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Progressives Rip Morning Joe Corporate Duo for 'Ring-Kissing' at Mar-a-Lago
One veteran journalist called Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough's meeting with Donald Trump "a disgusting show of obeisance in advance."
Nov 18, 2024
On MSNBC's "Morning Joe" on Monday, hosts Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough assured viewers that their recent meeting with U.S. President-elect Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago was not meant to "normalize" the Republican leader, whose own former chief of staff said recently would govern as a dictator.
But Trump's warning to the media after the gathering underscored the danger of treating the president-elect as just another politician whose views differ from those of the liberal news network.
Trump toldFox News that the meeting with Brzezinski and Scarborough—who celebrated New Year's Eve with Trump in 2016, only to be called "crazy" and a "psycho" by him months later after their coverage angered him—was "extremely cordial," but then issued a warning.
He told Fox he believes he has "an obligation to the American public, and to our country itself, to be open and available to the press."
"If not treated fairly, however, that will end," Trump said. "The media is very important to the long-term success of the United States of America."
Trump also immediately used Brzezinski and Scarborough's "ring-kissing," as progressive news outlet The Tennessee Holler called it, "as a trophy and saying they praised him effusively."
The Holler wasn't the only critic to compare the hosts' meeting with Trump to a scene out of The Godfather. Krystal Ball, co-host of the online political news show "Breaking Points," accused Brzezinski and Scarborough of helping to "usher the fascists in" before going to Mar-a-Lago to "kiss the ring."
In addition to drawing Trump's ire by warning ahead of the election that he was a threat to democracy and accusing him of "lying every day and destroying the country" during his first term, the hosts and their network have been hostile and dismissive of progressives who have called on Democrats to try to appeal to working-class voters instead of "Liz Cheney Never Trumpers," said Ball.
On "Morning Joe" on Monday, Brzezinski said, "For those asking why we would go speak to the president-elect during such fraught times, especially between us, I guess I would ask back, 'Why wouldn't we?'"
"Joe and I realized it's time to do something different, and that starts with not only talking about Donald Trump but also talking with him," she said.
Scarborough said the trio discussed and expressed their different views on issues such as "abortion, mass deportation, threats of political retribution against political opponents and media outlets." He claimed Trump "seemed interested in finding common ground with Democrats on some of the most divisive issues."
The hosts suggested Trump has done an about-face in his views on the media since the election, when he called journalists "the enemy camp" and the days leading up to it, when he said he wouldn't "mind" if reporters at a rally he held were shot.
Ryan Grim of Drop Site News joked on social media that the meeting exposed the hosts as "resistance commanders" who had turned out "to have been collaborating double agents from the beginning."
"We've been played," he added.
While the two journalists said they believe it is "time for a new approach" in covering the president-elect, Julianne McShane at Mother Jonespointed out that journalists "have tried" for years to talk with Trump about his perspective on issues.
"Trump repeatedly rebuffed sit-down interview invitations during the campaign from CBS News and NBC News, both of which Harris did do; Instead, Trump gave interviews to a bevy of right-wing male podcasters. If Trump and his team are serious about respecting the press, they will have to engage with them—respectfully, and on the issues—rather than denigrate them," wrote McShane. "It's ultimately unclear if Trump's sudden friendliness toward the media can be attributed to the MSNBC reunion at Mar-a-Lago. But one thing remains certain: You probably can't trust this one, at all."
Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch wrote that Brzezinski and Scarborough's "capitulation is another of my worst fears about life under Trump 47."
"Those of us who plan to keep writing against Trump's autocratic ways are going to be marginalized as 'dead-enders' who aren't getting with the program, which will make it easier to shut us up," said Bunch.
Veteran journalist Jeff Jarvis denounced the "Morning Joe" hosts' Mar-a-Lago meeting as a "betrayal of their colleagues, democracy, and us all" and "a disgusting show of obeisance in advance."
Bunch quoted Yale historian Timothy Snyder, an expert on authoritarianism, who advised Americans as Trump took office for the first time in 2017: "Do. Not. Obey. In. Advance."
