The liberal commentators including hosts and pundits on Tuesday’s Morning Joe admitted that the press coverage of the entire election has expressed a clear disconnect between the electorate and the elitist establishment. In attempting to understand why Trump supporters agree to his recent claims of a ‘rigged election’ and why he has not lost a lot of support despite a dramatic increase in negative stories, co-host Mika Brzezinski admitted that the “condescending liberal media, they missed the story.”
This was in response to fellow co-host Joe Scarborough’s statement critical of “the media bias, the disconnect between voters and the media whether you are talking about Donald Trump supporters or Bernie Sanders supporters."
In a conversation between Scarborough and a frequent commentator Willie Geist, Scarborough stated that “most people would think that Hillary Clinton would be 30 points ahead by now given the press coverage in the last couple of weeks and Donald Trump's own explosive rhetoric on the campaign trail, but these polls are stubbornly close in a lot of important states that Mitt Romney lost.”
Then Geist responded: “You would think that the last 10 to 12 days of coverage going back to the Access Hollywood tape of 2 Fridays ago would have buried Donald Trump in some of these states… but the truth is that we know Hillary Clinton is not a popular candidate for president of the United States, and she's more popular than Donald Trump at this point.”
To address Trump’s claims about the media’s role in ‘rigged’ election and the voter’s appeal of Donald Trump’s candidacy, Scarborough declared that:
“the media coverage over the past two weeks have been so one-sided against Donald Trump that it's actually making a lot of people who loathe Donald Trump actually push away from supporting Hillary Clinton, and that's -- I know that's -- I -- I am hearing it wherever I go that this race, like Mike said, this race is about Hillary Clinton. People are making their choices based on how they feel about Hillary Clinton, and it's almost like they have tuned Donald Trump out, but the press is weighing in so heavily here that I don't know if the coverage actually might have a small effect. Backfiring -- backfiring, actually, in a way that feeds into Donald Trump's narrative.”
in a sense, Scarborough’s thoughts that disproportionate negative press coverage of Trump confirms Trump’s claims of a ‘rigged election’ further explains why Trump has not actually lost too much in battleground state polls despite liberal media bias. This is why over the course of the discussion, even leftist commentators like Brzezinski had to admit that the press has been condescending toward Trump and in doing so has dismissed the concerns of his supporters.
Too add to this, Mike Barnicle also admitted to the liberal media bias by bluntly saying that “too many people in the media, our business, coastal elites or a lot of people live who are in our business don't understand the loss that has taken place in the country over the last 20 or 25 years.” Also, he went further to explain that Trump supporters are concerned with the direction of the country since Obama’s presidency failed to solve the aftermath of a devastating economic crisis and recession as well as an endless ongoing war on terrorism. In doing so, Barnicle wanted to explain disconnect between voters and their elected officials:
“they are thinking this: they have no voice in government that they are represented by a professional political class who keep running for re-election, raising money to enhance their own futures and present status, but they don’t talk about their lives and what do they read and what do they hear now lately in the last year? If they go to a Trump rally, they are not going to a Trump rally to listen to a guy who they sort of like what he says without paying attention to who he is. Then they hear and read in the papers they are probably racists for going to the Trump rally, and they take great offense to this, and they ought to, because we don’t understand their lives and we don’t cover their lives.”
Brzezinski concluded the conversation later concluding that: “History will look at this election and the media coverage of it….”
Here are the excerpts from the October 18th discussion on Morning Joe:
MSNBC’s Morning Joe
10/18/2016
6:05:25 – 6:09:14 AM
JOE SCARBOROUGH: I think, looking at what some of the state polls might mean, and saying again so people don't freak out and pass out while watching our show, Hillary Clinton is still the heavy favorite, but I think most around this table, and most watchers of this show and most people would think that Hillary Clinton would be 30 points ahead by now given the press coverage in the last couple of weeks and Donald Trump's own explosive rhetoric on the campaign trail, but these polls are stubbornly close in a lot of important states that Mitt Romney lost.
WILLIE GEIST: You would think that the last 10 to 12 days of coverage going back to the Access Hollywood tape of 2 Fridays ago would have buried Donald Trump in some of these states…
MIKA BREZINSKI: Game over…
GEIST: But the truth is that we know Hillary Clinton is not a popular candidate for president of the United States, and she's more popular than Donald Trump at this point, and those states, Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, all as close they are, they are tied or within the margin of error show this could swing one way. Now, Hillary Clinton is obviously the favorite now and they smell blood in the water so much they are going in hard to Arizona, and they have Bernie Sanders there today, and Chelsea Clinton, and the First Lady of the United States, going to Arizona, a Democrat has won there only once in Arizona – that was Bill Clinton won in 1996, so they want to run up the score and they believe they can cut off any path they have if they can steal Arizona as well.
