On Monday’s Morning Joe, host Joe Scarborough in a conversation concerning who the Trump administration would be appointing to positions of power and what policy achievements they would reach, warned his colleagues in the media not to be too quick in making negative determinations as they mistakenly did, time and time again throughout the election.
As a result, the conversation among the liberal commentators turned somewhat fair and balanced when Council on Foriegn Relations President Richard Hass went on emphasizing Donald Trump’s pragmatic rather than ideological approach to politics. Then the show’s co-host Mika Brzezinski pointed out:
“I am thinking of what we know of him, what we’ve seen – the contact we’ve had with him of late – this is the most accurate and measured conversation I have seen all weekend umm…and I didn’t expect it, I mean all weekend long I've been on the phone with people, many of them really powerful, most of them hysterical. I don't know if I can say the same – many of them Republicans.”
Scarborough expanded on that, saying: “Well, hysterical and making the same mistake that people have now made twice about Donald Trump, ‘he cannot win the primary' and they give him a 1% chance.What do they do? I'm sorry. I got to say it. I said this from the beginning, Ronald Reagan feasted on the low expectations of his rivals, there were piles of political bones at Ronald Reagan's feet from people who underestimated him…They did it to Donald Trump during the primary. They did it to Donald Trump during the general election. They should have learned their lesson – nobody in the media learned their lesson, nobody! They’re doing it again…”
On Tuesday’s Morning Joe, a media columnist at The New York Times, Jim Rutenberg whose article after the election was emphasized by Scarborough on last week’s broadcast was invited to elaborate more on his opinion of the biased mass media coverage throughout the election. Scarborough began discussing “oppositional journalism”, questioning whether Rutenberg thought the meida went too far in opposing Trump.
Frequent panelist Mike Barncile also commented, stating strongly that:
“Everyone is familiar with the thinning out of the American newspapers and even the big newspapers, the most important newspapers, The Times, The Washington Post have their own difficulties but one of the biggest difficulties and it's because I think because you have to feed the online beast if you're out there as a reporter, feeding it two, three times a day. You end up focusing more on the candidate than the country.”
In a concluding consensus the once confident during the pre-election but now self-critical liberal NYT journalist concurred:
“I agree. I think that -- it used to be when I started out political reporting, you had voice pieces, voters voices, and those still happen, but there’s an overwhelming look at where are the polls, what's happening inside the campaign, what does Washington establishment think and you know this campaign was not being fought in the way the Washington establishment was fighting and also, this is not geographical. This is not fly-over country. There’s parts of Long Island, Queens, Brooklyn – everywhere so I think it's a state of mind..."
Here are the series of excerpts from the November 14th and 15th discussions on Morning Joe:
MSNBC’s Morning Joe
11-14-2016
6:13:19 – 6:14:20 AM
JOE SCARBOROUGH: By the way, (Trump) doesn’t see himself as a Republican…
RICHARD HASS: No, this is eclectic, and it’s going to be taking specific policies in foreign policy and domestic policy, in economic policy that he embraces – the appointments, again show a range rather than a narrow ideological or philosophical embrace. This is going to be much more eclectic across the board, very hard to characterize…
MIKA BRZEZINSKI: I am thinking of what we know of him, what we’ve seen – the contact we’ve had with him of late – this is the most accurate and measured conversation I have seen all weekend umm…and I didn’t expect it, I mean all weekend long I've been on the phone with people, many of them really powerful, most of them hysterical. I don't know if I can say the same – many of them Republicans.
SCARBOROUGH: Hysterical and making the same mistake that people have made now twice about Donald Trump. He cannot win the primary and they give him a 1% chance. What do they do? I'm sorry. I got to say it. I said this from the beginning, Ronald Reagan feasted on the low expectations of his rivals, there were piles of political bones at Ronald Reagan's feet from people who underestimated him…They did it to Donald Trump during the primary. They did it to Donald Trump during the general election. They should have learned their lesson – nobody in the media learned their lesson, nobody! They’re doing it again…
(....)
