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Oct
23
2012

Morning Joe's Drone Debate: Whose Four-Year-Old Girls Should Be Killed?

By 33 Comments
joeklein-drones

MSNBC's Morning Joe had a  remarkable discussion of U.S. drone attacks today (10/23/12). Here's a clip of the most intense moments of the exchange between the conservative-leaning Joe Scarborough and Time columnist Joe Klein, who is occasionally mistaken for a liberal: Scarborough offered up a more passionate critique of drone attacks than you're likely to hear from his left-leaning MSNBC colleagues: "If you're between 17 and 30, and you're within a half-mile of a suspect, we can blow you up." When Klein interjects to argue that drones are "decimating bad guys," Scarborough responds that the attacks are "taking out a [...]

Filed Under: Media Criticism, MSNBC, Time, War/Military Tagged With: , ,
Oct
19
2012

FAIR TV: Factchecking Moderators, Chris Matthews Wants a King, When Advertisers Write the "News"

By 2 Comments

This week on FAIR TV: Who factchecks the debate moderators? What Does Chris Matthews Think is in the Constitution? And why not just let advertisers write the "news"? Please take a look– and spread the word.

Filed Under: ABC, Advertisers, Media Criticism, MSNBC Tagged With: , , , , ,
Sep
03
2012

When Candidates Lie, REAL Journalists Say They 'Finessed the Facts'

By 13 Comments
Rachel Maddow/photo by JD Lasica

On the subject of why politicians aren't worried about corporate media factcheckers, a New York Times article from last week (8/31/12) by Alessandra Stanley is worth a second look. Under the headline, "How MSNBC Became Fox's Liberal Evil Twin," Stanley wrote: "You can agree with everything that Rachel Maddow or Ed Schultz say on MSNBC and still oppose their right to say it." Stanley's problem was that "all that attitude" on MSNBC "leaves fewer choices for viewers who like their election coverage with informed commentary without a twist of bias": All that arch sarcasm and partisan brio may rev up [...]

Filed Under: Election, Factchecking, Fox News, MSNBC, New York Times Tagged With: , , , , , ,
Jul
05
2012

Shamir Remembered–With Selective Amnesia

By 12 Comments

In death, the U.S. media remembered the late Yitzhak Shamir as "a political hard-liner who served two terms as Israeli prime minster" (CNN, 6/30/12), "the hawkish Israeli leader who balked at the idea of trading occupied land for peace with the Palestinians" (MSNBC, 6/30/12) and "a man of iron will and simple tastes" (Washington Post, 6/30/12) who prided himself on his hard-line views, his relentless determination to hang onto every square inch of what he considered the Land of Israel, and his championing of Jewish settlements in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, defying the demands of Israel's most [...]

Filed Under: CNN, Israel/Palestine, MSNBC, New York Times, Washington Post Tagged With: , ,
Jun
01
2012

MSNBC: No Time for Obama's Kill List?

By 32 Comments

The New York Times' lengthy report (5/29/12) on Barack Obama's drone "kill list" should provoke serious questions: Is such a program legal? How does it square with Obama's criticism of the Bush administration's "war on terror" policies? What does it tell us about how the administration identifies "militants" who are targeted for assassination? But those questions have been raised only in fits and starts–and are basically absent from the liberal cable news channel MSNBC. In fact, a far more interesting discussion of these questions can be heard on Fox News Channel. It's not all good on Fox, naturally. Host Bill [...]

Filed Under: ABC, Afghanistan, Media Criticism, MSNBC, New York Times, Pakistan, War/Military Tagged With: , , , , , ,
Jun
01
2012

On Chris Hayes and Heroism

By 36 Comments

It is a very good thing that the Nation's Chris Hayes has a weekend show on MSNBC. The panelists are smart and the lively conversations dig deeper than virtually anything else on cable news. (The same can be said for MSNBC's Melissa Harris-Perry.) In other words, sounds like a recipe for trouble.  And trouble arrived after a Memorial Day show that aired on May 27. Here's the clip that caused the controversy.  To me, his words sound carefully measured, and I think you get a better sense of that tone from seeing the clip rather than from reading a transcript [...]

