During Monday’s 3rd Hour of Today, NBC co-host Al Roker and network journalists Peter Alexander and Laura Jarrett sucked up to MSNBC host, PBS News Hour contributor, and Washington Post columnist Jonathan Capehart as though he were a personal friend and applying zero ideological labels to someone with a long track record of hate toward half the country.
Just over a week ago, Capehart questioned the Christian faith of Catholics who support Donald Trump because he’s “antithetical” to the “teachings of Jesus Christ.” To provide one more example (in which a litany of them exist here), Capehart said in 2021 Republicans have been “picking at white grievance and tap-dancing with white supremacy.”
Nonetheless, Roker welcomed him as “a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has become a prominent voice in cable news” with Jarrett — who’s mother is Obama family confidante Valerie Jarrett — gushing he’s “an associate editor with The Washington Post, and once upon a time he was an intern right here at Today.”
“A prominent voice in cable news”? That’s as esoteric and misleading as if it were used to describe Donald Trump.
For his part, Alexander finished out the intros: “He now co-hosts MSNBC’s newest morning show called The Weekend. And Jonathan is telling his life story in a new memoir called Yet Here I Am: Lessons From a Black Man’s Search For Home. Jonathan, it’s great to see you in person! Thanks for being with us.”
They first asked about the memoir with Alexander wondering what the title “mean[t] to” him with Capehart claiming he was trying to be a bridge between black and white Americans. After Jarrett said she knew Capehart was “laboring over” what the title would be,
ALEXANDER: So, the book is called Yet Here I Am, which speaks to this sort of improbable path that your life has led, bringing you to this place. What does that title — what “yet here I am” mean to you?
CAPEHART: So, when you are African American in this country, in particular a black man, there are all sorts of assumptions and other things that surround you, whether — whether they’re deserved or not, whether they are warranted or not and yet, I’ve found as I was sort of writing the book, I defied the statistics. And so, when you get to the end of the book, as I’m realizing the arc of my life, despite the — despite conceptions, yet here I am in this position. Positions socially, professionally, that would be improbable. Improbable.
JARRETT: I remember you laboring over the title.
CAPEHART: Yeah.
JARRETT: It seems like you made the right choice. In the book you write about “feeling like a Steve Urcel” or a “Carleton Banks” —
CAPEHART: Carleton Banks!
JARRETT: — type kid, I think we all know what that means.
ROKER: A blurd!
CAPEHART: A blurd, yes.
JARRETT: But you also write about feeling like an ambassador for your community. At this stage, at this place in your career, do you still feel that way?
CAPEHART: Um, not as much as I did as a kid, and keep in mind the context of that line, I was born exactly three years —
JARRETT: Aww.
CAPEHART: — oh, Lord! I was born exactly three years to the day after the signing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
ROKER: Wow.
CAPEHART: The next year was the 1965 Voting Rights Act. That meant I am from the first generation to live free, free in this country. And so, there I am going to school viewing myself as hey we are all now mixed together, I’m going to be a bridge between blacks and whites, that's where the ambassador view came from.
Showing his worldview, Capehart said he felt this need to be a racial bridge “[b]ecause, for a lot of people, I might be the only — still the only black person they know — and that someone they know from television or from print” and “I take that job very seriously, as a journalist.”
Fact-check: Census data pegs Washington, D.C. at 46.6 percent white, 44.44 percent black, 12 percent Latino, and 4.9 percent Asian. If Washingtonians have only read or seen one black person, we have serious questions.
Following an exchange with Roker about advice he doled out in his book about how “everything we do in life is an audition for something else” and that his professional path all built up to the MSNBC job (and a trip down memory lane to his time as a Today intern), the crew ended with a soft look at Capehart’s latest MSNBC show, The Weekend.
“And now, we fast forward to today, host of The Weekend. Tell us about the show,” Roker wondered, to which Capehart dubbed “our version of the Today show” as it’s “the first live hour on MSNBC” of the day.
Try and not roll your eyes or laugh at this further description from Capehart: “We give you all the news that’s happened overnight, plus we talk about big issues that have happened around the country during the week and we bring on newsmakers and interesting guests to put the news that a lot of our viewers already know, but we bring them the context they might not know.”
“Yeah, yeah, and step back a little bit,” Jarrett replied.
On last Saturday’s episode, Capehart dismissed former FBI Director Jim Comey’s “8647” post about President Trump — which was largely taken to mean he wants to see Trump assassinated — as a “pseudo controversy.”
Thanking him for coming on, Alexander said he’s “one of the best guys in this business,” which is a generous way for the NBC chief White House correspondent to say he loathes conservatives.
Back on election night, Capehart smeared those who voted for Trump as having “given up on democracy.” And just after Trump’s inauguration, Capehart baselessly claimed Trump might try to revoke U.S. citizenship from black Americans and blasted the Laken Riley Act as having caused “terror” within “immigrant families.”
Other than that, we’re sure Capehart’s a good guy!
To see the relevant NBC transcript from May 19, click here.
