Foreign Policy

Questions for Mike Barnicle: does the phrase "suicide bomber" ring a bell? How about "martyrdom" in the name of Allah? On today's Morning Joe, Barnicle's argument in favor of the Iran deal was that to oppose it, one would "have to believe Iran is suicidal." The former Boston Globe columnist reasoned that if Iran dropped an atomic bomb on Tel Aviv, "Tehran would be a combination of glass and sand…

Hey, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has retired as president of Iran.  Why didn't NBC hire him and cut out the middle-man? But seriously, what did NBC think it was getting when it hired as a "contributor" someone who served as Ahmadinejad's translator and who in that role mouthed his vicious anti-Semitic rants? On Chris Hayes' MSNBC show this evening, Hooman Majd claimed the Iran deal is "a good deal for…

In an exclusive live interview with Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee on Tuesday’s NBC Today, co-host Matt Lauer scolded the former Arkansas governor for his strong criticism of President Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran: “It seems to me the irony here is you’re taking a pro-Israel stance, but in explaining that stance, you have offended people in Israel and Jews all around the world…

Israelis wouldn't have to be marched to ovens.  The ovens would come to them, in the form of an atomic bomb. On today's Morning Joe, Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson said that he was "offended" by Mike Huckabee's remark that President Obama's Iran deal would "take the Israelis and march them to the door of the oven." Robinson said the comment runs counter to the purpose of Israel, which…

It's a point of pride at Morning Joe that the show is unscripted. But in a notable deviation that might reflect the gravity of the moment, Joe Scarborough clearly seemed to be reading off a teleprompter today as he promulgated a damning indictment of Hillary Clinton's mishandling of classified information on her private email system. Scarborough's statement was interspersed with clips of Hillary…

Veteran journalist John Harwood, according to his Twitter home page, covers "Washington and national politics for CNBC and the New York Times." Saturday morning, despite all of his experience, Harwood tweeted a question (HT Twitchy) so naive that a freshman journalism student would have been embarrassed to ask it:

I'm virtually certain that he wouldn't dream of it, but the Associated Press's Josh Lederman seriously needs to consider correcting two extremely embarrassing paragraphs he wrote in his coverage of President Obama's appearance on Jon Stewart's Daily Show earlier this week. At the 15:03 mark of the Comedy Central video following the jump, Obama treated Stewart as if he's a legitimate journalist,…

While Matt Lauer pressed Secretary of State John Kerry on the Iran nuclear deal during an interview on Friday’s NBC Today, the co-host did allow Kerry to continue to make false claims about the policy without challenge.

News broke on Hillary Clinton's email controversy Thursday night, and Michael Schmidt and Matt Apuzzo led with this sentence in their initial report on nytimes.com: "Two inspectors general have asked the Justice Department to open a criminal investigation into whether Hillary Rodham Clinton mishandled sensitive government information on a private email account she used as secretary of state,…

While English-networks ABC and NBC combined with Spanish-language networks MundoFox, Telemundo, and Univision on Thursday night to skip testimony from Secretary of State John Kerry in a Senate hearing on the Iran deal, CBS covered it in a news brief, but only summarized it and ignored false statements by Kerry as he faced criticism from both sides of the aisle. In contrast, the FNC's Special…

Despite the revelation on Wednesday that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) made secret side deals with Iran over nuclear weapons inspections and refused to disclose the details to the U.S. Congress, NBC, ABC, and CBS all ignored the story. By contrast, FNC’s Special Report led with the news as anchor Bret Baier informed viewers “there is word tonight of a separate covert deal between…

Ouch: this one's going to leave a mark.  Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton has said that "John Kerry acted like Pontius Pilate, he washed his hands" on crucial issues in the Iran deal and left it to the IAEA to negotiate secret side deals with Iran on them. Cotton made his remarks on today's Morning Joe.  It might be a mark of the regard, or lack thereof, in which Kerry is held that no one…

Earlier today, Geoffrey Dickens at NewsBusters noted how the Big Three morning network news shows on NBC, ABC, and CBS failed to cover President Barack Obama's denial that the Internal Revenue Service ever went after Tea Party and other conservative groups in his appearance on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Specifically Obama said that "it turned out no ... the truth of the matter is there was…

In a softball interview with Secretary of State John Kerry aired on her MSNBC show on Tuesday, host Andrea Mitchell was in awe of Kerry meeting with the Cuban foreign minister on Monday following the reopening of the Communist nation’s embassy in Washington: “The first time since 1958 a Cuban foreign minister was here in this building....Did you have a sense of history? Did he?”