It may not have been her words, but Katie Couric quote tweeting a Charles Blow op-ed saying how airing President Trump’s Wuhan coronavirus pressers is journalistic malpractice is quite something. First, Blow hates Trump. Second, every registered Democrat that’s a member of the media—all of them—hates these pressers now because they’ve helped the president in the polls. They thought trashing the market would do the trick. It didn’t. The Dow is slowly recovering and the president’s response to this Wuhan coronavirus outbreak has been proactive and aggressive. Highlighting the negative has become some odd fetish by members of the media, and this is something that only has occurred during this presidency. It’s more than obvious that the press wants this man to fail and they know, whether they want to admit it or not, that if Trump is on camera—that’s trouble (via NYT) [emphasis mine]:
We are in the middle of a pandemic, but we are also in the middle of a presidential campaign, and I shudder to think how much “earned media” the media is simply shoveling Trump’s way by airing these briefings, which can last up to two hours a day.
Let me be clear: Under no circumstance should these briefings be carried live. Doing so is a mistake bordering on journalistic malpractice. Everything a president does or says should be documented but airing all of it, unfiltered, is lazy and irresponsible.
As the veteran anchor Ted Koppel told The New York Times last month, “Training a camera on a live event, and just letting it play out, is technology, not journalism; journalism requires editing and context.” He continued, “The question, clearly, is whether his status as president of the United States obliges us to broadcast his every briefing live.” His answer was “no.”
But Ted also told CNN that their ratings would be in the toilet if Trump wasn’t around, so there’s a business angle to this too. Also, it’s not just Trump—members of the coronavirus task force and the military officers assisting in the effort are part of these pressers. It’s not all Trump. Blow’s reference to this being an election year and “earned media” is a dead giveaway that he just hates these things because Trump is part of it, but back to Couric.
The emphasized text is what was part of her now-deleted tweet, but the Internet is forever. In fact, there was another one; our friends at Twitchy caught it where she is also quote tweeting Blow’s piece with “stop airing the briefings.”
Does anyone want to take a stab why this is hilarious? It’s the seat of irony. I mean, Couric has zero standing to talk about journalistic malpractice when she selectively edited her documentary to make Virginia gun owners look bad. It was done, supposedly, to let the viewer reflect on universal background checks. That’s crap. We know it. You know it. And in a rare instance, this was a case where not even NPR could defend Couric’s politburo antics. Even The Washington Post torched her for the editing. And this isn’t the first time her lack of self-awareness led to her stepping on a rake. In 2017, she said that “fake news was tearing America apart at the seams,” says the woman who committed journalistic malpractice and peddled fake news about the Second Amendment.
Virginia gun owners know what happens when Katie decides to edit what people say instead of showing their genuine reactions. https://t.co/e6LKelXDoB
— Cam Edwards (@CamEdwards) April 20, 2020
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