BTRTN: Hey, CNN... Stop Broadcasting Trump's Daily MAGA Rallies.
Born To Run The Numbers reviews what was billed at a COVID-19 Task Force briefing last night, and concludes that it is time for CNN to stop enabling Trump's shameless manipulation of a national emergency for his own political agenda:
http://www.borntorunthenumbers.com/2020/04/btrtn-hey-cnn-stop-broadcasting-trumps.html
Excerpts: "Yesterday afternoon in the White House Press Room, Donald Trump attempted to 'market' his side of the story of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States, and it was one of the most shameful episodes in an administration that has long since shorn our nation of its dignity...Instead of talking about the here and the now, last night Donald Trump used the first 45 minutes on this platform for emergency communication to weave a completely altered retrospective narrative about what a great job he has done since the very first days of the pandemic. The most disgraceful moment was his slick video, in which his White House henchmen handpicked the few brief moments in which Trump made appropriate statements about the pandemic, and conveniently omitted the literally dozens of clips of Trump claiming that the virus was small, not significant, becoming less of a problem, that he had it 'under control, and that it would magically go away...
"Hey, CNN: there’s an irony here. You hold yourself to a high journalistic standard that your own reporters must have reliable sources, factual grounding for your reporting, and must clearly separate out news from opinion. And yet you are allowing Donald Trump to broadcast over your network on a nightly basis without making the slightest demand for accuracy, factual grounding, reliable sources, and delineating fact from opinion. You are enabling his manipulation of the media. You are becoming Twitter, allowing Trump to put forward his version of reality, unvarnished and unfettered, directly to the American people... there are lives at stake. Precisely because American lives are at stake, don’t you have a higher mission to answer to?"