SCARBOROUGH: I think the question, Mike Barnicle, is if you are the Clinton campaign, do you go for the kill, do you go for the 40-state victory? Or do you say we are good winning by four or five points, and we are good with 320 electoral votes. What do you do if you’re Hillary Clinton? Do you nail down -- it looks like she is answering my question by going to Arizona, but do you try to down, North Carolina, Nevada these other states or spread it out strategically.
MIKE BARNICE: You try to win the Presidency, that's all you try to do if you are Hillary Clinton, and I don't think there could be any disagreement at the table about this, those numbers that we just saw on the state to state polls – those are largely about Hillary Clinton more so than they are about Donald Trump. The reluctance to vote for Hillary Clinton, it seems she is going to win with a fairly significant margin, and I think the real underlying story right now is what those numbers, the tenure of the campaign, the talk about the campaign within media circles and the coverage of the campaign in media circles is driving Trump into such a rage that he keeps falling back on the ‘rigged election’ as a blanket for his rage.
SCARBOROUGH: I think Jim, just to take a counter view, I think the media coverage over the past two weeks have been so one-sided against Donald Trump that it's actually making a lot of people who loathe Donald Trump actually push away from supporting Hillary Clinton, and that's -- I know that's -- I -- I am hearing it wherever I go that this race, like Mike said, this race is about Hillary Clinton. People are making their choices based on how they feel about Hillary Clinton, and it's almost like they have tuned Donald Trump out, but the press is weighing in so heavily here that I don't know if the coverage actually might have a small effect. Backfiring -- backfiring, actually, in a way that feeds into Donald Trump's narrative.
6:13:46 – 6:16:35 AM
BRZEZINSKI: So, Donald Trump was on the campaign trail ahead of the 3rd and final debate, he was in Wisconsin on Paul Ryan's home turf a day after slamming the House speaker him on Twitter as “a man who does not know how to win” and throughout the day on Twitter he was critical of his party and concerns of voter fraud, tweeting, “of course, there was large-scale voter fraud happening on and before election day. Why do Republican leaders deny what is going on. So naive.” Here he is and his running – here’s he and his running mate on the trail.
MIKE PENECE: The truth is, there's a lot of talk about rigged elections out there today. And I have no doubt the national media is trying to rig this election with their biased coverage in Hillary Clinton's favor, but in terms of the actual vote itself, and if you are here at the rally and not volunteered to provide accountability at a polling place come election day, you have not yet done all you can do.
DONALD TRUMP: The media is an extension of the Hillary Clinton campaign as WikiLeaks has proven and they don't talk about WikiLeaks, they just talk about Trump. Trump. Trump.
PUBLIC: Tell the truth! Tell the truth!
TRUMP: We do need truth. We do need truth. You know, to make America great again, we do need some truths from these people. They are poisoning the minds of voters. They even want to try to rig the election at the polling booths, and believe me, there's a lot going on. You ever here these people saying there’s nothing going on. People that have died ten years ago are still voting, illegal immigrants are voting. I mean, where are the street smarts of some of these politicians?
TRUMP: You look at certain cities, and I won't name them right now, but they’re certain cities --
CARL CAMERON: You mentioned Philadelphia quite a bit.
TRUMP: Philadelphia is one that’s mentioned, I think Romney got no votes. I mean McCain got no votes. I mean like no votes! Philadelphia is certainly one. You look at what is going on in Chicago, you look at what is going on in St. Louis and many other cities. There's tremendous voter fraud and how Republican leadership doesn't see that is beyond me.
WILLIE GIEST: And the prospect of a rigged outcome in three weeks is exactly what is very real for some of the supporters of Donald Trump. A new poll from the Morning Consult taken late last week as Donald Trump spoke about one big fix - shows 81% of Trump supporters believe the election could be stolen as a result of widespread voter fraud, and this is 48% of Trump supporters say they are not confident votes across the country will be accurately counted on election day, compare this to 13% of Clinton supporters who share that same fear.
