Why won't the president lead? No, not like that, now you're being divisive.
Tomorrow Republicans everywhere will be freaking out (more so, that is) and telling you that the end of our democracy is nigh (for real, this time), but the general public won't have seen the thing
they're freaking out about.
Eight years ago, President George W. Bush delivered a prime time address on immigration, carried by all the big broadcast networks.
On Thursday, President Barack Obama will do the same thing, but three of the broadcasters, ABC, NBC, and CBS have signaled that they won't be carrying it.
It's not that changes in immigration policies that may affect a few million people isn't news, then, since it was news in the Before Times. It's just that this time around
it's just so "political."
Mike Allen reports in Playbook on Thursday morning that part of the reason the networks didn't want to air the address was because of its perceived political nature:
“There was agreement among the broadcast networks that this was overtly political. The White House has tried to make a comparison to a time that all the networks carried President Bush in prime time, also related to immigration [2006]. But that was a bipartisan announcement, and this is an overtly political move by the White House.”
And so our national press trundles on. The president's actions on immigration are
political because the Republicans have shouted very loudly that they are
political, thus rendering the president's statements on those actions themselves
political, compared to the same actions and speeches by other presidents, and we didn't become guardians of the nation's discourse in order to cover politics. That's public radio crap.
The cable news stations will be carrying the presidential address, however, and—importantly—so will the large Spanish-language network Univision. On the plus side, this means the wider part of America will not be exposed to the required Republican rebuttal to the announced reforms, which is expected this time to consist of Rep. Steve King shouting Pulp Fiction catchphrases into American living rooms for five or ten minutes.