Just when you thought things couldn’t get any crazier with this election, we have this news.
Cable networks, news networks, and Twitter broke off their broadcasts of President Donald Trump ‘s address in the White House briefing room on Thursday; other channels did fact check the President’s unproven claims rather than carry them on live tv.
Trump launched his remarks by baselessly alleging that Democrats were practicing “fraud” and attempting to “steal” the election. “If you count the legal votes, I easily win,” said the president, even though the counting of the legal votes is still going on.
There are some important states, including Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Arizona, which still carry votes. Neither the President nor the Democratic nominee, former Vice President Joe Biden, has enough electoral college votes to win. Many of these votes come in the form of mail-in ballots, including by the active military.
LL major news networks such as NBC & ABC cut away from president Trumps speech in an unprecedented move. It’s not the first occasion that the networks have chosen not to air Trump’s comments live; in March, many terminated their live coverage during one of the President’s coronavirus briefings because he had defied his own health specialists.
Although there has been a great deal more emphasis about how social networks moderate election-related misinformation, there has been little analysis of TV news — and the clips it produces are not generally moderated by websites, even though they include disinformation.
Shortly after the president began speaking, MSNBC cut away to anchor Brian Williams. “Here we are again in the unusual position of not only interrupting the President of the United States but correcting the President of the United States,” Williams said. “There are no illegal votes that we know of, there has been no Trump victory that we know of.”
