Refusing to Air Biden's Speech on the Looming Threat of Fascism, ABC, CBS, & NBC Demonstrate Instead Their Loyalty to the British Monarchy
President Biden's speech was a stark acknowledgement of the danger we face. But three major American networks chose to waste live airtime on King Charles.
Two weeks ago, President Joe Biden publicly acknowledged in a speech the existential threat myriad political writers (including this one), pundits, podcasters, former and current politicians, and journalists have been warning about for years — the rise of right-wing extremism.
One would assume, considering the speech’s gravity to warrant its being delivered during prime television broadcast time, all the major corporate media giants (except Fox) would have aired it.
But one would be wrong.
While ignoring one of the most important speeches any president of the United States has ever had to deliver, network behemoths ABC, CBS, and NBC tripped over themselves to provide precious special live coverage Friday afternoon of King Charles III’s first speech as Britain’s new monarch.
Speaking for 23 minutes in front of Independence Hall in Philadelphia, Pa., Biden called his predecessor out by name when alerting the American people that “Donald Trump and the MAGA republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our Republic.”
King Charles has no affect on the United States whatsoever.
His speech was even more irrelevant to us than the British monarchy is to the United Kingdom.
President Biden’s speech was an acknowledgement of the danger we face, and the so-called “liberal” media had a perfect opportunity, once again, to step up to its journalistic responsibility.
Instead it, once again, chickened out.
This is becoming more common among the corporate media networks as they tack further to the right to avoid being accused of being “liberal.”
Corporations are by nature right leaning because the wealthy CEOs and boards of directors behind them don’t want their taxes raised, so they support republican policies that exclusively enrich them.
There are several serious problems at the core of this, stretching back several decades, across several federal administrations that relaxed telecommunications’ broadcasting and licensing regulations.
The result is the dearth of a truly progressive media infrastructure that can compete with the titanic infrastructure the millionaire- and billionaire-backed right-wing media has been able to construct.
These right-wing outlets have done such a successful job hammering home the lie that any other mainstream outlet not them is de facto “liberal” that the presumably “liberal” outlets tack further to the right to avoid being accused of it.
This obsession with placating their more truculent competitors has led The New York Times, The Washington Post, and others to adopt a more right-leaning bias.
So it should come as no surprise that CNN’s new president Chris Licht instructed staff to stop referring to Donald Trump’s discredited claim the 2020 election was stolen from him as “the big lie” because it sounds too much like a “Democratic Party talking point.”
If we sometimes wonder why most people we meet are so ignorant of basic current events and the important political decisions being made for them and about them every day, look no further than the ratings-biased, for-profit media.