Our Take: Trump TV, Albo’s selfie & Nollsy for the NRL Grand Final?

Chris Spyrou (0:07)

Hello, hello, hello, happy Saturday, and welcome to Our Take. I am Chris Spyrou.

Sacha Barbour Gatt (0:12)

Sacha Barbour Gatt.

Chris Spyrou (0:13)

And we are the hosts of The Briefing, but we bring you this more relaxed, more chilled version of Zee Briefing once a week, every Saturday. It is called Our Take. It is where we unpack the week that was, what we made of it, and what you listening on the other side of this made of it as well.

We start by debriefing a story. Sometimes it's a story we argue about, oh fair, maybe it's a story that we've covered to death. Maybe it's a story we haven't actually gotten to this week, which is this week's Debrief. We haven't technically gotten to every part of this story just yet.

Sacha Barbour Gatt (0:44)

Covered bits of it.

Chris Spyrou (0:45)

Bits of it. We also open up our inbox and go through some of your DMs, comments and reactions from the week that was. And we also have our Weekend Quiz, which this week and we are joined by a listener.

Sacha Barbour Gatt (0:56)

I know Chris is very, very excited about this.

Chris Spyrou (0:59)

Oh, so excited. And then of course, we cap it off with a staple of the Weekend Briefing, The Weekend List, where we recommend what to watch, see, do, eat and listen to. But first, let's get into this weekend's Debrief. And to kick it all off, I'm going to play a bit of this.

Riveting listening.

Sacha Barbour Gatt (1:19)

Okay. So what you were supposed to hear there was one Donald Trump speaking at a ribbon cutting ceremony on the lawn of the White House.

Chris Spyrou (1:30)

Yeah, he was announcing this $6 million helipad thing that had been done and he was talking. You could kind of make it out. You can kind of hear him a little bit.

Sacha Barbour Gatt (1:38)

You can hear him very, very faintly. Now, the issue and the reason you couldn't hear him clearly was because he was doing this after most of the American mainstream media, all in fact, had decided to boycott covering his events. Now, this was in response to initially, he decided that he didn't want CNN, MSNOW or Politico journos from being able to cover White House press events. He called them fake news. In response, they did launch legal proceedings. They're suing the White House over this decision. We did cover that in headlines this week. But what followed was surprising in that Fox, that was the big surprising one, but Fox along with ABC, CBS, NBC all decided to in solidarity, stop covering events with Trump in them because of his decision to ban CNN, MSNOW and Politico.

Chris Spyrou (2:30)

Yeah, and they're boycott very much centered on the way that they share their different equipment and stuff. So this is called the shared TV pool coverage. That's the thing you'll be hearing a lot. So if, for example, let's say ABC can't make it to an event, they'll take footage from NBC or they'll take audio from NBC. They'll use their microphones. Now that none of them are doing that and some of them aren't even rocking up altogether, you're not getting live mic feeds of the president or of White House events. There was a particular moment in New York where Trump was speaking with the mayor there, Zorin Mandami, and there was reporters involved because Mandami said, like, we absolutely have to have him here. And then Trump was like, oh, they all said they're going to boycott me.

They're not boycotting me. See, they've all turned up here today. But that was kind of like a bit of an exception there because the mayor was like, I absolutely have to be here. But yeah, that chopper audio went viral. And it's kind of like setting up potentially what we're expecting to see over the next few weeks if this issue isn't resolved.

Hello, it's Future Chris here, hopping in with an update after this was recorded. We actually do have an update on this story. The judge, the federal court judge that was overseeing CNN, Politico and MS Now's case has issued an order, a 14-day order, that their journalists be returned to the White House and that their access be returned to the White House. He essentially said that it looks like what the Trump administration is doing here is a breach of the Constitution. The case will continue, but for now, those journalists are back in the White House. Okay, let's get back into the debriefing.

Sacha Barbour Gatt (4:09)

What the White House has actually done in response to the boycott, because I think Trump has a feeling that it's not going to last. We saw journos there reporting on his appearance at the UN this week. He of course spoke at the UN General Assembly, and he called out the CNN reporter and said, why are you here? And she said, well, because so the UN let me in. It's not a White House event, it's a UN event. And so what the White House has done is launched this thing called Trump TV.