Donald Trump's widely publicized interview with Kristen Welker, the new host of NBC's "Meet the Press," was simply too boring to watch all the way through. One can feel compassion, in an abstract sense, for media professionals or would-be informed citizens who felt that perhaps it was important to try to understand what Trump is "thinking" at this juncture in history, or who rode along for some distance with the argument made by Peter Baker of the New York Times in an apologia tacked onto the end of Welker's interview: The media can't stop asking questions of a major presidential candidate just because that person is a soul-destroying black hole of anti-information who sucks in everyone and everything in his orbit and reduces them to tiny, stupid caricatures of themselves. (That's not exactly how Baker phrased it, to be fair.)
But it was a bad idea for Welker and NBC News to do this interview in the first place, a bad idea to broadcast it and a truly terrible idea to spend any of your one wild and precious life absorbing it. As media critic and NYU professor Jay Rosen observed in an X/Twitter thread, there was "zero innovation" visible in the way NBC's producers approached and structured this entire experience, and zero indication that any of the so-called lessons supposedly learned by the mainstream media over the course of the Trump ordeal — how long has it been? Seven years? Seventeen? "Seven-seven"? I can't remember — have actually changed anything.
