Rejecting Liberal Moderators = “Suppressing a Free Media”
Rejecting Liberal Moderators = “Suppressing a Free Media”
“Reince Priebus is on the
warpath again. The RNC chairman who has made bones trying to suppress African
Americans’ votes, now has a plan to suppress a free media. Having waged war on
the 15th Amendment, the one that gave African Americans the right to vote, he’s
now battening down the hatches on a free press....If NBC dares to run a planned
mini-series on Hillary, Reince Priebus has decreed it will have no role in
Republican debates. Same for CNN: If it does a documentary on Hillary, it’s
dead as far as Priebus is concerned. It will be pushed out in the cold while
Republicans stick to Fox and other platforms that will meet their terms.”
— Chris Matthews opening MSNBC’s Hardball, August 6.
Irony Watch: MSNBC vs. Partisan “Echo Chambers”
“The RNC has threatened to
end its partnership with CNN and NBC in hosting the 2016 GOP primary debates if
they don’t cancel plans for the biopics about Hillary Clinton....Does that mean
you just want to scream into an echo chamber?... You’re just going to say,
we’re going to take our marbles and go home, because you think there is
implicit bias, because someone asks hard questions?”
— Anchor Thomas Roberts to RNC Communications Director
Sean Spicer on MSNBC Live, August 15.
“Priebus is wading
dangerously into an ideology which even he has warned against. That would be
party isolationism....This is how you do it [broaden the party]? By shutting
out news outlets and retreating to your own Fox News echo chamber? If he gets
his way, it isn’t new voices that the party will be hearing and reaching, just
their own.”
— Guest host Michael Smerconish on MSNBC’s Hardball,
August 8.
Host Ed Schultz: “RNC Chairman Reince Priebus would like all of us to believe that he
is threatening to boycott NBC and CNN in the run up to the 2016 presidential
election because of planned projects on Hillary Clinton. However, it might just
be a convenient excuse....The conservatives, the Republicans, you see, they are
concerned about a poor debate performance because they’re shaky on the issues.
That’s the bottom line....Obviously there’s embarrassment there, correct?”
Salon’s Joan Walsh: Yes. There’s absolute embarrassment. He’s trying to
hide his candidates. He’s going to have a crackpot set of candidates in 2016,
just like he had in 2012, and he’s afraid of that. He’s a big crybaby, and he’s
playing to the base. He’s telling the base “Oh, the horrible liberal media is
after us again.”...They want to be in their hermetically-sealed Fox universe
talking to one another.”
— MSNBC’s The Ed
Show, August 10.
Claims of Media Bias Just a GOP Fundraising Scam
Anchor Andrea Mitchell: “And Chris Cillizza, what do you make of all of this,
what the Republican Party is trying to do in response to what we, a lot of us
feel, is a really bad idea, which are these Hillary films?”
Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza: “Right, look, I think there’s a couple of things
going on here, Andrea, that are not immediately evident but are probably the
real motivation. I think the biggest thing, frankly, is fundraising. Look,
attacking Hillary Clinton and the mainstream media for propping up Hillary
Clinton, which is what Reince Priebus is alleging, is absolute gold, almost
literally gold, for the Republican Party and their small donor base, who reacts
vehemently and with their wallets to that sort of thing.”
— MSNBC’s Andrea
Mitchell Reports, August 8.
How Can We Put Pressure on “Overwhelmingly White” GOP?
“Part of the political logic
behind immigration reform was the strong showing by Latino voters last
November, you know. That doesn’t seem to resonate with a lot of House
Republicans, who represent overwhelmingly white districts. What other political
leverage can you bring to bear to help move a bill in the House?”
— NPR’s Scott Horsley to President Obama at his August
9 news conference.
“They [Republican House
members] are very much freelance artists, at this point, trying to win in those
districts that are overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly conservative. That’s
the way that these maps were redrawn. And they don’t even have any incentive to
go out and broaden the base of the party, because those aren’t the people who
are in their backyards.”
— The Washington Post’s Nia-Malika Henderson on MSNBC’s PoliticsNation, August 6.
“How does this President get
past the folks who say ‘No’ on everything? Is there no incentive for the GOP to
work with the President on anything, ever, or do you think the disastrous poll
numbers in terms of the congressional approval in this country — if those stay
consistent — people are going to be like ‘Okay, really, we actually do need to
get something done because the American public is ticked off?’”
— Anchor Alex Witt on MSNBC’s Weekends with Alex Witt, July 28.
Blaming Conservative “Parasites” for Detroit Disaster
“Conservatives are using the
most insulting language possible that they can come up with to blame unions,
blame black people, blame their culture, for Detroit’s troubles. But the real parasites, my friends, are
their conservative ideals that are coming from state government and from the
feds....Conservative policies which help businesses out for years — and are now
saying, ‘We don’t want to fund public education. We’re not going to go down
that road to health care. We don’t care what those workers did for all those
years.’ These are the real parasites who gutted Detroit.”
— Host Ed Schultz on MSNBC’s The Ed Show, August 3.
