On Thursday, MSNBC anchor Hallie Jackson cited a former Trump administration official criticizing cable news coverage that “wants to spend hours and hours dissecting the latest Trump tweet and yet they barely notice when we achieve long-sought conservative policy goals.” While Jackson claimed that such policy achievements did get air time, Washington Post Senior Political Reporter Aaron Blake argued that “the American people aren’t interested in” the president’s substantive accomplishments.
“There’s also the president not only getting on the campaign trail, but continuing to do – his administration at least – the work that they wanted to do from day one, which is dismantling, for example, Obama-era regulations,” Jackson told viewers during her 10 a.m. ET hour show. She then quoted from an Axios article:
...our friend Jonathan Swan, who writes about how cable news, according to a former official he was talking to, “‘wants to spend hours and hours dissecting the latest Trump tweet and yet they barely notice when we achieve long-sought conservative policy goals’ – like adding work requirements to Medicaid and stripping federal funds from Planned Parenthood.”
In the piece, Swan, along with co-authors Amy Harder and Sam Baker, declared: “While many of us have been distracted by Rudy Giuliani’s latest legal theories — and President Trump’s latest tweets — the Trump administration is making two big moves that will get him closer to his goal of erasing President Obama’s biggest policies.”
Responding to the anonymous “former official,” Jackson complained: “I do take exception to that, only because if you watch the show, former official, you know we cover those things in our Swamp Watch and Under the Radar segments.” So either she trashes conservative policies as part of her “Swamp Watch” segment or she admits that the topic has barely gotten any coverage by featuring it in the “Under the Radar” segment.
Moments later, Blake chimed in: “And I don’t even think it’s necessarily that the media isn’t focusing on these things. I think it’s that the American people aren’t interested in them, related to this Russia stuff.” Of course, why would anyone be interested in actual public policy when the media offer up non-stop headlines about scandal and Russian collusion?
However, the Post reporter did fret over the notion that the Russia investigation was an effort by Trump to “say, ‘Look over here,’ while they’re doing the whole dismantling of the entire federal government over here.” Blake added: “...liberals are saying that. They’re saying, ‘Hey, look at what’s going on over here. Let’s not get distracted by this.’”
To summarize the liberal media narrative: The American people don’t care about any of Trump’s policy accomplishments, and besides, every policy Trump is enacting is awful anyway.
Here is a transcript of the August 2 exchange between Jackson and Blake on MSNBC Live:
10:10 AM ET
(...)
HALLIE JACKSON: There’s also the president not only getting on the campaign trail, but continuing to do – his administration at least – the work that they wanted to do from day one, which is dismantling, for example, Obama-era regulations. Axios has a little something on that from our friend Jonathan Swan, who writes about how cable news, according to a former official he was talking to, “‘wants to spend hours and hours dissecting the latest Trump tweet and yet they barely notice when we achieve long-sought conservative policy goals’ – like adding work requirements to Medicaid and stripping federal funds from Planned Parenthood.”
I do take exception to that, only because if you watch the show, former official, you know we cover those things in our Swamp Watch and Under the Radar segments. But there is this idea that even as the president is clearly spending a lot of time talking and tweeting about exactly this, there are other cogs in the wheel continuing to do the work on the policy side.
AARON BLAKE [WASHINGTON POST SENIOR POLITICAL REPORTER]: And I don’t even think it’s necessarily that the media isn’t focusing on these things. I think it’s that the American people aren’t interested in them, related to this Russia stuff. And I think the president recognizes that.
Now, whether this is a strategy to like, you know, say, “Look over here,” while they’re doing the whole dismantling of the entire federal government over here. That’s – it sounds like the administration is saying that, but also liberals are saying that. They’re saying, “Hey, look at what’s going on over here. Let’s not get distracted by this.”
But when you have a president like this, who is constantly making news, constantly stoking controversy, it makes it that much harder for everything else to break through.
(...)
