The men and women who work at CNN and MSNBC are practically begging their bosses to stop airing President Donald Trump’s daily press briefings. Geraldo Rivera has a different idea.
“To my colleagues at #MSNBC & #CNN,” the pundit tweeted on Wednesday. “Your decision to cut away from or not carry daily Presidential Corona Briefing not only hurts your ratings but more importantly is a disservice to your viewers. Let @realDonaldTrump & experts make their point-then fact check or bust their chops.”
And if that wasn’t enough, he pressed his unpopular case further during an appearance on Sean Hannity’s radio show later in the day.
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“I tweeted out today to my colleagues at MSNBC and CNN that I thought it was really amateurish of them to not carry the president’s task force briefings,” Rivera told Hannity. “That they were not only harming themselves in terms of ratings but doing a disservice to their audience.”
As Rivera went on to say what he thinks the cable news networks should do if they “disagree with the president,” Hannity interrupted him.
“Geraldo, with all due respect, they are not your colleagues,” the host said. “They have spent every waking minute of every day for over three years hating this man irrationally and lying!”
“I’m being gracious to get to this point,” Rivera replied. “If they want to fact check him or if they want to like, you know, really give him a hard time and roast him over the coals, let the audience see what he said and then do it. Don’t preempt him and then try to categorize or define what he was saying, it’s very dishonest and it’s not doing your audience a service.”
For the most part, all three of the major cable news networks have been airing Trump’s briefings in their entirety and offering commentary either through chyron captions on screen or during fact-check panels that follow. On Wednesday evening, however, MSNBC cut away a handful of times and CNN declined to start airing the briefing until Dr. Deborah Birx started speaking.
