"Presidents rarely make speeches during prime TV viewing hours, and typically only do so to address a national crises or matter of exceptional urgency."

"The networks, in turn, typically carry presidential speeches when the White House requests the time and after previewing the president’s remarks. However, they have passed on speeches that were part of campaign rallies or events, or when the subject was deemed insufficiently important or newsworthy.... People involved in negotiations over Thursday’s address said the networks deemed Biden’s remarks as 'political' in nature and therefore decided not to televise it. These people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive discussions, cited the speech’s criticism of Trump — Biden’s possible political opponent in 2024 — and its timing two months before the midterm elections... The non-coverage stands in contrast to the three networks’ decision in June to preempt their entertainment programs to air the first hearing of the House select committee’s investigation of the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riot...."

 
Writes Paul Farhi in "As Biden warned about democracy’s collapse, TV networks aired reruns/While broadcasters typically air a prime-time address by the president, they determined that this speech was more ‘political’ than newsworthy for live coverage" (Washington Post).

All 3 networks judged it too political to deserve live coverage in prime time? And yet the Marines were there, attesting to its nonpolitical nature!  

Farhi supplies this hilarious tweet from polisci prof Brendan Nyhan: "'The networks refusing to cover Biden’s speech (presumably because it was going to be critical of Trump and/or not newsworthy enough) is precisely the problem' confronting democracy." No, it's precisely the separation of government and journalism we need in a healthy democracy. 

I'm avoiding reading the many pundits who seem to be straining to resist the reality of the Mueller report.

I read. I don't watch the news on TV. But if I wanted to laugh at these people in their ludicrous scrambling for dignity and a way to keep hating on Trump, I'd watch it on TV. I'd do what you can see Scott Adams doing in this video, watch them on TV and laugh at them. Look at their faces! They're so unhappy! But — maybe a bit like Trump himself, with his cheerful simple tweets this morning — I don't want to get bogged down in their dismal, entropic experience. It's too time-consuming. I watched a little. Laughed a little. But my thing is blogging, and I mostly use text.

But I scan the headlines and I pretty much know what's in the text. I don't drop into reading unless my senses tell me there's some rich material. And I feel that I already know the Trump haters' talking points about the Mueller report and Barr's letter about it. I'm not putting my time into counting the repetition of talking points I already know. If I applied myself, I could go deep — oh, so deep! — into all the perseveration about the word "exonerate." Do you know that the word means to relieve of a burden (an onus)? I am lightening my load by not reading all that stuff.

But I will read "Conclusion of Mueller probe raises anew criticisms of coverage" by Paul Farhi (WaPo):

“Nobody wants to hear this, but news that Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller is headed home without issuing new charges is a death-blow for the reputation of the American news media,” Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi wrote in a column published Saturday, a day before Barr nailed the collusion coffin shut. He added: “Nothing Trump is accused of from now on by the press will be believed by huge chunks of the population.”...

Journalist and commentator Glenn Greenwald — a longtime skeptic of the collusion angle — tweeted his contempt for the media coverage on Sunday, too: “Check every MSNBC personality, CNN law ‘expert,’ liberal-centrist outlets and #Resistance scam artist and see if you see even an iota of self-reflection, humility or admission of massive error.... While standard liberal outlets obediently said whatever they were told by the CIA & FBI, many reporters at right-wing media outlets which are routinely mocked by super-smart liberals as primitive & propagandistic did relentlessly great digging & reporting.”...

“Russiagate” has been a news media obsession since Trump’s victory in November 2016.... The cable news networks, particularly CNN and MSNBC, have added hundreds of hours of discussion about the topic, too. The story undoubtedly was an important factor in shaping voters’ perceptions before the 2018 midterm election, in which Democrats won control of the House. But the conclusion of the inquiry has put a question once hazily debated into sharp focus: Did the mainstream news media mislead?..

I call fake news on the assertion that the question is just coming into focus! The question has been there all along, but the Trump-resistance media has deliberately blurred it and actively diverted us from it. I don't even want to spend my time watching this phony hand-wringing over what went wrong. Either you did it on purpose or you're so insane and incompetent that you're not worth reading at all.

WaPo's "What the latest James O’Keefe video leaves out" attests to the absence of unfair, out-of-context quotes.

Paul Farhi says "it’s what the video doesn’t show that may be as important as what it does," but I think what's most important is what Farhi doesn't put on his list of what's not in the video.

The omissions Farhi identifies are:

1. The video identifies the man on camera as John Bonifield, a "supervising producer," but fails to specify that he works on health and medical stories.

2.  The video fails to specify that Bonifield is based in Atlanta and "not in Washington or New York, where most of CNN’s coverage of national affairs and politics are produced."

3. The video doesn't say who the man making the video is or how he gained access to Bonifield.

See what's missing? There's absolutely nothing saying that Bonifield's statements were edited to distort or take anything out of context or encourage misinterpretation. There's nothing on Farhi's list that makes us feel we need the unedited footage to be fair to Bonifield and CNN. Every single thing is about additional facts that can be presented to us without access to the complete footage that Project Veritas holds in its possession.

These additional facts are perfectly easy for Bonifield or CNN or The Washington Post to share with us, including the identity of the Project Veritas operative and how he got access to Bonifield. Obviously, Bonifield knows that. According to Farhi:

People at CNN said Project Veritas’s operative was referred to Bonifield through a social-services organization in Atlanta called Rainbros that matches young adults with mentors. 

The link on Rainbros takes us to a website that says "Rainbros. Where Gay Gets Easier./Peer Coaching for Gay Atlantans/How can we help you make your life better?"

Farhi says: "Bonifield met the man in question about five times, and apparently was under the assumption that he was interested in a career in journalism." Yes, it's not very nice to use a mentoring service to get to some presumably kind-hearted person who is devoting his energy to (I hope!) helping young people. And this kind of trickery from Veritas is hardly surprising at this point, and we can talk about that. But I'd also like to know more about how The Washington Post and CNN get access to all the leakers that have been feeding the Russia craziness in the media that made the Project Veritas operation worth doing.

Let's talk about all of it. But let's recognize that Bonifield really made those statements and — from what I can see so far — there was nothing unfair about how they were presented in the edit we got yesterday.