From the Thursday edition of the Morning Jolt, a good indicator of the Left’s love for the hecker’s veto and preference for confrontational, disruptive efforts over the more subtle and effective ones:
The Dumb, Dumb, Dumb Effort to Disrupt Saturday Night Live
The groups trying to get Donald Trump booted off of Saturday Night Live are going about their objective entirely the wrong way.
Pressure continued to mount on NBC to cancel Donald Trump’s guest-host appearance on this weekend’s “Saturday Night Live” as a coalition of advocacy groups delivered petitions to the network Wednesday calling for him to be dropped from the show.
The petitions delivered to 30 Rockefeller Plaza, home of NBC and “Saturday Night Live,” marked the latest attempts to dissuade the network from allowing the Republican presidential hopeful to host the show, with the National Hispanic Leadership Agenda earlier asking that NBC reconsider the decision.
Their rhetoric is ludicrously over-the-top:
“There’s mounting evidence that Donald Trump’s racist demagoguery is resulting in real-world violence and physical and verbal intimidation,” Mushed Zaheed, deputy political director of Credo Action, one of the participating groups, said in a statement.
Really? Really? Are they referring to those two thugs in Massachusetts? You really think those two would have been kumbaya-singing, tolerant, pacifist solid citizens if not for Donald Trump’s speeches?
They’re even adopting the Code-Pink style and threatening the heckler’s veto.
DeportRacism.com is working with activists in New York to disrupt the live broadcast of the show to both hold NBC accountable and make a statement to the world that Trump’s racism has no place in the White House.
The DeportRacism.com Political Action Committee will pay $5,000 cash to anyone on the set of the show or in the studio audience who yells out or gets on camera during the live broadcast clearly heard saying “Deport Racism” or “Trump is a Racist.”
This is a chance to turn Trump’s appearance on the show into a media story that addresses his racist comments against Latinos. Anyone can claim the $5,000 bounty with no prior relation or involvement with the DeportRacism.com movement if they disrupt the show and meet the both of the following criteria:
Notice, “This is a chance to turn Trump’s appearance on the show into a media story that addresses his racist comments against Latinos.” What, do they think Trump’s comments in his announcement speech didn’t get media coverage? Where have they been? Those comments were dissected, denounced, debated and denunciated. When are the rest of us allowed to move on with our lives?
There’s a much simpler argument, and one more likely to generate logistical and legal headaches for NBC. Help Trump’s rivals organize their “equal time” requests after Trump’s appearance:
Let’s say a legally qualified candidate asks for and receives an equal opportunity.
When the stations agree that a candidate’s claim for free time is valid, the station loses all control over what happens in that slot. The candidates are entitled to do or say whatever they want, and the station can’t edit it out.
“This is why broadcast station managers absolutely hate free time,” said [William E. Lee, a professor at the University of Georgia Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication and co-author of The Law of Public Communication].
Of course, we won’t know how many minutes Trump may actually have been seen or heard as the SNL host until the next morning. Since we can assume he won’t be in every skit or the musical performance, let’s just say the network counts 25 minutes of free time from a 90-minute show.
This opens up NBC affiliates “big time” in those markets where Trump has several legally qualified opponents, Lee said, though NBC’s top dogs must have realized a ratings bump would be more beneficial than a potential avalanche of candidate claims.
A move like that would help all of Trump’s rivals, making it marginally less likely he would win the nomination, and it would be acting in the name of “fairness,” instead of attempting to shout down and shut up someone who had the audacity to say something they don’t like. But I suppose their preferred approach gives a clearer view of their mindset and instincts.