like if you wanted to analyze this event on your own, there's nothing being withheld from you. You know, that cautious headline that the New York Times or Fox News or whomever was putting out, it's not like that was keeping information from you so that you could not learn what was going on.

Yeah, it's a good point. You had all the tools you needed right there in front of you. And then, so, of course, what people do is they take photographs of those headlines, which is like taking a photograph of the Bulldog edition of the newspaper back in the old days and being like, look. Look how they got the story wrong. Look what they were doing. Yeah. These useless legacy media organizations.

And Elon Musk, perhaps not surprisingly, was getting in on that too, saying X is the voice of the people. I'll go ahead and go with the legacy media institutions on that, especially when something happens like it did on Saturday. A lot of conspiracy theories, David, on Twitter. In the moments after the shooting, from the left, the idea that it was all staged, there was a world record set for politics and professional wrestling references. On Twitter, as I'm sure you saw, we can just mostly leave those there, but holy moly. people

you know again and and not you know oh here's some rando that with five followers people that you and I follow yeah tweeting and retweeting stuff about that some of it joky some of it

kind of in the I'm joking but I'm not vain and then from the right this idea that it was Biden's fault yeah or the fault of Democrats more broadly we saw the note from well there's sorry there's two tears

This was Biden's doing, and this is Biden's fault, right? I mean, I guess we could separate those out. So you're saying Mike Collins from Georgia. Yes. Right, who had the tweet, who's the member of Congress from Georgia. And then more broadly people saying, you know, pointing to Biden's words from that phone call with donors a while back. Where he said, it's time to put Trump in a bull's seizing on those words that he said. Or maybe J.D. Vance, who's about to, who could be Donald Trump's running made here in a matter of hours.

Yeah. He tweeted the central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all cause. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump's attempted assassination. That was J.D. Vance on Twitter and that was very, very close to the events from Saturday. And there's also a lot of, you know, conspiracy theorizing about the Secret Service. And I mean, that's kind of all goes in the same, can Biden cloud, right? that the deep state is somehow involved in all this. But again, we can leave that there.

Yeah. And what's funny about these theories is they touch on or are adjacent to actual news concerns, right? The things that journalists are trying to figure out. Like what happened with the Secret Service on Saturday is an absolute, is one of the biggest single stories to come out of the day. Yeah. How in the world could that have happened? you know you saw carolionic who wrote a book about the secret service and the recent turmoil in that organization

writing about that on saturday or sunday i can't remember which exactly but that is that is a massive story yeah and and will be something that we'll read about here in the coming days uh i want to leave it here because we are now starting as of today monday the republican convention in milwaukee so we're moving from this news event to a political convention. It's one of those moments, David, where it just feels like things, and this has maybe been a feature

of the last several years, are moving way too fast, news events moving so fast that we can barely process them. Donald Trump has said after Saturday that he is changing the tenor of the Republican convention. He said the original speech he was going to give

which would be Thursday night was going to be a quote unquote humdinger about Joe Biden. This would have been one of the most incredible speeches. He says, honestly, it's going to be a whole different speech now. It is a chance to bring the country together. Trump had also talked about walking out on Monday night, which is tonight,

and then having his running mate revealed because his running mate would walk out with him. Sort of like in a moment from a reality show. It's not totally clear whether that's going to happen. and then the Biden campaign has also they had frozen their advertising and their campaigning

according to a note from Politico that's going to resume on Tuesday and Biden has an interview with Lester Holt from NBC tonight that's going to go on as scheduled only other note and this sort of came spilling out onto Twitter on Saturday

was the political prognostication people were doing this is now we know how the election is going to end because of this news photograph or because of what happened on Saturday yeah um and of course you know it's not it's pretty easy to find democrats anonymous democrats especially who will join in on this one um tells axios we've all resigned ourselves to a second trump presidency

