Margaret Sullivan says President Trump has begun using his daily press briefings on the coronavirus pandemic as a substitute for his sidelined campaign rallies rather than the critical venues for public information they should be. In response, she says news organizations should stop taking the briefings as live feeds and instead cover the news within them with context and fact checking at every step.
ESPN sent a reminder to all of its employees on Friday that network policy is not to talk about politics unless they intersect with sports. The reminder came after talk show host Dan Le Batard criticized racist comments from President Trump and the network’s policy on politics in his show.
President Trump lumped in the many-sided scrutiny of Russian-backed ads on Facebook into a broader “Russia hoax” in a Friday morning tweet. “The Russia hoax continues, now it’s ads on Facebook,” he tweeted.As Ted Johnson points out, however, Facebook “is taking the scrutiny seriously.”
President Trump’s contempt for the news media was again glaringly on display when he chose not to hold a news conference at the conclusion of the G-20 summit in Hamburg. But the impact of his decision goes far beyond simply demonstrating a lack of concern for informing the American people.
