President Obama's press conference on Thursday was filled with news, and cable news networks naturally covered every bit of what he said about the IRS, Benghazi and the AP scandal.
There was just one pesky problem: this other guy kept talking too, and not even in English.
That man happens to be Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the prime minister of Turkey. He's a pretty important guy in a pretty important part of the world, and he had all sorts of things to say about Middle East policy and Syria that may have been worth listening to. But, apparently, no cable news executive thought that American viewers could handle all that foreign stuff, especially when it had to be translated. Fortunately, they had a solution: ignore him completely.
Whenever Erdogan started talking, they cut away. Whenever Obama started talking, they raced back. This happened over and over again, on every network.
Some of the networks wouldn't even give Turkish reporters the time of day. Even when Obama responded to an answer from a Turkish reporter, networks would cut off the question but go back to Obama for his response (to a question viewers weren't privileged to because why would audiences ever want to hear a question from a non-U.S. network?) That led to our favorite moment of the entire day, on CNN:
Jake Tapper: ''I think we're getting a question for President Obama."
Wolf Blitzer: "It's a Turkish reporter."
Jake Tapper: "Oh, it's a Turkish reporter. I apologize." (Keeps talking.)
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