Cancel the Trump Show

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/trump-primetime-address-776278/?fbclid=IwAR0FtLevUKZ78w7ITq6j52MRfgrZn349CW6PEPeBFNmaXirCHdctMCP3qQ4

January 8, 2019 12:28PM ET
Cancel the Trump Show
Networks should stop broadcasting him live, and not just because he lies
By Jamil Smith

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It is lunacy that ABC, CBS, NBC and several cable channels agreed to give President Trump free airtime this evening to speak to the American people about, as he termed it in a tweet, “the Humanitarian and National Security crisis on our Southern Border.” That is just more code for the wall for which he has been holding his own government hostage for 18 days now. Once a mere mnemonic device inserted into his speeches to remind him to scapegoat immigrants, Trump has erred and made this a real goal. Bereft of any leverage in this fight, he is retreating to his safest place: television. This makes sense, given that he has treated this presidency as he would a piece of primetime reality programming, with the requisite plot twists and stunt casting.

We don’t know precisely what he’ll say, because the White House won’t tell us. But Trump will lie to us, that much can be presumed. It’s a sucker’s bet that his address will be, as Democratic leaders Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer said in a joint statement, “full of malice and misinformation.” (They plan to deliver a joint rebuttal speech after Trump is finished.) Throughout the decades of his public life, Trump has had an adversarial relationship with facts that are inconvenient to his interests. Trump’s entire case for the wall, to the extent that he has bothered to even make an argument, is based on deliberate misinformation. And his lies about immigration are only increasing in frequency as his presidency progresses.

The decision to air his address live represents a failure of creativity on the part of news executives. What should have been done, they might ask? Former Obama senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer, now of Crooked Media, tells Rolling Stone that networks should air it on tape delay with fact-checking on the screen. Karine Jean-Pierre, MoveOn’s chief public affairs officer, agrees. “The only responsible decision would be to show video of the address after it has happened, not live, with proper fact checks and context,” she says. “Or to reject the request outright, which is what all the networks did when President Obama requested primetime airtime to discuss immigration in 2014.”

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“I think people mistake live broadcasts for coverage,” says NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik, speaking for himself. “Yes, we should cover what he has to say. Does that require that all major channels across the spectrum carry him live?”

Certainly not, and here is where we should make a distinction between Trump’s speech tonight and other times when he appears live on on television, such as press conferences and his forthcoming State of the Union address at the end of this month. As Folkenflik noted in our conversation, those are times when the press is either present to check him or there is an embargoed copy of the remarks released so that coverage can be prepared. Tonight, though we can anticipate being lied to, the White House press office hasn’t released a word of what he is going to say.

But even Pelosi and Schumer’s rebuttal doesn’t solve the real problem at hand: news networks playing by the old rules when the president is mocking them aloud. Trump continues his stress test of this republic and its norms, and the people in charge of our institutions — blinded by their privileges, hopelessly naive or simply incompetent — keep failing us. Besides, do we really think that this is the last time that he will do this? Next up: a primetime address on the Mueller witch hunt! Tune in, America. Which channel? Every channel.