Cable and network broadcasters have started to cut away from President Donald Trumps daily briefings on the CCP virus epidemic, despite their apparent popularity with Americans.
ABC, CBS, and NBC all covered Trump at the beginning of Mondays briefing, which began about 6:10 p.m. ET. After 20 minutes, they switched to the network evening newscasts, never to return to Trump. The president spoke until shortly after 8 p.m.
Trump has been filling the public in on the governments steps to counter the CCP virus, also known as the novel coronavirus, which broke out in the central Chinese city of Wuhan around November and was allowed to spread around the world due to the coverup by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
The cable news networks have given Trump blanket coverage for his briefings, but CNN cut away on March 23 at around 7:20 p.m. MSNBC followed within five minutes.
“If the White House wants to ask for time on the network, they should make an official request. Otherwise we will make our own editorial decisions,” CNN commented on its decision.
MSNBC, through a spokesperson, said that “we cut away because the information no longer appeared to be valuable to the important ongoing discussion around public health.”
The networks top host, Rachel Maddow, had said on the evening of March 20 that television networks should no longer show Trump live. She cited examples of what she called false or misleading statements the president had made in past briefings.
“All of us should stop broadcasting it, honestly,” she said. “Its going to cost lives.”
Conservative political commentator Bill Whittle called the broadcasters decisions “an indication that the president is doing a pretty good job.”
In his view, the media are tuning out because airing the briefings unedited shows Trump acting counter to a narrative pushed by a number of media outlets that hes incompetent and tyrannical.
“Why on earth would a news agency carry the presidents daily address, buttressed by any number of scientific experts, on the daily progress of this worldwide pandemic?” he said jokingly in a March 26 video posted on his YouTube channel.
“Why on earth would you want that live? Why cant we just sent cameras there so that we can edit out the parts that we dont like, edit together the things that were actually said in such a way as to make him look like an idiot or a tyrant and then we can re-control the media, rather re-control the story, re-control the narrative. When you hear people saying that President Trump should not be giving the press conferences live, thats all the evidence you need that hes doing a good job.”
Soaring Ratings
Trumps briefings have had droves of Americans tuning in, nearly tripling ratings for that time slot.
Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC attracted 8.28 million viewers for Trumps March 20 briefing, with nearly half of them watching Fox. The audience for those networks a year earlier was 2.82 million, according to ratings agency Nielsen.
The March 23 briefing had 12.2 million viewers, with Fox capturing more than half, The New York Post reported.
Meanwhile, Trumps approval ratings have continued to climb. A GaRead More – Source
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