Rachel Maddow Lands a Scoop, Then Makes Viewers Wait
Rachel Maddow had a big scoop, and she handled it her way.
With a single tweet on Tuesday, Ms. Maddow, the MSNBC anchor, set the political world ablaze, announcing at 7:36 p.m. that she was poised to reveal previously unseen tax records from President Trump on her 9 p.m. program. (“Seriously,” Ms. Maddow added.)
In the need-it-this-instant world of online news, 84 minutes struck some journalists as an awfully long time to wait. The White House took advantage, releasing a pre-emptive statement that detailed Mr. Trump’s tax figures from 2005 before MSNBC had a chance to air its own report. The Daily Beast and other news outlets ran items as well.
Ms. Maddow, who is enjoying the biggest viewership of her show’s nine-year run, did not appear to mind. She opened her program on Tuesday as she usually does: with a deliberately paced, fact-heavy monologue, in this case reviewing Mr. Trump’s past refusal to release his taxes to catch up viewers on why this new revelation mattered.
The revelation itself, however, was held back until after the first commercial break, a windup that some fellow journalists, eager for any bombshells, found exceedingly lengthy.
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Ultimately, the reporting that Ms. Maddow eventually aired on Tuesday night’s show — two pages from a single, decade-old federal tax return — was less groundbreaking than the mere fact that a portion of the president’s records had surfaced at all. The journalist who obtained the records, David Cay Johnston, a former tax reporter for The New York Times, said that the documents arrived “over the transom” in his mailbox. Mr. Johnston even speculated on-air that Mr. Trump had sent the documents himself.
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On Twitter, journalists complained that Ms. Maddow had overhyped her findings with the initial teasing tweet, noting that the information in the returns did not amount to a scandal. Others asked why so much of the focus was on Ms. Maddow and not the subject at hand. “The President of the United States has not released his tax returns,” wrote Peter Hamby, a journalist at Snapchat who previously worked for CNN. “Journalists are attacking Maddow for using her show to discuss this.”
Good reviews or bad — scoop or no scoop — Ms. Maddow’s Tuesday program is sure to keep her at the center of the political conversation. Last week, Ms. Maddow achieved a ratings milestone, beating out Fox News heavyweights Bill O’Reilly and Tucker Carlson among viewers aged 25 to 54, the most coveted demographic in television news.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/15/us/politics/rachel-maddow-trump-tax-return.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0
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