Visits: 12
The anchors and pundits vamped on Friday, filling the long hours of airtime with questions and speculation. And then — shortly after 5 p.m. — they finally had something headline worthy.
That was when the major networks and cable news outlets reported that the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, had completed the investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election and had submitted his report to Attorney General William P. Barr.
On CNN, Wolf Blitzer read aloud from a copy of Mr. Barr’s letter to Congress. On CBS, the anchor Jeff Glor broke into the network’s analysis of the N.C.A.A. men’s basketball tournament.
On Fox News, the highest-rated cable news station, the anchor Juan Williams reported the big story during the daily episode of “The Five.” “We’ve just been told that the Mueller report has been delivered to the Justice Department,” he said at 5:03.
Not long after those words were out of his mouth, the speculation started anew. The “Five” member Jesse Watters seemed to undercut the import of the breaking story, saying, “I honestly don’t think the rest of the country, outside the swamp and the Mueller partisans, cares about the Mueller report.”
After mentioning a few things that, in his view, typical citizens actually do care about, like Netflix and college basketball, Mr. Watters added, “If there was real collusion, it would have leaked by now.”
Another “Five” panelist, Dana Perino, offered commentary that was less charged. “Setting aside what it says or doesn’t say about how Russia tried to get involved, I think this report could actually be quite instructive about what we need to do to protect our elections going forward,” she said.
On this day that so many had been waiting for, Mr. Mueller stayed out of the media glare. He had issued no public comments while conducting the investigation, and even when it was all wrapped up, he did not face the cameras. All the while, through the 22 months of his inquiry, he managed to drive countless hours of onscreen discussion without setting foot in a television studio.
The news of his report followed a day of low-calorie cable fare, heavy on anticipation and light on facts, that teased the development the networks were counting on.
“It’s Friday, but is it Mueller Friday?” the CNN anchor John King sked at the start of his noon-hour show, “Inside Politics.” Around the same time, the CNN reporter Laura Jarrett noted on Twitter that Justice Department reporters at the network had hunkered down: “Breaking — DOJ beat reporters ordering pizza,” she wrote.
What seemed like a relatively slow news days decelerated further when Fox News took a moment to declare that the 94-year-old Jimmy Carter had become the oldest former living United States president in history, surpassing the first President George Bush.
Then, at last, came the news that the special counsel’s work was done.
After all the buildup, the anchors had one new development to gnaw on: the fact that, according to a Justice Department official, the Mueller report recommended no new charges. (Before the report was submitted, the special counsel had filed 199 charges against 34 people and three companies.)
On NBC, after the main news had hit, the veteran Justice Department reporter Pete Williams reported that “there will be no more indictments from the special counsel.” Others seemed reluctant to go there, at least at first. “Nobody knows anything,” MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough cautioned on Twitter. And the Fox News anchor Bret Baier said, “We don’t have the meat of what’s in this report at this hour.”
Appearing as a guest on Mr. Baier’s show, the Fox News host Chris Wallace said: “The fact that that investigation is over is a big milestone, even if we don’t know what the final conclusion of the special counsel was. We will have to wait and see.”
He continued: “And I do think that if — and I repeat if — it should be the president is cleared of the basic fundamental charges of the special counsel, whether it was, one, collusion or, two, obstruction of justice, that is a major victory for the president.”
And before you knew it, television was populated, as it had been earlier in the day, with talking heads spinning out various possibilities that could fill the news maw in the days to come.
