Did Nickelodeon Cover Trump’s 2nd Impeachment?
No senators were slimed in the making of this satire.
On Feb. 10, 2021, as U.S. Rep. Jamie Haskin and the other House impeachment managers laid out their case in an effort to show that U.S. President Donald Trump had incited an insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6, a photograph started to circulate online that supposedly showed Nickelodeon’s coverage of the historic event.
While this may have raised a few sceptical eyebrows for some (for others it was likely an obvious joke from the start), the second picture posted by comedian Jesse McClaren made it clear that these images were created in jest. The second photo shows Trump’s lawyer Bruce Castor covered in green slime.
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| A very telling sign that the images are fake is that they use an older version of the Nickelodeon logo. |
However, Nickelodeon is not providing live coverage of Trump’s second impeachment trial, and the network did not digitally edit SpongeBob SquarePants into the Senate chamber, and they did not release any of their signature green slime on any politicians. The graphics are from Nickelodeon's recent coverage of a NFL Wild Card game and CBS' "Nick-ified" Super Bowl highlights, where popular characters from the network and it's iconic green slime were super-imposed into the game using augmented reality (AR) to attract a younger audience.
Nickelodeon, being aimed towards kids, is not known as being a news network. However, they do occasionally produce segments related to current events, and has covered political events in the past.
For more than two decades starting in 1992, Nickelodeon aired a Emmy-winning program called Nick News with Linda Ellerbee that covered a wide range of current affairs and topics, including sexism, global warming, hate crimes, being gay, and presidential elections. The original Nick News went off the air in 2015, when host Linda Ellerbee retired. However, the network rebooted Nick News as a multi-platform series in 2020, and has produced Nick News specials to talk to kids about racism (hosted by Alicia Keys) and for the network's Kids Pick The President initiative (hosted by Nick alum Keke Palmer, True Jackson, VP), as well as news segments for the network's social media channels.
In January 2021, Nickelodeon produced two segments related to Trump’s second impeachment. The first covered the riots at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6:
We talked to kids about how they’ve been affected & what they’ve learned from the recent events in the Capitol pic.twitter.com/pzSXJBtWCk
— Nickelodeon (@Nickelodeon) January 14, 2021
The second covered Trump’s impeachment:
what does it mean now that President Trump has been impeached for a second time? #NickNews pic.twitter.com/3yxeApOKN4
— Nickelodeon (@Nickelodeon) January 17, 2021
The original Nick News received three Peabody Awards, including a personal award given to Ellerbee for explaining the impeachment of President Clinton to kids.
During Nickelodeon's "Kids' Vote" as part of Kids Pick the President 2020, in which kids were allowed to cast their virtual ballots on who they think should be the next president, the network detected cheating, when threads on right-wing online forums began discussing corrupting the Kids Pick the President site with fraudulent votes. Subsequently, more than 130,000 bot-generated votes were detected. Nickelodeon utilized a voter certification tool to identify these votes and to remove them, ensuring that only individually placed votes counted toward the total.
Original source: Snopes.
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