A truly awful idea: Some liberals would pull plug on Trump’s briefings

It’s not much of a shock to discover that Rachel Maddow doesn’t like President Trump’s daily briefings on the coronavirus.

“I feel like we should inoculate ourselves against the harmful impact of these ongoing false promises and false statements by the president by recognizing that when he’s talking about the coronavirus epidemic, more often than not, he is lying,” she told her MSNBC viewers.

What is rather surprising is what Maddow wants to do about it, an idea that is gaining cachet among other commentators on the left as well. “If it were up to me, and it’s not, I would stop putting those briefings on live TV,” she said. “Not out of spite, but because it’s misinformation.”

Think about that for a second. Some liberals, who ordinarily cast themselves as champions of free speech, now want to suppress speech because of their animus toward Donald Trump.

Yes, Trump would still be able to hold White House briefings, but they would literally pull the plug on live coverage, depriving millions of Americans of the chance to see not just him but the vice president, surgeon general and assorted medical experts.

Just censor him. That’s what the argument comes down to. And what’s revealing is that the people who are making this case have spent years denouncing the president in ever harsher terms. Sullivan recently wrote that Trump is so dangerous that “we need to abandon neutrality-at-all-costs journalism, to replace it with something more suited to the moment.” The larger message is a clarion call for journalists to crusade against Trump, abandoning such niceties as fairness as a luxury we can no longer afford.

The president tweeted Monday that he watches “CNN, MSDNC, ABC, NBC, CBS, some of FOX (desperately & foolishly pleading to be politically correct), the @nytimes, & the @washingtonpost, and all I see is hatred of me at any cost. Don’t they understand that they are destroying themselves?”

I was struck when Trump used that word — “hatred” — to describe his media detractors in a 2016 interview with me. While it’s true in certain cases, it is far too broad a brush. And, of course, the president goes out of his way to slam the media as a way of discrediting their legitimate criticism of him.

In short, I think that good journalists can hold Trump accountable for what he says and does, or does not do, without bearing a personal grudge — and recognizing that an ABC poll has approval of his virus management up sharply, to 55 percent.

What I do not think is fair is for television to impose a blackout on the president of the United States because some on the left don’t think the public can handle hearing from him in this crisis.

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