| Should television broadcast Donald Trump's daily participation in the administration's coronavirus task-force briefings live? That's a hot topic of debate right now. To start, it's important to define our terms here. Everyone agrees that news outlets should cover what the president says. It's news. The question is how to cover it. Should it air live? Or does the shocking amount of misinformation Trump spreads mean that it's actively harmful to a nation trying to deal with a pandemic? I suppose I should add, it's not just factually incorrect material. Trump's impulse to present everything as a brilliant success means that even when he makes reasonable policy choices, he sometimes undermines them. This week, for example, on Monday Trump mused about ending social-distancing restrictions intended to fight the pandemic as early as next week. On Tuesday he dropped that, and targeted Easter instead. But because of how he presented it, he gave the strong impression that he was moving to end the restrictions, not actually extend them. And it's also a case of failure by omission. The task-force guidelines — sorry, "President Trump's Coronavirus Guidelines for America," according to the government mailer many of us received this week — are what the experts want people to know. But I doubt that more than a handful of Americans could name many of the guidelines. That's Trump's fault, because he rarely if ever talks about them during the briefings he dominates. (It doesn't help that Vice President Mike Pence keeps waiving the handout but rarely details what's on it.) Nor does it help when he continues his attacks on the media, making it more and more likely that citizens will disregard what they hear reported about best practices. Again, this isn't about whether or not to cover what Trump says. It's a question of whether to air it live, knowing, as the media critic Jay Rosen recently said of one, that it "subtracted from public knowledge and added to his depiction of journalists as hate objects." Still, I resist the conclusion that live coverage of a presidential press conference is a mistake. That Trump has begun doing them regularly during this crisis has make the administration more transparent and more accountable. It gets the president on record, which is inherently good, but it also increases the news value of stories debunking the things he says. The obvious solution is for Trump to continue doing these press conferences but to separate them from the experts' briefings. The research on this stuff emphasizes that people want to hear from the experts, and will tend to trust them. That's important for getting people to follow best practices. And that's why Trump should absent himself from the daily task-force briefing. What Trump needs more than anything is results, and the research says that if he wants results, he needs folks such as Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx delivering the message. But if he does that, then I think the cable networks, at least, should continue taking Trump's press conferences live the way they would with any other president. (Broadcast networks stopped doing this a while ago for other presidents, and they shouldn't do it for Trump unless there's a compelling reason.) Granted, they should come with as much on-screen fact-checking as possible. That shouldn't be so difficult, given that Trump usually repeats things from one appearance to the next (as all politicians do). Yes, there is still some risk to the public. But the public chose that risk when they put Trump into the White House. 1. Matt Grossmann talks with Bethany Albertson and Shana Gadarian about their research on the politics of anxiety and how it applies now. 2. Scott Lemieux on the basic flaw of the Bernie Sanders campaign. 3. Manuela Moschella and Lucia Quaglia at the Monkey Cage on the European Union's reaction to the coronavirus. 4. Daniel Nichanian speaks to Tammy Patrick about making voting by mail work this November. 5. Bridget Bowman on the money for elections Congress is making available for the states. 6. Jack Goldsmith and Ben Miller-Gootnick on the constitutional status of the current presidential succession law. One more time: Congress should put an end to this by changing the law and removing the speaker of the House and the president pro tempore of the Senate from the presidential line of succession. Whatever the constitutional status, the current law is simply a terrible one. 7. And Ron Klain on what comes after the current tough measures to stop the pandemic. And, yes, the administration is behind on planning for that, too. | 
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