Two major broadcasters said they will not be airing President Donald Trump’s primetime address in full.
ABC News and NBC News have confirmed they will not air the president’s remarks live on their broadcasts, which are expected to focus on Trump’s 2020 election lies.
ABC News said the president’s speech will be on the network’s free streaming service, ABC News Live, and ABC News Radio “with comprehensive, anchored coverage,” but noted that while the speech would not be broadcast on ABC News, its Special Report team is “fully prepared to break into network programming to deliver live updates and reporting should significant developments occur.”
NBC News similarly said it will “plan to air a special report on the network following the remarks‚” and will air the president’s remarks on its free streaming platform, NBC News NOW.
The networks will instead be running their regularly scheduled 9:00 p.m. programming, with ABC airing a new episode of the game show Press Your Luck hosted by Elizabeth Banks, and NBC airing The Americas with Tom Hanks.
CBS News’s plans have not been announced, but CNN media analyst Brian Stelter reported that the network is considering a “middle-ground approach,” in which CBS Evening News anchor Tony Dokoupil will report on what the president said, while fact-checking his address afterward.
Major cable news channels including Fox News, CNN, and MS NOW have not responded to the Daily Beast’s repeated inquiries about their programming, just hours ahead of the president’s expected address.
The White House has not replied to an inquiry from the Daily Beast about whether it has asked the networks to preempt their regular 9:00 p.m. programming to air the president’s remarks, a request the White House typically makes for a “national address” from the president.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt has repeatedly claimed that because the exact contents of Trump’s speech are unknown, more people will want to watch, saying, “Nobody knows yet what President Trump will ultimately say, which is why everyone should tune in.”
During her press briefing earlier on Thursday, she also urged TV networks to carry the address live and in full, so that Americans could listen to it themselves, claiming, “It will shock you.”
The president is expected to discuss voting machine security and announce apparent declassified intelligence reports that the White House claims reveal plans by other countries to interfere in the 2020 election.
His speech follows his years-long obsession with the 2020 election, which he lost nearly six years ago to former President Joe Biden. Trump has claimed repeatedly, and falsely, that the 2020 election was stolen from him due to widespread fraud, assertions which his legal team at the time could never prove in court nor present to the public or even to lawmakers behind closed doors.
Still, at nearly every chance he gets, Trump repeats his lies that election irregularities made the results of the 2020 election fraudulent. He has filled his entire administration with loyalists who believe his election claims.
Airing Trump’s election lies without fact-checking them has proved to be a massive headache for several right-wing networks.
Fox News, which did not respond to the Daily Beast’s repeated inquiries about its programming this evening, was forced to pay $787.5 million to Dominion Voting Systems for featuring Trump’s legal team on the network, where they repeatedly pushed baseless conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.
Like Fox, the right-wing One America News Network was forced to pay an undisclosed sum to voting technology company Smartmatic over its bogus claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election. OANN still has The Matt Gaetz Show, hosted by the scandal-ridden former House Republican, in the 9 p.m. timeslot.
