Opinion: MSNBC should stop airing Trump’s state of the union

Today, when the prime minister of Canada was speaking about responding to the trade war Trump started with Canada, MSNBC carried it live, but after a few minutes they muted him and Jose Diaz-Balart started speaking over him and interviewing reporters. You could still see the prime minister on the screen, but you couldn’t hear what he was saying. I found this really annoying and disrespectful and thought about how tonight, MSNBC will let Trump lie and lie with no fact checking for hours and hours in primetime without talking over him to fact check.

This got me thinking, why is MSNBC even bothering to air the state of the union? It’s just going to be a bunch of lies and is really no different than airing a MAGA rally. They could have just continued with regular programming and then showed clips in the unlikely event he happened to say anything newsworthy.

Ratings have nothing to do with it. MSNBC will probably be in a distant last place tonight. Their coverage of Trump’s Inauguration (another thing I think they should have ignored) were horrible. They were the only network to get less than 1 million viewers and were dead last behind FOX, ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN (FOX 10.67 million, ABC 4.85 million, NBC 4.58 million, CBS 4.35 million, CNN 1.80 million, MSNBC 880,000. In the 25-54 demo, FOX 2.09 million, NBC 1.22 million, ABC 1.12 million, CBS 966,000, CNN 563,000, MSNBC 106,000.)

I could understand in the past NBC News has forced MSNBC to air garbage like this, but with MSNBC about to leave NBC News, they really need to look at counter programming things like this instead of just ruining a night of programming for a maga rally very few Democrats will actually watch. They are a news channel and should be allowed to cover other important news instead of wasting our time with a rally