As Trump Addressed Supporters, MSNBC, Maddow Took Humiliatingly Hypocritical Stand
After the former president of the United States was indicted on 37 federal felony counts — an unprecedented occurrence in the country’s history — the establishment media’s foremost pusher of progressive conspiracy theories had an uproarious explanation for why a network that functions as an agitprop factory for the Democrats wasn’t going to carry his speech.
MSNBC, its star anchor Rachel Maddow assured Americans and the world, does not “knowingly broadcast untrue things.”
It’s enough to make you wish that Maddow was cursed with the nasal condition that also afflicted Pinocchio; her proboscis would have grown with such rapidity and force that it would have taken out several hundred thousand dollars of high-end video equipment.
And then, after that, she would have injured several staffers by going on to insist that she did “not say this with any glee.” Thus, the busted teleprompter and the producer with a shattered pelvis would have forced the network to carry Donald Trump’s remarks. All would be right with the world.
(And hopefully with the producer. I would wish him or her the speediest of recoveries — and remind them Maddow’s a pretty loaded woman and New York City has plenty of very competent personal injury lawyers.)
Alas, Pinocchio-itis is only a fairy tale condition — so, just before the former president spoke at Trump National Golf Club Bedminster in New Jersey after flying from Florida to the Garden State on Tuesday night, Maddow tried to pretend MSNBC was skipping coverage of the out of sheer editorial integrity.
“We knew heading into this that he was planning to make those remarks. We are prepared for his pre-fundraiser remarks tonight to again, be essentially, a Trump campaign speech. Because of that, we do not intend to carry these remarks live,” Maddow said.
“As we have said before in these circumstances, there is a cost to us as a news organization to knowingly broadcast untrue things. We are here to bring you the news. It hurts our ability to do that if we live broadcast what we fully expect in advance to be a litany of lies and false accusations, no matter who says them.”
MADDOW: MSNBC won’t carry Donald Trump’s remarks live because “there is a cost to us as a news organization to knowingly broadcast untrue things.”
— ALX 🇺🇸 (@alx) June 14, 2023
“And I do not say this with any glee. I hope it is clear that this is not a glib decision. We take our responsibilities seriously. We revisit decisions like this all the time. We make the best call that we can in real time, every time,” Maddow continued.
“But tonight, our call is this. We will monitor that speech by the newly indicted former president. We will not carry his remarks live. If he says anything newsworthy, we promise we will turn that right around and bring it back to you.”
Now, the mere fact she tried to get away with “I do not say this with any glee” while looking like she was struggling, with all her might, to stop her facial muscles from instinctively breaking out in a Cheshire-cat grin is enough to make this farcical.
And while other networks made the same decision — on CNN, conservative media watchdog Newsbusters noted, host Jake Tapper told the audience the network was “not carrying his remarks live because frankly he says a lot of things that are not true and sometimes potentially dangerous” — this is Rachel Maddow and MSNBC we’re talking about here.
The relentless mendacity of both employer and employee during the Trump administration wasn’t even a matter of debate. The bias was so clear — so evident even to media professionals with a progressive bent — that Maddow’s blatant hypocrisy on Tuesday crossed the line from typically arrogant to simply humiliating.
When even fans had to know she was lying, and she was obviously banking on them not caring, the network was surrendering even the pretense of being honest.
Maddow, remember, let us know the standards she would keep for the Trump presidency on election night 2016: “You’re awake by the way. You’re not having a terrible, terrible dream,” she told viewers in an infamous rant. “Also, you’re not dead and you haven’t gone to hell. This is your life now. This is our election now. This is us. This is our country. It’s real.”
‘You’re awake…also, you’re not dead and you haven’t gone to hell. This is your life now. This is our election.’ – @maddow reality check pic.twitter.com/xFL8HCBZwM
— Staci D Kramer (@sdkstl) October 8, 2016
The acknowledgment that Trump had won was about the closest Maddow came to the orbit of reality during the Trump years.
It got bad enough that even lefty outlet Slate ran a piece in 2019 titled “Rachel Maddow’s Conspiracy Brain,” in which television critic Willa Paskin wrote that Maddow “has turned the universe into an intricate web of intersecting plots that all lead to one conclusion: collusion.”
“In the days since the Mueller report was sent to Barr, Maddow has held fast to her faith that Mueller is some kind of avenging hero, who will get Trump in the end. ‘As we await the Mueller report,’ she said on Tuesday night, ‘we are left with this incredibly provocative set of unexplained behaviors,'” Paskin wrote.
“Then she cued up ‘the mystery sound,’ a not particularly eerie ding she used to introduce a long digression about a still-active ‘mystery case,’ in which a ‘mystery company owned by mystery country’ has resisted all attempts to testify about some mystery topic at the special prosecutor’s request, which she then tied to a number of other still active parts of the Mueller investigation, which she intimated could still result in something damning …
“Maddow’s winking insistence otherwise feels like willful misdirection. ‘All this stuff is still live,’ she said, with the amused self-assured look of someone who thinks they have figured out a magician’s trick, ‘even as it’s shutting down.’ There’s no reason to peel the arrows and news clippings off the wall, so long as you can find a new string.”
And this is just Maddow. MSNBC’s journalistic malpractice during the Trump years was so flagrant that one of its hosts announced on-air that he had evidence some of Trump’s business loans from German financial institution Deutsche Bank had been co-signed by “Russian oligarchs.” It turned out that it was single-sourced reporting — and, apparently, very incorrect single-sourced reporting, which resulted in this humiliating apology:
WATCH: Lawrence O’Donnell retracts his reporting about Trump loans. pic.twitter.com/JxNsIPhBNg
— MSNBC (@MSNBC) August 29, 2019
But MSNBC does not “knowingly broadcast untrue things.” Especially not Maddow. Especially not when it deals with Donald Trump. Right.
For those of you who didn’t catch the president’s remarks because you were tuned to MSNBC or CNN — I know that’s not many readers of The Western Journal, but I’m sure maybe a few of you chanced upon this article — it’s worth watching. Among other things, Trump called the 37-count indictment “political persecution like something straight out of a fascist or communist nation.”
There are two things totalitarians do to the political opposition in “a fascist or communist nation.”
The first is that they use the legal system to sideline them with phony accusations. The second is that they don’t allow them to be heard — because, of course, the opposition always speaks untruth and state media outlets are forever in the business of deciding what’s fact and what isn’t, and making sure you see only what they think is true.
This clip would be merely funny and humiliating– for both Maddow and MSNBC — if the implications weren’t so serious.
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