Teresa Hanafin didn’t hold back against Trump in her Fast Forward early-morning email news digest for the Boston Globe, warning in the Tuesday edition that Trump would be spewing “his agitprop live tonight” during the first Oval Office address of his presidency.
The major TV networks all caved to Trump's request that they broadcast his agitprop live tonight when he addresses the country from the Oval Office at 9 p.m. about the southern border. But news anchors and execs are wringing their hands over the prospect of being hapless conduits for Trump's umpteen untruths.
“Caved”? National Review’s Jim Geraghty argued that airing President Trump would be wholly justified: “This is a long bipartisan tradition for American presidents, and this is the first time Trump has done this. We’re almost two years into his presidency. Refusing air time to Trump would be straight-up partisan bias....It’s just not plausible to argue that the broadcast networks were stingy with Obama, or that Trump’s demands are excessive....”
Hanafin (who also oversees the paper’s email newsletters) continued digesting and linking to Globe stories that hopefully showcased less trademark liberal snark than her email newsletert:
They could run a crawl across the bottom of the screen that contains facts every time he lies; he's bound to repeat many he's already told about immigration, so they could have a lot prepared ahead of time. But given Trump's fondness for fiction, the "crawl" may have to be more like a sprint, zipping by so fast that it's unreadable....
Trump could make a purely political announcement that there is a national emergency at the border so that he can bypass Congress and use Pentagon funds to build the wall; he's desperate to stop those big meanies Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter from yelling at him.
In the same edition, she also tried to redefine the intra-Democratic tug over the anti-Jewish Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement (BDS) as a sneaky Republican “trap”:
That's convenient because Democratic leaders are trying to avoid stepping into a trap the GOP is trying to set for them. You may have heard of the BDS movement -- Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions. It's been around for 13 years and is a global campaign to boycott all things Israeli in an effort to get Israel to withdraw from occupied territories. It's ostensibly designed to help Palestinians, but some say it has anti-Semitic elements....
In her conveniently flattering breakdown of Democrats as torn between “support for Israel vs. Americans’ right to protest,” she skipped over actual anti-Israel Democrats in Congress (like newcomers Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Oman) who indeed support the BDS movement:
Sensing that the Democratic caucus is split on the issue -- support for Israel vs. Americans' right to protest -- the GOP decided to introduce as its first bill of the new legislative session a measure to give states the explicit authority to punish Israel boycotters. Democrats who vote for it will be criticized for squashing free speech (Republicans don't care if they're criticized for that); those who vote against the measure will be accused of being anti-Israel.
