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Sorry but it’s really that simple-as the lawyers like to say asked and answered asked and answered. Brian Stelter wrote about this indefensible decision today but he totally missed the punchline-he covered every base except home plate. 

President Trump is tapping into one of the powers of the presidency, a televised Oval Office address, for his first time. He will receive wall-to-wall coverage for his pro-wall speech on Tuesday night. And to say that there are mixed feelings about that is an understatement.

While the address may not change anyone’s mind, there are very strong feelings both for and against the television networks’ decisions to televise it in the first place. The debate isn’t just raging on social media — it is happening inside the networks as well.

At issue: How should a uniquely deceptive president be treated by TV networks that value the truth?

For some, it’s a no-brainer: A presidential address from the Oval Office merits live coverage. Period.

For others, it’s a no-brainer in the other direction: This particular president is so prone to falsehoods and fear-mongering that his speeches shouldn’t be shown live.”

Right away the way he frames it means little more than: you say potato and I say  potahto.

While Stelter is one who always emphasizes journalists need to fight for objective reality against Kellyann Conway’s alternative facts here he’s already telling the reader they’re free to believe whatever they want to believe.

Sure there’s a debate but there’s no wrong answer. This is exactly the epistemological universe Trumpism thrives on-if there is no objective truth you’re free to believe whatever you want to believe. By leaving out the key point Stelter gives permission to his network and others to say either decision is defensible when what they have done here is absolutely indefensible.

He then cites Ted Koppel who rather astonishingly declares ‘President Trump deserves the benefit of the doubt.’

This is simply incomprehensible unless Koppel has been living on Pluto since 2015 and so has never seen Trump lie even once. But, again, Stelter fudges this debate by withholding the key point that utterly explodes the simplistic declaration that ‘A presidential address from the Oval Office merits live coverage. Period.’

Obama wanted to do a live immigration speech in 2014 and the networks turned him down.

The answer from the networks is: better than Obama.

The reason the networks denied Obama in 2014? They claimed it was too political. Really.

UPDATE: Stelter did an interesting and incisive piece on this very dubious decision of giving Trump free air time for what amounted to a highly misleading campaign speech. But Stelter continued to hem and haw about Obama 2014. His framing was ‘Before President Trump’-of course he insists on calling him ‘President Trump’-‘it was not a very tough decision on giving a President who wanted to address the nation air time, true there was 2014 when the networks for some very complex nuanced reasons didn’t give it to Obama, but the rule has been give the President the airtime s/he seeks.’

Stelter continued to pretend not to see that this Obama exception needs explanation as it blows up his entire framing-‘Previous President always got their requested airtime except for Obama in 2014…’

Clearly Obama 2014 substantiates the point that the media has decided not to give out requested airtime in the past, begging the very awkward question as to what made Obama’s 2014 speech on DACA more ‘political’ than what Bush said about the same basic topic in 2007-indeed, Obama and Bush largely agreed on the subject of the speech-immigration reform and the Dreamers-much less what made Obama 2014 more political than Trump’s error infested xenophobic rant last week-the sort of ranting that already lead one #MAGA supporter to assassinate 11 Jews in a Pittsburgh synagogue in October, 2018?

Yet the networks were offended by Obama’s 2014 speech on DACA in a way Trump’s lies and fomenting of hate and even, alas, violence doesn’t./

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump will deliver a primetime address to the American people about the government shutdown he initiated and about the fake crisis at the US-Mexico border that he says justifies it.

The #TrumpShutdown showing once again why Trump thinks himself such a political genius:

To quote Hank Hill-from King of the Hill: let me put this in a way genius can understand, you are not a genius. 

Back to Yglesias:

In 2014, Obama was ready to announce a series of executive actions on immigration in the wake of the collapse in negotiations over a bipartisan comprehensive immigration reform bill. The plan had a lot of moving parts, but the centerpiece was to give work permits and formal protection from deportation to millions of unauthorized immigrants while focusing the nation’s immigration enforcement resources on immigrants who’d committed violent crimes.

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.

 

 

 

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October 28, 2016: a Day That Will Live in Infamy Copyright © by . All Rights Reserved.

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