President Trump will reportedly issue his first Oval Office address on Tuesday to discuss the government shutdown and border negotiations. News networks, which favored playing footage of empty podiums awaiting the race-baiting reality television host and professional celebrity during his campaign, always at the expense of his purportedly more serious Republican competitors, are now debating whether to stream the president of the United States addressing American citizens about a pressing funding crisis of political creation.
Cry me a river, media. You broke it, you bought it.
The same cable news industry which gave then-candidate Trump $2 billion in free media exposure has finally realized that the chickens have come home to roost. As it turns out, the playboy president actually has a knack for the political game, besting the media class that apparently thought him a useful idiot, the same Pied Piper candidate that Queen Hillary Clinton thought she could use to secure her coronation as opposed to facing, say, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, or Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., in the 2016 general election for the presidency.
So now that Trump has really ground their gears, the media is throwing a hissy fit, reported to CNN’s Brian Stelter as a “damned if we do and damned if we don’t” situation.
“He calls us fake news all the time, but needs access to airwaves,” Stelter said a television executive texted him. “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.”
I would have a modicum of sympathy for the cable news class if only they gave an ounce of fight against Trump’s pathological disdain for the truth sooner than two years ago. When Trump feared facing Megyn Kelly’s litigative line of questioning at the final Republican presidential debate before the pivotal Iowa caucuses, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski were more than happy to offer the petulant billionaire an unchallenged forum at a prime-time town hall, separate from the real debate. On a hot mic, the commentary couple were caught agreeing to Trump’s demands that they “just make us all look good” and ask “nothing too hard” of the presidential candidate.
The media still hasn’t learned the journalistic corollary to the infamous slogan of the Pixar film “The Incredibles”: “If everyone’s super, no one is.”
If everything’s outrageous, than absolutely nothing is.
The past two years have felt like an eternity because the media have remained unable to restrain themselves amid their outrage. Sure, the average politician ought to face excoriation for giving a pass to literal neo-Nazis or erring in his recollection of basic historical facts. But the media decided to treat the septuagenarian rich kid with kid gloves long ago. They don’t get to rewrite the rules now that they don’t like the outcome they brought about. I, for one, remember when the Catholic, Latino family man from Florida was viewed as more frightening than the serial adulterer with a questionable bias against racial minorities by the woke folks at Vox — at least right up until Trump was nominated.
The media does not get to have their cake and eat it too. If they think that spending segment after segment on Trump’s sophomoric tweets means that they haven’t effectively handed him their programming schedule to dictate, they can guess again. So what if they take one pathetic last stand in refusing to air his address in live time? Their panelists will still huff and fuss over whatever outrageous bait he drops for them for the next week or two.
News networks may be damned if they do or damned if they don’t, but they have no one to blame but themselves for reaching that point.
