Yes, I admit, I watched the nine minutes of stupid overdone fear-mongering blather, laughed at the laughable attempt of one sociopath stiffly reading the words of another sociopath to sound empathetic, had my desperate itch for truth nicely scratched by the Pelosi/Schumer response, watched before and after fact-checking and analysis. My drug of choice was CNN, which meant that I got to see Ana Navarro and Daniel Dale in action; too bad Rick “Everything Trump Touches Dies” Wilson and Steve “Where Are The Pesos?” Schmidt were elsewhere.
And somewhere in the before-speech analysis, the pundits discussed the history of presidents asking networks to pre-empt their regular programming so as to broadcast a presidential address, and someone, I can’t recall who, noted that they don’t do it unless the address will be newsworthy, i.e. contain some news.
So, for instance, George W. Bush addressing Americans after 9/11 was naturally newsworthy, though as I recall he didn’t just use it to comfort the citizenry but gin up hate in preparation for the Iraq War—still, a president doing that is news. Barack Obama’s planned address on the ACA was also newsworthy, since healthcare is of massive importance—though the networks, reflecting the anti-health-care views of their 1%er owners, thwarted it claiming it would be too political, to their shame.
As you might have noticed, there was absolutely no news in T***p’s “crisis of the heart” anti-brown-people diatribe, just a rehashing of the same old racist trash he’s spewed since starting his presidential campaign, enabling the networks to effectively fact-check before the oral diarrhea even started.
Would they have given him the time if they had known that’s what it would be? I doubt it. (CNN learned beforehand that T***p wasn’t going to do it; but by that time they’d already allotted the time, both to T***p and to Pelosi and Schumer.) I think, and the pundit on CNN hinted also, that the only reason they did was that T***p said he might declare a national emergency to bypass Congress and pull military funding for the wall. Because that would have been news—a constitutional crisis—and they actually would have been remiss to miss it.
And then…
Now the only question is… how many times will T***p be able to do this? (Not as many as Lucy, PLEASE.) CNN might be preparing for it as one of its pundits said that Trump will likely keep the national-emergency tactic in his back pocket.
My feeling is that no media should do any favours for a pathological liar who calls them the enemy of the people and is willing to hold the country hostage with a government shutdown for purely selfish reasons.
Chris Cuomo & CNN deserve credit for making the point that it was all a big distraction from the Manafort revelations, and reporting that story (emphasis added):
Manafort discussed a Ukrainian peace plan with Kilimnik, his lawyers acknowledged. He also shared polling data related to the 2016 presidential campaign with Kilimnik, Manafort's legal team acknowledges in their court filing.
The details accidentally released Tuesday are the closest public assertion yet in the Mueller cases of coordination between a Trump campaign official and the Russian government, as Kilimnik is believed to be linked to Russian military intelligence.
It’s a big-ass smoking gun is what it is. The T***p campaign altered the Republican platform to favour Russia’s position on the Ukraine, and enabled Putin’s fake news trolls to help steal the election by providing data that precisely pinpointed easily-fooled American voters. This was arranged at least in part in the discussion(s) between then-T***p campaign manager Paul Manafort and Russian operative Konstantin Kilimnik mentioned in the filing.
This is where the corporate media should focus their attention today. We’ll see if they do.
—
I’m a SPWM (single parent with mortgage) who earns every dollar I earn by writing. If you’d like to help keep it economically feasible for me to write diaries like this one on DKos, please consider sending a donation my way. Suggested amount $3. THANK YOU to all who have helped already. Your generosity humbles me.
Wednesday, Jan 9, 2019 · 6:12:37 PM +00:00 · KM Wehrstein
Several commenters have said that the networks would have aired the speech regardless. I disagree, because while the cable networks Fox (naturally) and CNN agreed fast, the broadcasters took a little longer, deliberating about the merits. They wouldn’t have deliberated for two seconds after, say, 9/11, or a major natural disaster if a President asked for primetime. See here.