Filed Under: MSNBC, War/Military Tagged With: ,
May
24
2012

Chris Matthews and the Awesome Power of Cable Television

By 19 Comments

Here's the video of MSNBC host Chris Matthews speaking at a cable industry conference this week. We noted here the odd notion that, as Matthews argues, 24-hour cable news would have stopped the Iraq War lies–despite the fact that 24-hour cable news had been around for more than 20 years at the time of the invasion. But watching the video is rather jarring: Matthews' passionate critique of embedded, what-officials-say-is-OK-with-me journalism sounds like Amy Goodman. It's so fundamentally at odds with Matthews' actual work that you have to wonder whether he believes any of it. Of course, Matthews was speaking at [...]

Filed Under: Iran, Iraq, MSNBC Tagged With:
May
23
2012

Chris Matthews: Cable News Would Have Stopped Iraq War Lies

By 38 Comments

(UPDATE: See the video of Matthews' comments here, along with some discussion of what it all means.) Reporting from the big cable TV industry event this week, Broadcasting & Cable's Andrea Morabito writes (5/22/12): Hardball host Chris Matthews argued that because of the rise of opinion-based news networks, the non-critical aspect of the media is gone, going as far to say that the reporting that verified the U.S. administration's claims about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in 2002 would not happen today because of cable news. "I would like to think there would be a reckoning we didn’t have [...]

Filed Under: Media Criticism, MSNBC Tagged With: ,
May
04
2012

Matthews Remembers Mission Accomplished (Some of It)

By 26 Comments

On Wednesday (5/2/12), MSNBC host Chris Matthews played a long clip from the Daily Show, where Jon Stewart mocked Republicans who are complaining about Barack Obama's celebration of the killing of Osama bin Laden. Stewart naturally recalls George W. Bush's "Mission Accomplished" photo op stunt from 2003.  Stewart points out that if Republicans are angry about Obama "spiking the football," Bush was spiking the ball before the game started. So the clip played, and then we cut to Matthews, chuckling away. Of course Stewart's point is right on–anyone who listens to this whining from the right is bound to recall [...]

Filed Under: Barack Obama, Iraq, MSNBC Tagged With: , , ,
May
02
2012

May Day Media

By 25 Comments

With Occupy Wall Street making its May Day comeback, what did the corporate media have to say? Take a look at the New York Times story (5/2/12), which was stuffed in the Metro section and focused on… well, take a look at the headline: About half of the article is focused on arrests, "occasionally bloody clashes" and the like. Before the protests even started, there were warnings about what was to come. On ABC's Good Morning America (5/1/12), Josh Elliot warned viewers: We're gonna begin with what's shaping up to be a potentially brutal morning commute, particularly in major cities [...]

Filed Under: ABC, MSNBC, New York Times, protest, Reuters Tagged With: , , ,
May
01
2012

Romney's the Right Kind of Flipflopper

By 16 Comments

As we've written before, some political flipflops are better than others. The ones that Mitt Romney commits, or might commit in the future, are often seen as being the good kind. That argument was advanced once more this Sunday (4/29/12) on the Chris Matthews Show, by Time editor Rick Stengel and the host himself, who were engaged in a familiar Beltway media discussion where journalists pretend to be campaign strategists. In this case, the question was whether the Obama campaign should push the idea that Romney is a flipflopper, or the idea that he's very conservative. STENGEL: The thing that [...]

Filed Under: Election, Mitt Romney, MSNBC, Time Tagged With: ,
Jan
23
2012

Rooting for Newt?

By 24 Comments

To me, the most interesting observation after the South Carolina primary came from New York magazine reporter and regular TV pundit John Heilemann, who said this on MSNBC (h/t Nicole Belle at Crooks and Liars): Gingrich is going to get so much free media attention over the next few days. It is going to be wall to wall Gingrich, and I think it is fair to say that, in some ways, the "liberal media," as Gingrich would put it, is kind of rooting for Gingrich right now. They want this–they/we, want this race to go on, so he is gonna [...]

Filed Under: Election, MSNBC, Politico Tagged With: , , ,
Dec
16
2011

The New Anti-Corporate Populism Isn't So New

By 16 Comments

Last night (12/15/11), MSNBC hosts Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes were impressed by a new Pew poll–flagged by Washington Post blogger Greg Sargent–showing that a vast majority of the public believes that corporations and the wealthy have too much power. The picture one gets from the poll is pretty dramatic: The question that seemed most important to Maddow and Hayes was why Republican politicians aren't shifting their policies in response to this apparent surge in anti-corporate populism: MADDOW: The national sentiment right now being expressed to pollsters is that the people at the top are getting way too much of [...]

Filed Under: Economy, MSNBC, Politics Tagged With: ,
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