Petition to stop airing Trump's live coronavirus press briefings gets 200k signatures as journalists' outcry grows
A petition to urge major news outlets such as CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR, and Fox News to stop airing President Donald Trump's daily press briefings related to coronavirus live was started by MoveOn, a progressive public policy advocacy group and political action committee.
"Please stop covering the President’s daily live campaign rally (thinly disguised as a coronavirus 'news conference'). There is no need to do so. News organizations can monitor the briefings in real-time and have your anchors and correspondents quickly share appropriately edited valuable, accurate parts, which will come from medical experts. That will leave the President’s insults, false braggadocio, and outright lies on the editing room floor, where they belong," the petition, which at the time of writing this article had gathered over 200,000 signatures, read.
While most of the POTUS' pressers have been carried live by most mainstream news networks, channels like CNN and MSNBC have made the editorial decision to cut away from the briefing at certain moments. For example, when Trump brought a bunch of CEOs to the stage to shower him with praise on March 30, including his longtime supporter, Michael Lindell, the CEO of MyPillow, which is presently also making face masks, CNN abandoned their coverage of the president's speech and turned to their own anchors in the studio.
Since late March, an increasing number of left-leaning news outlets have held debates on whether they should be covering Trump's pressers live. CNN anchor Don Lemon recently complained about how Trump had turned his briefings into his "new rallies".
"I have said I don't think that you should really listen to what he says, you should listen to what the experts say," Lemon told his colleague Chris Cuomo, who is self-quarantined after being diagnosed with COVID-19. "I'm not actually sure, if you want to be honest, that we should carry that live. I think we should run snippets. I think we should do it afterwards and get the pertinent points to the American people because he's never, ever going to tell you the truth."
He continued, "And guess what he's gonna do. If you ask a question that is a legitimate question - and if he doesn't like the question, he's gonna say whether you're being mean or not or whatever he wants to call it, he's gonna say, 'That is a mean, nasty question.' Why? Because he wants his base to think that the media is being mean to him and they're attacking him. It is all a plot! It is all orchestrated."
MSNBC’s Chris Hayes also echoed in the same vein a few days earlier. “They have morphed into something akin to Trump rallies without the crowds,” Hayes said. “The briefings are where he casts his failures in the most positive light. Yesterday the man who initially dismissed the coronavirus threat — remember we have all heard it time and time again — said that if 100,000 persons died from the virus, he and his team have done a quote, very good job.”
One of the first news anchors who felt like the live briefings should not be covered live was MSNBC host Rachel Maddow after Trump claimed multiple times that the "malaria" drug they're hoping to use against the coronavirus was "effective" despite Dr Anthony Fauci of the White House task force saying it had not gone through a clinical trial.
"If it were up to me, and it's not, I would stop putting those briefings on live TV. Not out of spite but because it's misinformation. If the president does end up saying anything true, you can run it as tape but if he keeps lying like this every day on stuff this important, all of us should stop broadcasting it. Honestly, it's gonna cost lives," she said.
Meanwhile, White House officials have criticized outlets that have declined to carry the briefings live.