The ratings for President Trump’s daily briefing are soaring, and leftists are getting apoplectic.
The New York Times reluctantly admitted on Wednesday that the president’s daily coronavirus updates are garnering an average audience of 8.5 million on cable news, adding, “roughly the viewership of the season finale of ‘The Bachelor.’”
The Times moaned, “And the numbers are continuing to rise, driven by intense concern about the virus and the housebound status of millions of Americans who are practicing social distancing. On Monday, nearly 12.2 million people watched Mr. Trump’s briefing on CNN, Fox News and MSNBC, according to Nielsen — ‘Monday Night Football’ numbers. Millions more are watching on ABC, CBS, NBC and online streaming sites.”
Then, of course, the attack on Trump while acknowledging he’s reaching a tremendous audience: “And the audience is expanding even as Mr. Trump has repeatedly delivered information that doctors and public health officials have called ill informed, misleading or downright wrong.”
The Times intimated that Trump’s critics gripe that the briefings are putting Americans’ lives at stake. The Times quoted uber-left MSNBC commentator Rachel Maddow stating, “I would stop putting those briefings on live TV — not out of spite, but because it’s misinformation,” as well as former ABC anchor Ted Koppel sniping, “Training a camera on a live event, and just letting it play out, is technology, not journalism; journalism requires editing and context. I recognize that presidential utterances occupy a unique category. Within that category, however, President Trump has created a special compartment all his own.”
Koppel snapped, “The question, clearly, is whether his status as president of the United States obliges us to broadcast his every briefing live. No. No more so than you at The Times should be obliged to provide your readers with a daily, verbatim account.”
The Times quoted Suzanne Nossel, the chief executive of PEN America, terming Trump’s remarks “an appalling daily spectacle and an international embarrassment.”
On Tuesday, a Seattle radio station tweeted that it would not air White House briefings dealing with the coronavirus because they exhibited a “pattern of false or misleading information.”
KUOW, which is a part of National Public Radio, tweeted, “KUOW is monitoring White House briefings for the latest news on the coronavirus — and we will continue to share all news relevant to Washington State with our listeners. However, we will not be airing the briefings live due to a pattern of false or misleading information provided that cannot be fact checked in real time.”
Deadline reported, “The news networks have been covering the briefings live, but CNN and MSNBC cut away from them on Monday, as the event stretched beyond an hour … an MSNBC spokesperson said that ‘after airing the press conference for over an hour we cut away because the information no longer appeared to be valuable to the important ongoing discussion around public health.’”
On Tuesday morning, the nation’s leading infectious diseases expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, slammed the media for trying to create a rift between him and President Trump, asserting, “I would wish that that would stop because we have a much bigger problem here than trying to point out differences … When I have made recommendations he’s taken them; he’s never countered or overridden me; the idea of pitting one against the other is just not helpful. I wish that would stop and we’d look ahead at the challenge we have to pull together to get over this thing.”
He added, “What the president is trying to do is to balance the public health issues with the fact this is having an enormous impact on the economy of the country which may actually, indirectly even, cause an incredible amount of harm and difficulty, even health-wise … The president has the awesome responsibility of considering every aspect of this. I just give public health advice completely clean, unconnected with anything else. He has to factor in other things. And that’s the way he operates; he takes in advice from a number of people from a number of different vantage points and then he makes his decision.”
