Extortion
Those spiteful self-interested turds.
Vice President Mike Pence has blocked Drs. Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx, as well as other top U.S. health officials, from appearing on CNN following the network’s decision to not air the White House coronavirus press briefings in full.
Will they send them to bed without dessert next? Take away their allowance? Say they can’t go to the picnic?
“When you guys cover the briefings with the health officials then you can expect them back on your air,” a spokesman for the vice president told CNN.
Trump and the White House Coronavirus Task Force, led by Pence, have been giving daily briefings to the press for several weeks after rising numbers of Americans have been infected. A CNN executive said that the network has sometimes cut away from the briefings after Trump speaks, and turns to a panel to fact-check the president. However, the network usually broadcasts only the president’s question-and-answer session.
Trump tells lie after lie after lie at those “briefings” which are mostly campaign rallies. Trump and his gang have no business withholding what Fauci can tell us in an attempt to force news outlets to broadcast Trump’s lies. It’s fucking outrageous.
The New York Times, another outlet that has been a target of the Trump administration’s ire, stopped airing the briefings on its website entirely.
“We stopped doing that because they were like campaign rallies,” Elisabeth Bumiller, the paper’s Washington bureau chief, told the Washington Post. “The health experts often have interesting information, so we’re very interested in that, but the president himself often does not.”
The president himself almost never does, is more like it.
I was outraged when I saw this on the CNN site this morning. The only propaganda they will allow is the propaganda they approve of. This is why Pompeo didn’t allow an NPR reporter on his plane. “Asking the wrong questions” is actually their excuse to keep anyone from asking the right ones. Control of the media is a key component of fascism.
Fine then. They can surely find better experts than Il Douche can. CNN can just air their own experts, and then say “We asked Dr. Fauci, the Trump Administration’s whateverheis, for comment, and Dr. Fauci remains forbidden to speak to the free press.”
Reprehensible behavior by the Trump administration.
Reprehensible behavior by CNN to only air the Trump part of the briefings. It calls to mind how much airtime they dedicated to Trump’s rallies in 2016, at the expense of covering other candidates, because the rallies drew ratings.
They’d do better to only air the Fauci / Birx part of the briefings.
They are actually skipping the scripted part of Trump’s briefing, and waiting for the Q and A part when he (sometimes) lets Fauci and Birx speak, along with others clearly more interesting than Trump and his “cheerleading” bullshit.
Also, I remember that CNN covered everyone during the 2016 election and primaries both, but it seems like we’ve all been through hell since those days, so I might be wrong about that.
One of the schools locally has forbidden its library to subscribe to the New York Times, citing as its rationale that they print “Fake News”.
twiliter:
The behavioural psychologist BF Skinner showed conclusively (without that being his primary intention) that if you can take control of any animal’s essential resources: food, and water in particular, then you can get it to do all sorts of tricks it would not otherwise do.
(Using this principle, Skinner trained pigeons to guide torpedoes onto target, before the development of inertial guidance systems, making those pigeons the first kamikaze pilots.)
In the human context, control of their subjects’ information supply has been top priority for despots down through the ages, and busting censorship likewise has been top priority for those who would overthrow them.
Witness the Russian Bolsheviks’ campaign to defeat Czarist censorship and the Stalinist campaign to impose their own version of it again; on the poor long-suffering ‘masses’.
iknklast @5, is that a public school? I would have thought they were straying into 1A issues which someone with standing could sue over.
I do so hope that in November the GOP get their arses royally handed to them. My fear is that they have already so thoroughly gerrymandered key states and disenfranchised so many voters that it is now next to imposable to create anything like a level playing field.
Rob, this is a deep red state (as opposed to a deep state?). They believe the First Amendment means they get to do what they want, when they want, to whom they want, and forbids liberals from saying, doing, or thinking anything. Creative interpretation of the first amendment is an art form out here.