“Our audience skews a third, a third, and a third,” PBS News Hour Co-Anchor Geoff Bennett told members of the Television Critics Association today in a live call from Milwaukee, WI, ahead of the first night of coverage from the Republican National Convention. With an even audience of registered democrats, republicans, and independents, PBS News is one of the most trusted sources for unbiased coverage. “You will not find a TV audience of that composition anywhere else.” With 2 million nightly viewers on PBS stations and 34 million monthly views on YouTube, it may surprise people to hear that PBS News reaches an even larger audience than 24-hour cable news networks. “What all that suggests is that our approach to the news and our content is resonating. There's an audience for the kind of news programming that we provide, and that's not something that a lot of people know.”
(PBS News)
Now known as PBS News across digital and social platforms, PBS News Hour is still the name for the weeknight broadcast program on PBS stations. This week, Geoff Bennett and Amna Nawaz will join viewers live from Milwaukee for the PBS News Special: Republican National Convention (8:00-11:00 pm ET) through Thursday, July 18th. But naturally, the environment they arrived in is overshadowed by the recent assassination attempt on former president Donald Trump. “We had just arrived, many of our team, in Milwaukee and were making preparations for convention coverage, which, in and of itself, is an enormous undertaking for our team,” Amna Nawaz shared about dropping everything to cover the breaking news out of Pennsylvania. “When the news broke, we immediately jumped into action. We had digital reports up very quickly. Our colleague, Lisa Desjardins, who’s been covering the Trump campaign, jumped in to do some live digital reports to get the news out and facts to our audience. And then as we learned more, because you’ll remember in those first hours there were a lot of details that were still coming to light, we continued reporting from here on The News Hour on Sunday night, anchored by our colleague John Yang, back in Washington, and then followed up with full reporting the next day. And then, as President Biden took to the air for a rare Oval Office address, we went live with a special network report covering those remarks as well. [It’s] not exactly the way we thought we’d be kicking off coverage at the RNC, but news happens, and that’s what we do.”
“I went for a walk and tried to get outside of the hardened security perimeter where our hotel is,” Geoff Bennett explained when I asked about the atmosphere around Milwaukee, which is near where I grew up. “Our hotel is a stone's throw from the Pfizer Forum. As far as I walked, I was still within the security perimeter. I'm not entirely sure if that's a result of what happened over the weekend, so I can't give you a good readout on the vibe in the city, but I can tell you that within this mile of vast metal fencing, security is tight but the delegates, the Republican officials, the few of them who are here so far, they are excited to be here. They feel good about their prospects come November. I think it's fair to say they’re relieved that President Trump was not more severely injured. And we'll see what happens, either between this afternoon and this evening, when he's expected to announce his VP pick.” By the time this article was published, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump had picked his running mate – JD Vance.
“I think it would be a mistake for any of us to get ahead of it and try to predict what happens next or how this influences the race,” Amna Nawaz added when asked how the assassination attempt has impacted the election. “We have no idea yet. We're just trying to keep up with things as they come out. Every other hour, there's a piece of news. We now have the first indication of how long former President Trump would be able to stick to the message of unity and tamping down the political rhetoric. He's already on Truth Social calling January 6th a hoax and decrying all the political investigations or the investigations against him as political. So I think there's a sense that things are shifting in real-time, and one of the worst mistakes we could make is trying to get ahead of where things are.”
PBS News recently announced a partnership with PolitiFact for their election coverage, which is in place during this week of RNC coverage. “We, as journalists, always do the best that we can in the moment, particularly in live events, which are the most challenging to fact-check in real-time,” Amna Nawaz explained. “There really is a real-time running log, keeping up with the information on issues that they have long been fact-checking and have a really robust encyclopedic background on, each of these topics that we expect to come up. We're going to be pointing people towards that as a side-by-side guide that they can follow for that. But we will be covering the speeches here as they unfold in the same way we'll be covering the speeches at the DNC as they unfold, without having to interrupt every few minutes to do any potential real-time fact-checking. I think we owe our audience the ability to just watch the speeches as they unfold, to take in the information, to seek out additional facts as they're able to, and then embed it in all our reporting. Every night, on the News Hour, but also as part of our special coverage during the primetime hours of the convention, we'll be doing that as well. There's no guide to it. There's no formula, but we seed all of that fact-checking in whenever and as often as we can.”
If you’re looking for nonpartial coverage of the 2024 election, consider PBS News’ take on the Republican National Convention this week, plus the upcoming Democratic National Convention, the VP and presidential debate, Election Day, and beyond.