this feels like a great time for journalists to do something that you and I have encouraged them to do repeatedly on this podcast, which is say, I don't know. Yeah. I don't know what's going to happen. Mm-hmm. Despite my standing as a political pundit of some renown, I'm not saying me. I'm imagining somebody appearing on Morning Joe, but despite my standing as a political punitive of some renown, I cannot begin to predict what is going to happen going from.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, all the just people immediately. drawing, you know, dry race forward lines, Teddy Roosevelt and whoever else, Ronald Reagan. Reagan was a big,

that was a big history explainer. Yep. Yeah, but even the details of that were not, you know, were in conflict by the end, right? About the degree to which it helped his,

his, his, his, re-election. It's, yeah, this is a great time in general to say that you don't know.

And it's, and, and, you know, history is informative. right. There's so much to draw on to learn from, but to point to any point in the past and say this proves what's about to happen is a mug's game

and you know, we could say that about any number of things over in recent history. You mentioned Biden by the way. We should talk about his speech or his statement from the Oval Office. From the Oval Office last night.

I don't know about you. It was waiting for the, you know, Copa America finals to start with it, you know, and the game was delayed and suddenly Biden was talking. I'll just kind of submit that without comment, except to say, as it relates to the prognostication, just, you know, every Biden moment from here on out is going to be, is going to be kind of judged and and broken down in a very horse racy sort of way. You know, every performance is going to lead to people making definitive predictions

about the outcome of the election. And I think that puts us in even more, again, you know, without coming down on any particular side, that puts us in such a bizarre and unique reality right now that, like, we have one candidate who just survived an assassination attempt. And the other side, we have a guy who's, who's, you know, in the position of being our commander-in-chief, our leader, or, you know, the person who should kind of calm us all down from this, but it's impossible to judge anything,

to listen to anything that he says without putting it in the, without couching it in terms of, of election numbers, right? I mean, it's just a very, it's just a very kind of surreal, um, compliment to everything that's already happening. not to mention the story that, you know, whether he's going to be the Democratic nominee, which is the story we're all teed up to talk about today, right? The NATO press conference, another interview with Lester Holt tonight, which was part of his efforts to stay on the ticket and to make sure that he is still the Democratic nominee.

I mean, again, it just feels like four or five things are happening at once. They are all unrelated and yet utterly related. Yep. it has been an utterly, you know, again, I don't want to quate things, but just this will be one of those, you know, moments in American, in American politics and American life. I think when we look back on it, I think all those things happen within three weeks of each other. All of that happen. And again, we're about to start a Republican convention that is a big deal in its own right. We're about to know who Donald Trump's running mate is. Maybe the person that's going to be the next vice president of the United States. And there's, so much now unfolding. So many stories unfolding right on top of another. Well, even the, I mean, this is slightly skewed, but the conversations about Biden staying on the ticket, you know, kind of come back to timelines, right? Like, is it feasible for him to stay on the ticket? And I was watching the news the other day and somebody was just like, there's only three months between now

and the election. And the other person was just like, yeah, three months. And I found myself to sort of like stuck in the middle of this debate, whatever. If debate's the right word, then you're like, I honestly don't, I cannot wrap my head around how long three months is in the context of a presidential election. It's like this temporal debate. Is that a long time? Yeah. Is it longer?

Is it short? I don't know. I don't know. And we've heard the version of that. There's a month till the Democratic convention. Yeah. You're like, is that a huge amount of time? Yeah.

Or is that not a huge amount of time? Yeah. you can say the exact same words and have two different, completely different points of view. He is David Shoemaker. I'm Brian Curtis. Production Magic by Brian Waters. We'll bring back the normal proceedings next week.

We've got a big show, though, David, on Thursday, Chris Sullenrop, our friend of many, many years, is at the Republican convention in Milwaukee. He is going to be telling us what this is all like, how the convention unfolds, especially under these utterly strange circumstances. We'll hear from him Thursday, morning and try to get that up before Donald Trump's speech on Thursday night. You and I, David,

return Monday with more lukewarm takes about the media. See you then. See you later, Brian.