Support justice-driven, accurate and transparent news — make a quick donation to Truthout today!
President Donald Trump announced on Monday that, starting this week, he would be resuming daily coronavirus press briefings similar to those he held earlier this year.
Trump held those briefings beginning in March and lasting through the end of April, when he lamented in a tweet that the briefings were “not worth the time & effort” after news reports began fact-checking him in real-time and journalists present at the briefings began asking him questions that were more critical in nature.
Trump’s comments during the briefings were widely known for being contradictory to his own health experts’ advice for how to manage the coronavirus pandemic in the United States. The president also gave dangerous advice to the American people, including pushing a potentially dangerous drug that had not been tested as a means to treat COVID-19, as well as suggesting the ingestion of disinfectants ought to be given serious consideration.
On Monday, citing the television ratings that happened before, Trump said the briefings would be making a comeback.
“We had a lot of people watching […] in the history of cable television, there’s never been anything like it,” Trump said to reporters.
https://www.facebook.com/WorldNewsTonight/videos/992782574513235
It’s possible that, absent his ability to host campaign rallies across the country as widely as he has wanted to, the president is hoping to use the briefings as a means of promoting himself to a wider audience on a daily basis. Indeed, in April, several commentators noted that Trump’s spring round of press briefings were more akin to his campaign rallies than actually providing any benefit to the American people, as far as coronavirus and public health was concerned.
“They have become a daily stage for Trump to play his greatest hits to captive audience members,” Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan said of the briefings.
Others warned that it was imperative for news media to look away from them.
“All of us should stop broadcasting it, honestly. It’s going to cost lives,” MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow said.
Last week, White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany hinted that the briefings might be returning, suggesting that they were helpful to the president more than harmful to his image.
“It’s causation not coincidence that the president’s handling of the coronavirus was higher in public opinion when he himself was addressing the pandemic,” she said.
However, it’s not clear that McEnany’s predictions — that daily press briefings will improve Trump’s standing with Americans — will actually come true, nor is it clear that her assessment is based on reality.
According to Real Clear Politics’s averages of polling data, Trump had an average approval rating of 46.5 percent on March 27, when his daily press briefings had just started. By April 30, a few days after he decided to stop holding them, his average approval rating was down to 44.3 percent, with a majority of Americans (an average of polls showing 51.4 percent) saying they disapproved of the job he was doing.
A recently published ABC News/Washington Post poll finds that only 39 percent of the American public approve of the way he’s handling his job as president, while 57 percent disapprove of his job performance.
Important Message: Please Read
For 25 years, Truthout has survived by publishing impactful investigative journalism and analysis; distributing full editions 365 days a year; and building a community of readers who support us with small, hard-earned donations.
Eighty percent of our $3 million yearly budget comes from small donors alone. Of those, 8,000 readers support us with monthly donations. Back in 2018, when Facebook decided to suppress the circulation of posts made by organizations, thereby cutting readers off from seeing many articles shared by the news organizations they had intentionally decided to follow, Truthout’s total traffic declined by 40 percent, as nearly all of our traffic from that platform disappeared.
As Google plans to roll out its new AI search bar, providing shoddy AI summaries instead of directing readers to our site, the consequences promise to be even more explosive. Google Search is our single largest source of traffic; it’s the route by which 27 percent of our readers find us. If even half of that 27 percent disappears, it will have a devastating impact on our journalism.
The entire journalism ecosystem will shoulder this blow, particularly independent publishers and news sites that depend on traffic and aren’t bankrolled by large corporations. If you can support Truthout with a donation today, you can help us resist the inevitability of Big Tech’s AI takeover. Please give today.