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MSNBC's Chris Hayes Catches Fox News Red-Handed Deceiving Its Audience to 'Clean Up' for Trump
"Do you see what they did there, on their own network?"
Oct 17, 2024
MSNBC's evening news anchor Chris Hayes walked his audience through an overt deception perpetrated by Fox News Wednesday night as the right-wing cable outlet used selective editing of Donald Trump during Bret Baier's primetime interview with Kamala Harris.
The line of questioning from Baier stemmed from recent public remarks Trump made in which he said "the enemy from within" was the most serious danger to the nation and that he would use both the National Guard and U.S. military to go after "radical-left lunatics," which he claimed included Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), a centrist member of the Democratic Party currently running for U.S. Senate in California.
When Harris invoked these comments to criticize Trump for threatening to turn the U.S. military against people who have different political beliefs than him, Baier interrupted her to say that the former Republican president had been asked about those very remarks earlier in the day during a separate town hall-style event, also hosted by Fox.
But in the clip shown by Baier to the television audience and to which Harris was asked to respond, Fox only included a small part of what Trump actually said on the subject during the town hall, leaving out his clear repetition of calling Schiff and others "the enemy from within" who must be dealt with.
As Hayes explains during his examination of what transpired, Baier used a selected "soundbite to try to clear Donald Trump of saying a thing in which he cut out the part where says it."
Watch the segment:
"Do you see what they did there, on their own network?" asked Hayes of the selective editing by Fox producers. "[Trump] said—he repeated—'They are the enemy within... they're sick people... they're evil.' He repeated it! And then Brett Baier's like, 'Let me play you what [Trump] said today,' and just cut out the big chunk."
In her reaction to the clip showed by Baier, Harris said, "Bret, I'm sorry and with all due respect—that clip was not what he has been saying about the 'enemy within' when he has been speaking about the American people. That's not what you just showed."
When Baier tried to explain that he was just trying to show his response to a question, Harris interjected, "You and I both know that he has talked about turning the American military on the American people. He has talked about going after people who are engaged in peaceful protest. He has talked about locking people up because they disagree with him."
"This is a democracy," Harris continued. "And in a democracy, the president of the United States should be able to handle criticism without saying they are going to lock people up for doing it. And this is what's at stake, which is why you have someone like the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff saying what Mark Milley has said about Donald Trump being a threat to the United States of America."
For his part, Hayes said the entire episode—in which Trump refused to climb down from his fascist positions, but Fox still tried to "clean up" for him—represents "the same playbook we see over and over from Fox."
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Study Exposes Double Standard for CNN and MSNBC Coverage of Gaza v. Ukraine
U.S. media, analysts said, "should elevate its coverage of the suffering in Gaza to be comparable to that of Ukraine, with the same urgent and moralizing tone."
Oct 15, 2024
As the death toll from the U.S.-backed Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip continued to climb on Monday, The Nationpublished a study revealing the "glaring double standard" for American corporate media coverage of that war and Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
The analysis was conducted by Adam Johnson, who co-hosts the podcast Citations Needed and writes media criticism at The Column, and Othman Ali, a researcher and data analyst with an advanced degree from the University of Oxford.
The pair—who released their full dataset on GitHub—focused on the first 100 days of each conflict. Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022 and Israel launched its war on Gaza in retaliation for the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attack.
Since the Russian invasion, media critics have highlighted "the racist and dehumanizing double standards of war reporting." Over the past year, such criticism has mounted, with arguments that Western media are "enabling" genocide in Gaza.
In March, protesters frustrated with the U.S. "newspaper of record" even gathered in Manhattan and chanted, "New York Times you can't hide, we charge you with genocide." Watchdogs like Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting and Media Matters for America have published various critiques, with the latter often focusing on right-wing sources.
"CNN and MSNBC's pointed lack of sympathy with Palestinians is also important to examine because the media's consistent dehumanization and erasure of their suffering has helped 12 months of a killing campaign."
Johnson and Ali focused on commentary, editorial priorities, and reporting by CNN and MSNBC, explaining that "the third major cable network, Fox News, was not included in our analysis because the focus of our study is in the formation of liberal and Democratic Party-aligned support for Israel's war on Gaza."