MSNBC and Obama? We’re Really Not That Close
Host Chris Matthews: “By the way, those who talk about the tight relationship between MSNBC
and Barack Obama, for example, count the number of times he’s been on this
network. Zero. Michael Steele, thank you–”
Former RNC chairman Michael Steele: “That still doesn’t say anything about what you’ve
said about him.”
Matthews:
“Well, he agrees with us and we agree with him sometimes....I actually have my
views and he tends to coincide with them.”
— Exchange on MSNBC’s Hardball, August 6.
Left-Leaning Bezos a “White Knight” and “Savior” for the Washington Post...
“Jeff Bezos, of course, is
one of the guys who helped bring e-readers to America, helping to lure Americans away from traditional
newspapers. Now he is being credited as a white knight with deep pockets
helping to save one of this country’s great newspapers....Now an unlikely
savior, Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos, who is keeping the management team and
paying $250 million out of his own pocket to save the paper saying in a
statement, ‘The values of the Post do not need changing. The paper’s duty will
remain to its readers and not to the private interest of its owners.’”
— Correspondent Tom Costello on NBC’s Today, August 6.
...But “Naive” to Believe Conservative Murdoch Would Keep Hands Off the Journal
Correspondent Kelly Wallace: “He’s the man behind Fox News Channel and Britain’s Sky News, a conservative who put his imprint on the
New York Post and brought topless
women to The Sun in London. His critics say he may not impose tabloid on the Journal, but will impose his point of
view.”
The Columbia School of
Journalism’s Arlene Morgan: “It’s
almost naive for anybody to believe that he’s going to buy the Journal and keep his hands off of the
editorial product.”
— From the July
31, 2007 CBS Evening
News, talking about Murdoch’s purchase of the Wall Street Journal.
CNN Host Uses “Inaccurate Fact” to Scold Guest
Breitbart’s AWR Hawkins: “In Virginia, there was a 16 percent increase in gun sales in
2012. That’s 490,119 guns were sold. Now you would expect, the way you speak,
Piers, for violent crime to rise proportionally. It didn’t. It fell 5 percent.
There were 4,378 incidents of violent crime. That includes those–”
Host Piers Morgan, interrupting: “Which state has the highest murder rate in the
country, according to the FBI? Do you know? In America?... Allow me to help you....Allow me to help you.
It’s Virginia.”
Hawkins:
“Can I say one other thing, Piers?”
Morgan:
“Well, no, because here is the point, Mr. Hawkins. It’s Virginia, the very state you just quoted to me actually has
the highest murder rate in the country. According to 2009 statistics by the
FBI.”
— CNN’s Piers
Morgan Tonight, August 13. According to the FBI report Morgan cited, Virginia’s murder
rate was actually 24th; two nights later, Morgan apologized: “That was an
inaccurate fact, and I’m happy to correct it now on air.”
If Only “Radical” Republicans Would Stop Obstructing Obama
“What do you think have been
the most dramatic examples of partisanship or obstructionism or radicalism
during this 113th Congress so far?”
— Host Terry Gross to New York Times congressional reporter Jonathan Weisman on NPR’s Fresh Air, July 31.
“In the news: The jobs report
comes out today. It’s expected to be ‘meh.’ Many economists think the economy
could be a lot better if Congress did its job, but the House is, again,
threatening to shut down the government. We’ve been down this road
before...but, with an approval rating of 17 percent, you’d think the House
would come up with something new. Hahahahaaha.”
— CNN anchor Carol Costello, in an early morning
posting to her Facebook page on August 2.
Kidnapper’s House of Horrors: Just Like the U.S. Military?
“The twisted house that Ariel
Castro built was designed to protect himself and keep his victims silent and
hidden. And in some American institutions that were designed to promote intellectual
and political freedoms, we find instead this same culture of institutional
self-preservation at the expense of survivors of sexual violence — on college
and university campuses, where victims’ concerns go unaddressed and
perpetrators go unpunished, and in the U.S. military where an epidemic of
sexual assault is met with an unwillingness to protect soldiers who have been
victimized, and a reluctance to prosecute their cases outside the chain of
command.”
— MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry, August 3.
MSNBC Wishes Rush Limbaugh a Happy 25th Anniversary
“With his outrageous and
horrible comments, he’s really more of a benefit to the Democratic Party....He
is offensive in every way you can be offensive. He is racism in the big sense
in term, of whole classes of people. There’s sexism in the big sense, and then
there’s the direct personal attacks, which are also unbelievable.”
— MSNBC’s Krystal Ball on PoliticsNation, August 1, talking about the 25th anniversary of The Rush Limbaugh Show.
Americans Would Vote to Keep Black People “Out in the Field”
ESPN’s LZ Granderson: “To have the capital of the United States have a team with a racial slur as its mascot’s
nickname, it’s not about political correctness. It’s about morality and it just
seems to be immoral to continue to do that.”
Mediaite’s Joe Concha: “Also, not what the fans want, L.Z., as well. And
eight in 10 say don’t change it.”
Granderson:
“I’m sure black people, if they were put to a vote, black people would still be
out in the field. So, let’s not talk about morality put up to a vote.”
— Talking about the Washington Redskins
team name on CNN’s Erin Burnett OutFront,
August 8.
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