A Historic Verdict Made for Riveting TV. Then the Punditry Began.
Every major TV network broke in to daytime programming to present a rare moment of political and legal suspense.
At 5:06 p.m. on Thursday, shortly after NBC News broke in with a special report, Savannah Guthrie and Lester Holt told viewers that a verdict in the first criminal trial against an American president was imminent. After weeks of dramatic testimony that, with no cameras in the courtroom, made little impact on TV, the tension spilled onto the airwaves all at once.
“Oh, here we go,” Ms. Guthrie said abruptly, as the off-camera voice of Laura Jarrett, NBC’s senior legal correspondent, could be heard in the background. “Guys! We need to go,” Ms. Jarrett said. “We need to go.”
“Go,” Ms. Guthrie exhorted. The camera jumped to Ms. Jarrett, outside a Manhattan courthouse, who over the next 87 spellbinding seconds read off each count, one by one, followed by the same two-syllable verdict:
“Guilty.”
On every major TV network, anchors reeled off the outcome for former President Donald J. Trump with an auctioneer’s rapid-fire cadence. “Count 1, guilty; Count 2, guilty; Count 3, guilty,” intoned Ari Melber, the MSNBC legal correspondent, as a sober-faced Rachel Maddow sat beside him jotting notes on a pad. An on-air graphic totted up the final score: 34 guilty, 0 not guilty.
It was the kind of riveting moment that Mr. Trump, a TV connoisseur himself, might have appreciated if he were not its subject. “It is a remarkable moment in American history,” Anderson Cooper said as CNN broke the news.
The announcement of the verdict, however, quickly yielded to sharply divergent reactions in the partisan corridors of cable news.
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