Too Dumb to Cover: Mike Lindell, Trump’s Third Term and the Lost Art of Looking Away

There’s FAR too much coverage of dumb attention stunts because too many editors are chasing clicks instead of real news.

President Donald Trump appears to have finally given up on the idea of running for an unconstitutional third term. Mike Lindell refused to concede the Minnesota Republican primary he lost by 45,000 votes, claiming fraud or irregularities or some shit. And two former NBA players both claimed they now identify as women, declaring themselves eligible for the WNBA draft, which earned these douchebags a week’s worth of coverage from ESPN to the Advocate.

Yes, these are the exact sort of curious oddball stories that readers will almost always click, but more importantly, none of them are actual news. And yet too many editors are prioritizing the traffic from these sorts of dumbshit items and assigning them, because the clicks are more valuable to them than editorial standards.

I should know. I spent over a decade falling into the same trap, though to be fair, I eventually got religion with something I called the Candace Owens rule: when something is obviously designed to get attention from a bit player, it’s better left untouched. I eventually lost that battle, and so here we are.

I’m reminded of a broadcast rule, perfectly illustrated at Super Bowl LV. A streaker got nearly to midfield that night, and if you were watching at home, you had no idea, because CBS just calmly stayed on the Buccaneers’ bench like nothing was happening. Jim Nantz allowed that it was “one of the great runs of the night,” and that was the extent of it. Nobody ever wrote the rule down because nobody needed to: you don’t give the idiot what he came for. Let’s just say it was a big week for people running onto the field.

Pillow magnate and chief cable news underwriter, Lindell, gave the rule its biggest test last night after losing by eleven points, with Trump’s endorsement. He refused to concede on his own network, LindellTV, after a reporter on his own payroll asked if he’d accept the AP call. “The AP? Why would I listen to the AP?” He wants to reconcile the numbers first, whatever that means, and if this turns out to be the thing that finally proves there’s something wrong with the computers, well, so be it, he said.

Royce White handled his loss differently. He finished a distant third in Tuesday’s Senate primary, somewhere around 9 percent, and by Wednesday he’d announced that he actually won, that he’ll never concede to the moderates who enabled the communists, and that he’s running for president now, presumably right after he collects a WNBA MVP award. And look, the guy won this party’s Senate nomination two years ago, so he has voters, whatever else you want to say about him. What he really has is a perfect understanding that the event was never the point; getting somebody to react to the event is the point. The write-ups came fast; I read them, and now you’re reading about him in a column about why we shouldn’t do this. Nobody’s clean, me included. OR YOU. But I digress…

And here’s the good news, at least on the Lindell front: cable news almost entirely looked away! The most famous election-fraud salesman in America was crying fraud about an election he himself lost, and as of midday Wednesday, cable had barely acknowledged that the man exists.

But that’s only part of the story. The websites couldn’t resist a clicky headline for the omnipresent and weirdo pitchman who refused to concede. It’s a bizarre story of delusion, the sort that leads parents to tell small children not to “stare,” and as a result? It found a home everywhere from the Guardian on down, because, of course, it did. Aggregators treated it like found money.

And then there’s Trump’s third term, which in many ways is the biggest troll of them all. A president staying in office after term limits DOES merit coverage, but the political media world spent a year treating the taunt like it was a serious constitutional question, and not his just fucking with the press. All that attention was sparked because it was a story useful to both ends of the partisan spectrum: it was a loyalty test on the right, and a red-alert emergency on the left. Then Trump just put the thing down Tuesday night. He’d “love to run,” he said, but “the law is very strong.”

A year of constitutional analysis, over in one sentence, and barely anybody blinked. White, by the way, was still out there demanding the third term, which I’m embarrassed to even include here. Physician, heal thyself!

Restraint comes from different places across the TV dial. Sports broadcasters are loath to reward the next drunk running onto the field and futz with lucrative ad breaks. Cable news networks won’t go near anything a lawyer flagged. Partisan media want to report on whatever hurts the other side. Lindell lost to a fellow Republican, which is probably why his story was useless to everybody.

Social media have never been in the restraint business to begin with. Their whole model is keeping you staring at the thing your parent told you to ignore. So a dumb stunt is basically inventory. The websites manufacturing clicks aren’t much better (guilty as charged). I know firsthand that if I thought something would get read, it would get assigned. So whether or not it ends up being useful to the reader matters almost not at all. Useful has nothing to do with being true.

Sure, a Trump-endorsed candidate rejecting a statewide result is news by any standard I grew up with, and the Guardian writing it up straight is journalism. But there’s a difference between covering something and rewarding it. Nantz told the country somebody was on the field, and CBS still wouldn’t give the guy his pictures.

Directors of televised sports still cut away from the streaker on Sundays, so it's not like anyone forgot how. Any editor can pass on the dumb thing any day they want to; the only thing stopping them is the traffic report. Looking away isn't a lost art. The reason to look away is.