Multiple networks rejected the White House’s request to show slides and graphics on screen alongside President Donald Trump’s frantic, but ultimately meaningless, primetime speech.
Trump’s communications team supplied a set of slides for major news networks to run alongside the president’s address as he desperately tried to convince Americans that the economy is in good shape on Wednesday night, sources told CNN.
However, CNN, ABC, CBS, and NBC all refused to display the slides of bar charts and line graphs on topics such as food prices and wages because the material did not clearly cite where the information was sourced from.
Unsurprisingly, the staunchly pro-Trump Fox News featured the government-approved slides and graphics, with the network’s primetime host Sean Hannity also using them on his show.
Despite not wanting to display the charts, several major news networks still helped the president by opting to run his speech live on air.
CBS, whose new editor-in-chief is anti-woke commentator Bari Weiss, paused its three-hour finale of Survivor to make room for Trump’s rant.
At one point, one of the slides shown on Fox News—simply labeled “White House graphic”—directly contradicted a misleading boast the president made during his address.
During his hyperactive speech, the 79-year-old president claimed: “Gasoline is now under $2.50 a gallon in much of the country, and in some states it just hit $1.99 a gallon.” However, the graph Fox News displayed alongside Trump showed the national average gas price at just over $3 a gallon.
As CNN’s fact-checking team noted, citing AAA data, only four states currently have average gas prices below $2.50. Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy, also estimated that only around 75 to 100 of the tens of thousands of gas stations nationwide may be offering fuel for $1.99.
Other false claims Trump made during his 18-minute speech included the wild assertion that he has secured “$18 trillion” in investment during his second presidency and that grocery prices are “falling rapidly” since his return to the White House.
Trump also repeatedly blamed his current economic woes on his predecessor, Joe Biden, despite White House officials privately wanting the president to stop blaming the Democrat who left office nearly a year ago for the state of the economy.
This is not the first time Trump has used simplistic visuals to try to persuade voters that the economy is performing better than many millions of Americans believe it is.
In August, the president held an impromptu Oval Office press conference where he showcased a series of comically oversized charts touting economic gains.
Once again, the slides embarrassed the president during his big moment. One chart claimed that something called the “medium income” of real households had risen to $6,434, rather than the correct term of “median income.”
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment.
