This Just In — Maybe it has finally hit the fan.
The President of the United States announced early this week that he planned to make a national address tonight to discuss election security. As of this writing on Thursday morning, there is no major television network that has cleared its schedule to carry the speech live.
This is an extraordinary development. Normally, the White House would only request this kind of across-all-platforms access to the American people to announce something of urgent, national importance.
Normally.
Asking for all the networks to pre-empt their regular programming on a Thursday night is like asking all restaurants and bars to close on Saturday at 4:00 pm, forfeiting their prime money-making time to do business. For a nationally urgent matter, they’ll do it, but they have to all be convinced of the need.
After all, along with forfeiting advertising dollars, they lose any exclusivity of programming. Think of Nixon announcing his resignation or Reagan addressing the nation after the Challenger disaster. Did it matter what channel you were watching? No. It was everywhere.
That’s what this president wants. He wants very much to be the only show on television for his “big announcement” that he thinks the 2020 election was rigged. This election (which took place while he was president) was manipulated to toss him out.
He wants to advance this conspiracy theory despite the fact that his own administration declared that the 2020 election was free of foreign interference (unlike 2016) and was the most secure election in American history.
He subsequently fired the administration official who oversaw that investigation and reached that well-substantiated conclusion. Of course he did.
He wants to create a sense of emergency that the upcoming midterm elections are not going to be legitimate.
He wants and needs some major chaos to happen so the power grab to interfere with the elections will appear to be legitimate. This is all predictable, but the fascinating twist is that the networks have collectively stood up at this key moment and refused the manipulation.
FoxNews, which technically is an entertainment channel – like Bravo or Nickelodeon – is among the networks thus far saying no. They paid a massive defamation settlement a couple of years ago for allowing lies about election systems being hacked to be discussed and promoted on their air. They knew it was false. They allowed it anyway. That’s the malice standard.
This is the problem for any news organization. If you air a program featuring the promotion of disinformation, you’re almost certainly going to harm someone. Deliberately giving a platform to people who lie and cheat will end a news organization at any level. Credibility in the news biz is everything.
To stand up to the president and declare collectively that the expectation of propaganda coming from the Oval Office means that the credibility risk is too great to carry it live. This is astonishing and overdue.
The president can be expected to continue his campaign of distraction, intimidation and tantrum-driven antics to try to convince the voters that it’s too scary to go out to the polls in November and land this plane.
We must resist this at every turn. We must support our excellent board of elections and poll workers and turn out this fall in massive numbers — much too big to ignore. This is not the job of a savior candidate. It’s the job of the electorate.
Support the networks in their defiance of this plan to promote chaos. Support news organizations (like WCHL and Chapelboro) that are getting the job done every day without fear or favor. We can do this.
Jean Bolduc is a freelance writer and is the author of “African Americans of Durham & Orange Counties: An Oral History” (History Press, 2016) and has served on Orange County’s Human Relations Commission, The Alliance of AIDS Services-Carolina, the Orange County Housing Authority Board of Commissioners, and the Orange County Schools’ Equity Task Force. She was a featured columnist and reporter for the Chapel Hill Herald and the News & Observer.
Readers can reach Jean via email – jean@penandinc.com and via Twitter @JeanBolduc
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