7:09:39 – 7:14:28 AM
MIKE BARNICLE: Too many people in the media, our business, coastal elites or a lot of people live who are in our business don't understand the loss that has taken place in the country over the last 20 or 25 years. Specifically, if you have a 20-year-old son today serving in Iraq, or Afghanistan, that child was 5 years old when this war began. That is 15 or 16 years ago. And then along comes the winter of 2008 and 2009, and another loss occurs, and that shakes the foundations of the culture and country and people lose homes and incomes and jobs and they are unemployed, they lose their 401(k), and lose their life savings and what are they thinking along the course of the past 2 and a half decades, 25 years…They are thinking this: they have no voice in government that they are represented by a professional political class who keep running for re-election, raising money to enhance their own futures and present status, but they don’t talk about their lives and what do they read and what do they hear now lately in the last year? If they go to a Trump rally, they are not going to a Trump rally to listen to a guy who they sort of like what he says without paying attention to who he is. Then they hear and read in the papers they are probably racists for going to the Trump rally, and they take great offense to this, and they ought to, because we don’t understand their lives and we don’t cover their lives.
SCARBOROUGH: Yes, they should.
BREZINSKI: Oh my gosh…
SCARBOROUGH: Amen, amen, and amen. You Mika, you can question Donald Trump and whether Donald Trump is a racist or not and we have had that discussion, but the media's broad brush of Trump and Sander supporters have been offensive from the start, claiming that Sanders supporters were somehow young insolent, ignorant children that had no idea what was in their self-interests, and that all Trump supporters were racist, bigoted xenophobic, misogynist rednecks.
BRZEZINSKI: Deplorables.
SCARBOROUGH: Deplorables. What else was that, incurable -- what else did she say?
BRZEZINSKI: Irredeemables.
SCARBOROUGH: Irredeemable. The fact is, Willie, people that have been struggling for the last 30 years, know what coastal elites have not figured out, that this is an economy that has been on the decline for 30 years, 40 years, average wages for men in decline in real terms since 1973, and just look in this century, we were kept afloat by a tech bubble and then we were kept afloat by a housing bubble and the only reason we didn't sink into a great depression was because of a government spending bubble. There's no growth industry out there, and as we were saying on the set yesterday, you take all the Googles and Microsofts and Apples and Yahoos and everythings, combine all of the employees together that work there, it probably does not even come close to matching how many people General Motors employed in 1964.
GEIST: Instead of having that pain listened to and addressed by elites in Washington and also in the media, those supporters of Donald Trump feel like that pain has been mocked throughout this campaign. There's a reason when Donald Trump says the media is stealing this election from us and they are beliving him by 81%. because they watch the late-night shows make fun of them, they watch the press make fun of them and they are put on display and called racist in many cases, that doesn't mean the things Donald Trump is saying are the right solution to their pain, and I think a lot agree that they have not been but every time they hear themselves mocked on TV, or in a newspaper or on a website, that divide that Steve is talking about grows larger and larger and more damage is done and we are pulled further apart.
BREZINSKI: It appears to be ignored.
I don't think you can overstate the impact of the media and the anger against the media in this election, and that's something that focus groups, yes, the anger is there against the government and officials and against the rigged system but also the media being biased on right and left, about 8 out of 10 people think there's no hope with what the media puts in front of you…that is so biased.
BREZINSKI: History will look at this election and the media coverage of it….
SCARBOROUGH: I have to say it and I will just say it, over the past couple of weeks, media coverage has been deplorable. It has been one-sided and it has been biased, and it has been every bit as bad as media coverage of the Bernie Sanders' phenomenon at the beginning of the democratic process, and it was slanted and biased against Bernie Sanders, and it was completely weighted for Hillary Clinton, Sanders was holding massive rallies that everybody ignored and everybody tried to explain away and it's because -- and Mike Barnicle nailed it, Chris Aliza, we are all at the end - coastal elites that didn't get Bernie Sanders and don't get why people would ever vote for Donald Trump.
SCARBOROUGH: I have to say it and I will just say it, over the past couple of weeks, media coverage has been deplorable. It has been one-sided and it has been biased, and it has been every bit as bad as media coverage of the Bernie Sanders' phenomenon at the beginning of the democratic process, and it was slanted and biased against Bernie Sanders, and it was completely weighted for Hillary Clinton, Sanders was holding massive rallies that everybody ignored and everybody tried to explain away and it's because -- and Mike Barnicle nailed it, Chris Aliza, we are all at the end - coastal elites that didn't get Bernie Sanders and don't get why people would ever vote for Donald Trump.
7:18:55 – 7:19:35 AM
SCARBOROUGH: …one of the telling things coming out of the focus groups has to be with the media bias, the disconnect between voters and the media whether you are talking about Donald Trump supporters or Bernie Sanders supporters.
BREZINSKI: Look, I think from the get go Donald Trump and the concept of why people were instantly following Donald Trump, was rejected by the condescending liberal media, they missed the story and they have been behind the 8 ball ever since, and that's where we are at.
