When Donald Trump took to the stage last Monday after his historic victory in the Iowa Republican caucuses, he struck a relaxed, disarming tone. He spoke fondly of his late mother-in-law (whose home cooking, he joked, had fuelled 17-year-old Barron Trump’s towering height); he called his rivals “very smart people, very capable people”; he repeatedly stressed how important it was for Americans of all political persuasions to “come together”. This was the breezy, confident demeanour of a man who — having just won more votes than all his opponents combined in Iowa, a feat no Republican presidential hopeful had previously managed — knew he was well on his way to securing the nomination, and quite possibly the presidency. And yet not all cable news viewers would have been able to judge the tone of his address, because not all of them were shown it.

“At this point in the evening, the projected winner on the Iowa caucuses has just started giving his victory speech,” primetime MSNBC host Rachel Maddow told the camera, without using Trump’s name or showing the footage. “We and other news organisations have generally stopped giving an unfiltered live platform to remarks by former president Trump,” she continued. “It is not an easy decision, but there is a cost to us as a news organisation of knowingly broadcasting untrue things.” CNN, meanwhile, cut away from Trump’s speech when he began to mention the crisis on the US border with Mexico.

This is no way for news organisations to behave. First, it is not their job to try to protect viewers from “untrue things” — it is to report the news. After all, the line between what is and isn’t true is not always immediately clear. How could a network, therefore, be “knowingly broadcasting” them before they have been uttered? And if the risk of untrue statements being aired is so great, how could they stream anything live ever again?