Network TV executives have yet to grant Trump airtime for fake border crisis address, and they are warning that if they put him on the air, he will deliver a fact-free screed.
Brian Stelter of CNN tweeted:
This just in from a network source: "Time has been requested tomorrow night for 9p. Networks are deliberating."
— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) January 7, 2019
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TV exec texts: "He calls us fake news all the time, but needs access to airwaves… If we give him the time, he'll deliver a fact-free screed without rebuttal. And if we don't give him the time, he'll call every network partisan. So we are damned if we do and damned if we don't."
— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) January 7, 2019
The network executive was right. It doesn’t matter what they decide. Trump is still going to call them fake news, so that means that there are no negative stakes to turning Trump down.
If Trump wants to lie about immigrants from the Oval Office, he can do it the same way that he has been doing it for the past two years. He can go on Fox News and preach to the choir.
The networks will regret giving Trump any primetime airtime because most of the country will turn their televisions off. The networks will lose money by not running their more popular original programming, and they will look bad in the eyes of most viewers for giving Trump an unchecked platform on which to lie.
The smart decision here is to tell Trump to get lost. He can rant racist lies about immigrants and his imaginary border crisis on cable news.
Trump can’t be trusted with an unchecked platform, and any network that is dumb enough to give it to him deserves the viewer backlash and wrath that will follow.
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Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
