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This was, naturally, very controversial. And Obama, naturally, wanted to try to make it less controversial by convincing people that it was a good idea.

Conservative pundits were, at the time, pushing the notion that Obama was essentially seizing power like a Latin American dictator, so essentially anything that refocused the conversation on banal policy details would have played to his advantage. TV networks, however, didn’t give him what he wanted, in part because it was November sweeps time, but officially because he was playing partisan politics rather than addressing a true national emergency.

As Politico’s Playbook explained it at the time:

A network insider tells Playbook: “There was agreement among the broadcast networks that this was overtly political. The White House has tried to make a comparison to a time that all the networks carried President Bush in prime time, also related to immigration [2006]. But that was a bipartisan announcement, and this is an overtly political move by the White House.”

Applying this standard to Trump would lead to the conclusion that networks should not air the address. But networks are airing the address.

And this Stelter doesn’t even attempt to explain. Yglesias then goes on to argue:’

Television news loves Republicans.”

At this point there can be no debate that this is the truth. You can attempt to explain why this is-I can imagine a Brian Stelter attempting to give us some mundane, ‘innocent’ explanation as to why but the facts are the facts:

This turnabout where George W. Bush gets free airtime to promote his immigration idea but then Obama doesn’t get free airtime for his ideas because it’s “overtly political,” and then Trump gets free airtime for an overtly political message on immigration, is striking.

It’s particularly striking because, in this case, this mismatch is partisan rather than ideological — Bush and Obama had broadly similar approaches to immigration while Trump has a different one.”

Yet in 2014 the media tried to somehow justify their rejecting Obama after airing Bush by claiming that somehow Obama’s immigration speech was political in a way that Bush’s was not.

It reminds me of nothing so much as the systematic partisan imbalance in Sunday show bookings. Typically, when Republicans are in power, we’re told we get GOP-heavy guest lists to reflect what newsmakers are thinking. But when Democrats are in power, we’re told we get GOP-heavy guest lists to provide a counterpoint to officeholders. (This week, ABC greeted the new Congress by hosting a losing Republican Senate candidate from Michigan.)

I’m not entirely sure how to account for this imbalance in the actual coverage decisions. One popular theory is that Republicans have successfully “worked the refs” and led the press to become paranoid about exhibiting liberal bias to the extent that the bend over backward and display bias in the opposite direction.

I think a more parsimonious explanation might be that the key decision-makers in network television (wealthy anchors, executives, shareholders, etc.) benefit in concrete material ways from Republicans winning elections, and their conduct reflects that reality more than the private ideological convictions of rank-and-file workers.

Regardless, on Tuesday we’re going to have an overtly political Trump immigration speech in primetime — even though when Obama was president overtly political speeches didn’t qualify

Whatever the reason, the fact is the media favors Republicans-and my guess is both these explanations have a ring of truth in them-on the level of content the journalists fret about looking ‘liberal’ while their corporate bosses prefer the GOP’s pro corporate agenda.

At the end of the day, the media decided that better to air lies and misinformation-dangerous ones too as we saw after a #MAGABomber sent pipe bombs to Hillary Clinton, Barrack Obama, and the rest of the Dem opposition and a #MAGAShooter went out and assasinated 11 Jews at a Pittsburgh temple-than have Trump call them fake news and the GOP call them partisan.

Anyway, I and millions of others won’t be watching tonight-and I always watch cable news in the evening.

UPDATE: The MSM never tires of doubling down on the stupid. After getting roiled by Trump again-everyone admits that what he said was

A. Nothing new

B. Full of lies

But will the media learn anything this time as opposed to all the other times they’ve been rolled by Trump? Meanwhile Brian Stelter still can’t explain why Obama wasn’t give a primetime slot if previous to Trump deference was shown to the President.

But just to reassure us that they learned nothing new, the media subsequently criticized Nancy Pelosi for ‘sinking to Trump’s level’ suggesting she might pay a political price for not inviting him to give the State of the Union. It’s not enough that the media again gave Trump a platform to spew his dishonest bigotry in primetime-the same filth that led to the assassination of 11 Jewish Americans in October, 2018. Prior to this awful day and the pipe bombs sent by a another MAGA supporter to every top Democrat in the country the media had been oohing and aahing about how brilliant a political strategist Trump was in making up lies about the caravan.

The media then went after Pelosi for not doing the same. In truth, of course, Speaker Pelosi was entirely right-why should Trump get to give his campaign commercial while he had capriciously shut down the government out of political pique? She wasn’t going to fall into the media trap of pretending everything is normal while 800,000 government workers weren’t getting their paychecks, many more weren’t getting their tax refunds and, air traffic controllers were warning flight safety was suffering.

As it turned out she handled things perfectly and now her poll numbers have gone up for the first time in many years while his went South. Apparently most regular Americans didn’t see her as sinking to his level.