‘Not by a mile…’

On November 22, 1963, CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite – the “most trusted man in America” – solemnly informed the nation that President John F. Kennedy had passed away.

On June 13, 2016, Anderson Cooper opened his CNN broadcast by reciting the names of those killed in the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando the previous day.

Both moments, and the on-air reactions of those speaking to America about important and fundamentally sad things at times of national crisis remind us that the people who bring us the news are just that: people. And when confronted by things that are shocking and inexplicable, their reactions and emotions are simply those we all share as human beings. Or at least, we hope they are.

Last night, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow teared up at the end of her show as an AP story broke describing the detention of children at a government facility on the southern border.

She found herself unable to continue as she attempted to relay the story’s intro, which reads:

“Trump administration officials have been sending babies and other young children forcibly separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border to at least three “tender age” shelters in South Texas, The Associated Press has learned.

“Lawyers and medical providers who have visited the Rio Grande Valley shelters described play rooms of crying preschool-age children in crisis.”

After handing off to Lawrence O’Donnell, she later apologized in a Twitter thread, citing the detail of the AP story and saying: “If nothing else, it is my job to actually be able to speak while I’m on TV…” and concluding “Not the way I intended that to go. Not by a mile.”

Coverage of the immigration issue had taken a more intense turn on Monday when ProPublica published a dramatic audio tape from inside one of the detention facilities.

ProPublica reporter Ginger Thompson wrote that “[The tape] was recorded last week inside a U.S. Customs and Border Protection detention facility. The person who made the recording asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation. That person gave the audio to Jennifer Harbury, a well-known civil rights attorney who has lived and worked for four decades in the Rio Grande Valley along the Texas border with Mexico. Harbury provided it to ProPublica. She said the person who recorded it was a client who “heard the children’s weeping and crying, and was devastated by it.”

Over the past 48 hours, the administration has attempted to circle the wagons as the crisis deepened and the party of “family values” found itself increasingly wondering how it got into this situation. And yet the president and his associates were sticking to their “zero-tolerance” position, insisting it was not the first administration to employ such policies and pushing back against the public outcry, in what has become its familiar doubling-down mode, designed to provoke opponents still further. Fox News even wheeled out Newt Gingrich to blame the reaction on “those on the left who despise the United States.”

Moreover, the president himself is embracing the immigration story as what he sees as a “winning issue”, telling confidants that, as the AP reports, “he believes he looks strong on the matter, suggesting that it could be a winning culture war issue much like his attacks on NFL players who take a knee for the national anthem.”

Coming on the same day as the US withdrew from the UN Human Rights Council , even what passes for normality about the workings of this presidency now seems more ironic than ever.

At the same time, as you might imagine, some of the reaction in the comments to Maddow’s Twitter apology served to demonstrate how, with an approval rating of 45 per cent – the same figure as his first week in office – support for the president, whatever the issue, will always reflect a broader polarization in the nation. (Admittedly, the poll was taken after the North Korea summit and before the immigration story had intensified).

I wrote here recently about the president’s unwillingness to apologize and the effect that is having on the current political dialogue.

The recent debate sparked by Robert DeNiro’s outburst at the Tony Awards seemed to divide those opposed to the president into two camps – those who believe anger in our civic discourse plays into Trump’s hands politically by dragging the debate down to his level; and those who feel that that this is a unique situation and that the time for playing by normal rules has passed.

As Jessica Valenti wrote in The Guardian:

“But here’s the thing – the people who are standing by Trump right now are not people who are interested in arguments or facts. They’re supporting a man who lies with every other breath, a man who calls the press the “greatest enemy” of our country while he lauds an authoritarian dictator and shrugs off his human rights abuses. Someone who looked at a march of white supremacists where one woman was killed and said there were “very fine people on both sides”. Who called countries inhabited mostly by people of color “shitholes”.

“This is a president who deserves a bit of profanity.”

If anything the current immigration policy, and how the president has used it as a mechanism for division, has heightened that sense of a disconnect between what passes for a traditionally “normal” political discourse and the world we have now entered. Whether the pendulum will ever swing back seems, honestly, up for grabs.

Humanity

In 2001, the TV host who had arguably taken over Cronkite’s mantle as the nation’s “most trusted” newsman didn’t work for CBS. Or NBC, or ABC or any mainstream media outlet. But that didn’t mean he didn’t feel the news as deeply as anyone in his audience.

Perhaps because he wasn’t a conventional newsman, that allowed him to somehow be more “real” about his emotions. Perhaps it didn’t matter. But in the aftermath of the national trauma of the September 11 attacks, Jon Stewart gave America the response it needed at exactly the moment it needed it.

“The view from my apartment was the World Trade Center,” he said, in a heartfelt monologue. “Now, it’s gone… This symbol of American ingenuity and strength and labor and imagination and commerce. And, it is gone.

“But, do you know what the view is now? The Statue of Liberty. The view from south Manhattan is now the Statue of Liberty. You can’t beat that.”

David Remnick writes in this week’s New Yorker that “The innocence of children is, in large measure, defined by their shock when confronted by the cruelty of the adult world.”

That adults might be seen to share in that shock is, thank God, a sign that all is not lost. Of the many tweets in response to, and in support of Rachel Maddow, one said simply: “Inhumanity in the worst of us brings out the humanity in the best of us.”

It’s probably too soon to say whether what happened on last night’s show represents a tipping point in how the narrative unfolds from here in coverage of the child detention policy – and indeed in coverage of the wider story of this administration. But for those who look to identify a line in how they understand events that have an impact on the national conversation, that definition may have become clearer.

Emotion in our human interactions – even if there is a camera in the way – is nothing to be ashamed of. It is necessary, even. It is how we show we are whole. It is how we connect; how we share the same fundamental sense of outrage.

And in a shared sadness, it is how we know we can climb back from what might seem like the depths of despair.