(CNN) — Some major TV networks showed President Donald Trump’s prime-time address live on Thursday night while others pointedly did not — a divide that highlighted Trump’s long record of lying and renewed discussion about the news media’s responsibilities.
The White House took the rare step of formally asking the broadcast networks to take the speech live, setting up Trump to castigate those that opted not to.
And Trump made network decision-making a talking point in his speech. He harshly criticized NBC and ABC for not preempting their prime-time shows for his address and said it “should mean a revocation of their licenses.”
The two other major US broadcast networks, CBS and Fox, did air the unusual prime-time address.
CBS surrounded the speech with fact-checking and context both before and immediately afterward, a practice sometimes called a “truth sandwich.”
Still, Democratic Sen. Mark Warner criticized CBS while appearing on the network to rebut Trump’s address. He told anchor Tony Dokoupil, “It’s incumbent on you and any responsible journalist to push back on these falsehoods.” Dokoupil pointed out that he had been doing exactly that.
Dokoupil said, “We agree, you and I, that this is a vitally, vitally important topic, and the president has a terrible track record on it.”
The CBS anchor channeled the prevailing view in TV newsrooms. Trump’s fixation on false claims about the 2020 election made Thursday night’s address a fraught event for every organization in the business of live news coverage.
It was challenging even for Fox News, the president’s favorite network. Many at the network were loath to hear Trump relitigate the election he lost, two Fox News sources told CNN on condition of anonymity. Some at Fox thought the topic was simply bad politics for the GOP, while others thought it was bad for business, given that Fox was consumed by litigation after amplifying the president’s election lies in 2020.
Ultimately, and unsurprisingly, Fox News showed the address live in full during Trump friend Sean Hannity’s hour, followed by a brief discussion between Hannity and White House correspondent Aishah Hasnie.
Hasnie noted Trump’s claims of compromised voting machines and said, “Fox News has not seen that evidence yet and is not in a position to evaluate the accuracy of the president’s statement and claims at this time.”
Fox anchor Bret Baier, who led a special report on the Fox broadcast network, made a similar disclaimer afterward: “Fox News has not seen that documentation yet and is not in a position to assess the accuracy of the president’s statements tonight.”
Overall, the address was taken seriously in partisan pro-Trump media circles, while it was treated skeptically everywhere else.
On cable, MS NOW aired about 15 minutes of the speech, then cut away to unpack Trump’s claims. Chris Hayes said reacting to the speech was “a little bit like trying to argue with, like, a raving crazy person standing next to you on the subway claiming they’re Jesus Christ.”
CNN opted not to take the speech live, instead treating it like other presidential events that are monitored for news and scrutinized for accuracy.
“We’ll be monitoring what the president says tonight, as we always do, but aren’t taking it live, given the president has a well-documented history of saying blatantly false things about elections,” anchor Kaitlan Collins told viewers.
Collins and correspondent Evan Perez showed clips from the speech with a heavy amount of reality-checking.
A group of CNN journalists in the DC newsroom was shown on camera reviewing the newly declassified documents and assessing Trump’s claims.
CNN also streamed the speech live on its website, accompanied by real-time analysis from correspondents and experts.
NBC and ABC took a similar approach by streaming the speech and then reporting on its contents. Both broadcast networks interrupted prime time for brief special reports after Trump finished speaking. NBC’s Hallie Jackson said the information Trump presented was “largely not new.”
Earlier on Thursday, network executives were locked in hours-long meetings about how to handle the address.
The internal debates centered on two competing interests: the traditional newsworthiness of a presidential address and the risks of giving Trump an unfiltered platform for his election denialism.
But, as an executive at one of the networks remarked, “It’s not 1974 anymore. There are lots of ways to cover the news.”
And most of the networks landed somewhere in the middle, acknowledging the address without taking Trump at face value. There were fact-checks and critiques galore. But the raw speech was also widely available, from YouTube to the White House’s own website.
Dokoupil began the CBS special report by saying that “much of what the president has said on this topic is false. Most notably, of course, the claim that he won the 2020 election when, of course, he did not.”
“Because of this, there is an argument that it’s irresponsible to air the president’s speech tonight,” Dokoupil said. “But this speech will be made. It will be news. And it’s our job to cover the news. And so we are.”
CBS dipped into the address late, after several minutes of set-up, and also cut away a couple of minutes before Trump concluded.
The rest of the CBS hour provided context from election experts, several of whom pushed back hard on Trump’s depictions.
The CBS approach was of particular interest to media insiders because the network’s parent company, Paramount, has cultivated a close relationship with the Trump administration in the past year.
Paramount is currently seeking to buy Warner Bros. Discovery, CNN’s parent company, in a deal that has been challenged by a coalition of 12 Democratic state attorneys general.
Thursday night’s address also underlined how Trump has pressured major TV networks since returning to office. The Trump-aligned FCC is actively investigating the parent companies of both ABC and NBC.
Contrary to Trump’s comments on Thursday night, national networks are not licensed by the government, but local stations are. And the FCC is challenging eight of those ABC station licenses, a move that comes after years of public pressure from Trump.
Trump claimed without evidence that ABC and NBC opted not to interrupt prime time programming for his speech because “they know how corrupt our system is and they don’t want to reveal it.”
In an apparent ad-lib from his prepared remarks, he repeatedly complained that the broadcasters “pay nothing” to use the public airwaves.
The-CNN-Wire
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