TV hosts say Trump speech lacked news. Dems say told you so.

President Donald Trump's speech to the nation Tuesday night, in which he offered little he hadn't said before, quickly prompted a round of told-you-so's from critics of television networks' decision to air the Oval Office address live.

After hand-wringing by network bosses over whether to give the president a primetime perch, broadcast and cable networks uniformly decided to air it, given the potential for news about an ongoing government shutdown and suspense over whether Trump would declare a state of emergency in order to get the border wall he has long promised.

Democrats, many of whom had criticized the networks for agreeing to cut into primetime programming for Trump's address, said they should have seen it coming. “The Networks got played,” tweeted former Obama senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer.

It wasn't only political types questioning the networks' decision. Longtime industry watchers weighed in too. Bill Carter, a former New York Times television reporter and CNN analyst, tweeted that the "networks should feel totally burned" as Trump said "not one thing" he hadn't said before. Carter suggested network executives tell the White House "that was a fraudulent request" for airtime.

NBC anchor Lester Holt said Trump repeated “some of the dubious claims he’s made in the past,” ... “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd said the speech was “essentially a re-written version” of the president's campaign stump speech ...

https://www.politico.com/story/2019/01/08/trump-rehashraises-questions-for-networks-1089128