They found that on the two networks, Palestinians in Gaza received "far less sympathetic and humanizing coverage than either Israelis during the same period or Ukrainians during the first 100 days after Russia's invasion."
"The point of this analysis is not that U.S. media should reduce its coverage of the tragedies in Ukraine to achieve parity with Gaza, but that it should elevate its coverage of the suffering in Gaza to be comparable to that of Ukraine, with the same urgent and moralizing tone," the pair stressed.
"CNN and MSNBC's pointed lack of sympathy with Palestinians is also important to examine because the media's consistent dehumanization and erasure of their suffering has helped 12 months of a killing campaign, backed by unending American military and political support, that is unprecedented in the 21st century," they added.
Johnson and Ali highlighted four key findings:
- Sympathetic victims like journalists, refugees, and children are mentioned more in Ukraine than in Gaza, despite a significantly wider gap in casualties and human suffering;
- On CNN and MSNBC, emotive words such as "brutal," "massacre," "slaughter," "barbaric," and "savage" were overwhelmingly used to describe the killing of Israelis and Ukrainians, and almost never used to describe the killing of Palestinians;
- CNN and MSNBC covered the impact of Russia's invasion on civilians twice as often as they did the impact of Israel's bombing and siege of Gaza on civilians, despite the latter having a death toll five times that of the former; and
- On CNN and MSNBC, the words "war crime" or "genocide" were mentioned over 17 times more in the context of Ukraine than they were in the context of Gaza.
They found that for each child death in Ukraine during the first 100 days, there was the equivalent of 16.1 mentions on air, while kids in Gaza received the equivalent of 0.36 mentions. For journalist deaths, it was 24 versus 2.5. The study also shows that the networks "covered Ukrainian civilian suffering almost twice as often as they covered that in Gaza," despite the latter having a death toll that was 500% greater.
In just the first 30 days of the Russian invasion, cable news anchors, guests, and reporters used emotive terms for Russians killing Ukrainians 661 times. In the first month of Israel's assault on Gaza, they used such language to describe the killing of Israelis 1,053 times and Palestinians 43 times. Additionally, people appearing on-air for both networks described Ukrainians as being subjected to genocide or war crimes 1,790 times compared to just 104 times for Palestinian victims.
"One common rejoinder to this double standard is that Israel doesn't intentionally kill civilians, whereas Hamas and Russia do," Johnson and Ali pointed out. "But this assertion is based entirely on unsubstantiated conventional wisdom and is belied by scores of data points."
In a note attached to the article, the researchers detailed that the United Nations "estimated that around 4,000 civilians had been killed 100 days into the Ukraine war. The broadly accepted death toll in Gaza for the first 100 days is over 24,000, but this is a figure that doesn't distinguish between civilians and noncivilians. So, in the interest of being conservative, we are using the civilian death toll of 20,000—though this number, as several researchers have explained, is almost certainly a massive undercount because it only includes confirmed deaths, not those unidentified, under rubble, or dying from secondary causes such as preventable illness, starvation, etc."
More than 1,100 people were killed in Hamas' attack on Israel last October, and militants took over 240 others hostages. Some captives have been released, some have been killed—including by the
Israeli assault—and some are still believed to be alive.
As of Tuesday, Gaza officials put the confirmed death toll for Palestinians in the Hamas-governed enclave at 42,344, with another 99,013 wounded. In recent days, Israel has bombed a hospital complex and refugee camps. The vast majority of the strip's 2.3 million residents have been displaced, often several times over the past year.
The U.S. government has long supplied Israel with weapons and diplomatic backing and has ramped up such support since last October, despite global criticism. Multiple news outlets revealed Tuesday that in a Sunday letter, the Biden administration finally threatened to cut off U.S. arms unless Israel takes certain action to improve the humanitarian conditions in Gaza.
In response to the letter, Johnson
said on social media: "1) Israel can keep bombing all it wants 2) Criteria for 'improve' is vague and like 'invasion of Rafah' they'll just post facto change the definition."
"BUT what's noteworthy is the tacit admission the U.S. can condition military aid," Johnson added, "something I was told was pointless five [minutes] ago."
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