Dan Abrams Examines Media Challenges in the Trump Era

Journalist, legal expert and entrepreneur, Dan Abrams gives Steve Adubato his take of the media landscape today, the challenge of covering the White House in the Trump era, and his online sites such as Mediaite.

6/13/17 #2048

Excerpt:

"Hi, I'm Steve Adubato. Welcome to the Tisch WNET Studio here in the heart of Lincoln Center. It is our pleasure to welcome Dan Abrams, founder of Abrams Media, and also chief legal affairs anchor at ABC news. Good to see you Dan. Good to be with you Steve. You are doing all kinds of interesting things. Let everybody know that, even though the ABC studio is across the street, what kind of work you do there? So I'm the big legal guy there. I do the legal stories for ABC News. I do Good Morning America most mornings talking about whatever the legal story is of the day. It could be anything from a sort of tabloid headline type of criminal story, to the most serious cases involving the Supreme Court, et cetera. So it's a wide range of stories that I'm doing. And then doing the rest of the ABC Shows, 20/20, Nightline, world news, et cetera. So it's interesting and fun. That's not enough for you? Nope. No it's not. Nope. And I've known you for a long time. And your entrepreneurial spirit, let's say, beyond your broadcast skills, clearly gets the best of you? Let's talk about some of the other activities. The initiative that you've been involved in for over a year. Talk about it. It's 24/7 court...? Right. So it's called LawNewz - with a "Z" - is the name of the website. And in the last couple of months, we have expanded it from a website to a... effectively a 24/7 live video network, meaning we're covering trials. And we have in-studio analysts, and we have anchors, and we've got, you know, studio. And we're live most of the time between 40 and 60 hours a week. And then we'll replay some of the coverage from earlier in the day. But I've just been kind of amazed that no one else was doing this. I mean there's a real appetite out there. A market? Yeah. A real market? For people who love to watch trials. And look, there's both the sort of... I don't want to call it the "entertainment aspect" of it, but it is entertaining at times to watch trials. But there's also the fact that, I think it's important. I mean, you know, even the more mundane criminal trials out there, right? It's still the people of the state of New Jersey, or New York, or California, versus the defendant. We have the right to see what prosecutors are doing in the name of the taxpayers of the state of blank. Even a responsibility? Yeah. And so, look, courtrooms were built with galleries back in the old days. People used to come. Right. That was what they would do. Many of them..."