At the top of Tuesday’s NBC Today, co-host Savannah Guthrie proclaimed: “Donald Trump launches a new attack against Hillary Clinton and says he's concerned the election is going to be rigged against him.” In a discussion with Bloomberg Politics editor Mark Halperin minutes later, she noted: “...he made that intriguing comment yesterday about the system being rigged. Some people interpreted that as he’s laying the groundwork already that if he loses he can say, ‘Well, there was something unfair about the process.’”
Halperin scolded the Republican nominee for making such claims: “It's bad for the country. We need a bipartisan, nonpartisan sense that elections are fair. This is the kind of chaos that Donald Trump sows, maybe for himself, but without thinking about the good of the whole country.”
While the two journalists were eager to denounce Trump for questioning the fairness of the electoral process, they seemed to forget that the NBC morning show promoted the same fear of a rigged election just days earlier. On Friday, correspondent Stephanie Gosk pushed the theory that Russia could somehow hack into U.S. voting machines and fix the results. She breathlessly warned of “concerns that the entire electoral system may now appear vulnerable to outside manipulation.”
An NBC News analyst featured in that report actually used language identical to Trump: “I believe we are vulnerable in the entire electoral process. So long as someone is not paying very close attention, you could essentially rig the system.”
Guthrie herself endorsed the idea after Gosk’s report, remarking: “Pretty scary thought.”
Halperin didn’t make an appearance on Friday to lecture the network about such speculation being “bad for the country” or creating “chaos.”
