President Donald Trump received criticisms and backlash after he held a press briefing about coronavirus outbreak in the U.S. The POTUS wanted the country to return to business as usual and lift the lockdown, despite the scare the pandemic brings. With the length of his speech, which dubbed by the many as misleading, some cable news networks, like CNN and MSNBC, cut the coverage short and the White House seemed not to like it.
"Pretty disgraceful that @CNN and @MSNBC have both cut away from this @WhiteHouse briefing with @realDonaldTrump and @Mike_Pence during a global pandemic," White House Deputy Secretary Judd Deere said on a tweet. as he called out the networks. He then thanked Fox News for continuing the coverage until the end and keeping the Americans informed about the virus.
CNN's senior media reporter Oliver Darcy didn't let Deere's accusation unanswered and shared the response of the network's spokesperson about the matter. He tweeted that if the White House wanted to take the network's time, "they should make an official request." If not, the network would make its own editorial decisions.
In another post, Darcy explained that the spokesperson for MSNBC told him that the network decided to cut away from Donald Trump's press conference after over an hour. It found the president's speech no longer connected and of importance to the ongoing discussion on public health and coronavirus outbreak.
Netizens also agreed on the networks' reasons for cutting away from the speech of Melania Trump's husband. Some said that they also stopped watching the press briefing long before CNN and MSNBC did. One Twitter user even said that Donald Trump never provided "facts, details, and/or substance" about the real issue and only gave his mere opinion about the matter.
In the conference, Donald Trump told the reporters that the U.S. would be back to business sooner than the three or four months of the supposed lockdown. As expected, his announcement received criticisms and a backlash as he seemed to be hindering the country's efforts to fight the continuous spread of the virus instead of helping the nation, The Hill noted.
He was said to be giving misleading information to the people and talking about "unrelated tangents." They were also not following the social distancing protocol as he was in close physical proximity with his group of officials. President Donald Trump was planning to lift the policies that the federal government recommended to stop the spread of coronavirus, opposing the advice of the health experts, who were now worried that there would be a surge of cases if this happened.
