Television’s ability to handle a Trump-centric Republican National Convention faced an early test on Monday, when the president delivered a kickoff speech in Charlotte, N.C., that was filled with false claims about the integrity of mail-in voting and the policy positions of his Democratic opponent, Joseph R. Biden Jr.
Broadcasters were already bracing for a week of tough editorial decisions. Political conventions, at heart, are forms of propaganda, and TV networks typically give a long leash to candidates as they formally make their case to the nation.
But President Trump’s well-documented penchant for falsehoods presents a unique challenge, according to network executives.
Producers are trying to balance voters’ right to hear directly from their president while preventing misinformation from spreading unchecked on their channels to millions of viewers. The president’s allies say that Mr. Trump deserves the same deference as past presidents, and any intervention on the networks’ part is a sign of editorial bias.
As the president spoke in Charlotte on Monday shortly after delegates formally renominated him, a hodgepodge of journalistic strategies emerged.
CNN took the most drastic approach, cutting away from Mr. Trump in the middle of his remarks to Republican delegates. “This is a sad thing to say,” the anchor John King told viewers, “but a lot of what you just heard from the president of the United States is wrong, misleading and outright lies. Wrong, misleading and outright lies.” CBS also interrupted Mr. Trump with an analysis from the correspondent Major Garrett.
MSNBC carried the entirety of Mr. Trump’s speech live, opting for real-time analysis in on-screen graphics. When the president asserted that only a fraudulent election could result in his defeat in November, a caption read: “Without Evidence, Pres. Trump Claims He Will Only Lose the Election If It Is Rigged.”
After Mr. Trump finished, the NBC News anchor Chuck Todd ticked through a lengthy fact-check, noting that the speech was “filled with so many made-up problems about mail-in voting that if we were to air just the truthful parts, we probably could only air maybe a sentence, if that much.”
Fox News carried the president’s speech live, but did not offer a correction to Mr. Trump’s false claims. The anchor Harris Faulkner later asked a guest, the Trump campaign spokeswoman Erin Perrine, to back up some of the president’s assertions; Ms. Perrine offered no concrete evidence to do so.
Network executives are keeping teams of policy experts on standby this week to leap on-air at a moment’s notice, if producers determine that they should add context to what viewers are seeing onstage. A mix of on-screen graphics and captions may also be deployed to separate truth from falsehood.
Producers say they had the same fact-checking apparatus in place for last week’s Democratic National Convention. CNN, for instance, published several fact-checks on its website, with a reporter, Daniel Dale, writing that while Democrats spoke mostly in generalities or subjective opinions, “at least some of their assertions have been debatable or lacking in relevant context.”
In general, TV producers say they are inclined to air Mr. Trump’s remarks live, with clarifications and corrections offered as necessary.
“There are certain speeches in the political life of the country that the news networks treat as events the audience deserves to see: the State of the Union, an inaugural address, and convention speeches by the nominee and the running mate,” said Mark Lukasiewicz, who was an executive producer for coverage of six conventions at NBC News.
“These are singular events,” Mr. Lukasiewicz, now the dean of Hofstra University’s school of communications, added. “But the networks are going to struggle. How do you maintain an appearance of fairness and equity between the two parties’ political events, but deal with the fact that one candidate, you have every reason to believe, will not tell the truth?”
The Big Three broadcasters — ABC, CBS and NBC — may have an easier time of it this week.
With only one hour of coverage in prime-time at 10 p.m. — the same coverage allotted to the Democratic convention — these three networks already feature extensive analysis from anchors and pundits. If producers cut to reporters for real-time clarifications, it may not be jarring for viewers.
Other networks, including CNN, MSNBC and PBS, carried the entirety of the Democratic convention live and mostly unfiltered. Any decisions by those networks this week to cut away from a speech — and in particular, Mr. Trump’s remarks — is likely to draw intense criticism from Republicans and the president’s allies.
Fox News, as it did for the Democrats, is allotting an hour each night for formal convention coverage, beginning at 10 p.m. and led by the anchors Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum. The channel’s 9 p.m. host, Sean Hannity, occasionally dipped into the Democrats’ convention; this week, it will be up to Mr. Hannity’s discretion whether he carries excerpts from the Republican convention during his program.
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