Will President Trump's Address to the Joint Session of Congress on March 4, 2025, not be aired by CNN? No, that's not true: The CNN TV programming schedule shows the address will air live at 9 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. The schedule has five additional time slots blocked out to rebroadcast the address through the overnight hours.
The false claim appears in a post on X (archived here) published on March 2, 2025. It is captioned:
CNN isn't airing Trump's Joint Address to Congress.
They aired one Trump rally live in two election cycles--Butler, PA, July 13, 2024.
The same rally where he was nearly assassinated. That's not just a coincidence.
The media isn't just biased--they're complicit.
This is how the post appeared at the time of writing:
(Source: X screenshot taken on Tue Mar 04 14:36:26 2025 UTC)
This is not true -- the CNN schedule shows six time slots totaling eight hours of coverage of the "Presidential Address To Congress" in the overnight hours of March 4-5. The image below shows the CNN TV schedule (archived here) displayed in EasternStandard Time (EST).
The 9:00 p.m EST time slot would coincide with a live broadcast of the address from Washington D.C.
(Source: cnn.com screenshot taken on Tue Mar 04 15:37:36 2025 UTC)
The Presidential Address to the Joint Session of Congress is scheduled to begin (archived here) at 9 p.m. Eastern Standard Time (EST) on March 4, 2025 in the Hall of the House of Representatives. According to the schedule, CNN will begin its coverage at 8 p.m., leading up to the speech at 9.
The X post makes another false claim about CNN, that, "They aired one Trump rally live in two election cycles--Butler, PA, July 13, 2024." This is not true. While CNN had a reporter and a camera at the Butler rally, the event was not live streamed by CNN. Lead Stories debunked this claim here.
Additional Lead Stories fact checks on claims including CNN can be found here.