11-15-2016
8:53:20 – 8:59:59 AM
TOM BROKAW: “We have to have, I think, in the big urban areas, a determination to be open to other points of view as well - Flint, Michigan, I think, has galvanized the country in a lot of ways, because what they understand is in the working class communities, they can very quickly become victims of people who are not paying attention…”
JOE SCARBOROUGH: That was NBC’s Tom Brokaw talking last January about the media and how they were missing the big story in the rise of Donald Trump in places like Michigan. In a recent interview in The New York Times, the executive editor said about the campaign coverage: “if I have a mea culpa for journalists and journalism, it’s that we have a much better job to do being out in the road, out in the country, talking to different kinds of people than we talk to, especially if you happen to be a New York-based organization and we need to remind ourselves that New York is not the real world.” Over the summer, The New York Times columnist Jim Rutenberg addressed the need to treat Trump as a serious threat, writing: “…journalism shouldn't measure itself against any one campaign's definition of fairness. It's journalism's job to be true to the readers and viewers and true to the facts in a way that would stand up to history's judgment. To do anything less would be untenable.” Jim Rutenberg is with us now and of course, Jim - your August column, you got a lot of attention. I actually went on afterwards and incorrectly said you were actually saying that the press’ responsibility was actually to work against Trump – that was incorrect. The term that was always in the back of my mind that we discussed yesterday was “oppositional journalism” and we talked around this table about, first of all, sorry for getting it wrong on the exact language but we have been talking about it for some time - about the oppositional journalism where you have New York Times people that we love and trust and respect and know writing stories all the day, and then tweeting snide tweets 20 times a day throughout the day. It certainly seemed like the scale was tipped.
JIM RUTENBERG: I want to say, first of all, that the column talked about oppositional journalism, it would feel like oppositional journalism to go where the story took you and you're quoted in this piece saying “how balanced do you have to be when one side is just irrational.” I don't think it was treating Mr. Trump as a threat at all, president-elect Trump. It was about taking him seriously as a candidate, during the reporting you had to do, and he was going to take the story to some places that we had never been and we had to go there. It was going to feel oppositional sometimes that said, in 2015, we also had a headline about Hillary Clinton that said, “Early in 2016 race, Clinton's toughest Vote Appears to be the News Media.” Sometimes news coverage is –
SCARBOROUGH: You guys, hammered Hillary and we said it all along. I mean, I always said, don't take it up with the vast right wing conspiracy, take it up with The New York Times because you guys led on the e-mail coverage all along. As we got to the end of the campaign, though, it did seem oppositional, and again, I don't want to mention their names, but when you had all of your main beat writers tweeting out every day anti-Trump tweets.
RUTENBERG: I think, you know, I don't know which tweets you're talking about. I think the tweeting with opinion is something I have -- I don't like in general, that’s why my Twitter following is so low. Because it's just -- so I can't speak to that. I don't know the examples you're citing but people shouldn’t do it…
SCARBOROUGH: Everybody that was a beat reporter on the campaign, every single one. So I'm wondering, is there -- The Times does appear to be taking a fresh look at how they do this moving forward, something happened...
RUTENBERG: I think The Times is looking at what my boss spoke to, in terms of the tough-minded, fair-minded but tough-minded journalism that is going to go where it has to go, we have to continue that. Everyone has to continue that. I would hope president-elect Trump, I think, would expect no less because he is the leader of the free world. It's interesting that your segment with Jeffrey Goldberg, here he was talking about I hope he learns about America's extraordinary place in the world. That is an extraordinary thing to say about a president-elect but I think the great thing is that the wisdom of the voter is what it is, and it is going to take us where it takes us.
SCARBOROUGH: …and our job is, and we're more opinion than certainly you or the front page of The Times should be, questions that we have to constantly ask, too. If Rudy or Bolton are selected as the Secretary of State, there's going to be a storm cloud over the set for a long time.
MIKE BARNICLE: Those are all big stories, part of what Jim has written about this is, everyone is familiar with the thinning out of the American newspapers and even the big newspapers, the most important newspapers The Times, The Washington Post have their own difficulties but one of the biggest difficulties and it's because I think because you have to feed the online beast if you're out there as a reporter, feeding it two, three times a day. You end up focusing more on the candidate than the country.
RUTENBERG: I agree. I think that -- it used to be when I started out political reporting, you had voice pieces, voters voices, and those still happen, but there’s an overwhelming look at where are the polls, what's happening inside the campaign, what does Washington establishment think and you know this campaign was not being fought in the way the Washington establishment was fighting and also, this is not geographical. This is not fly-over country. There’s parts of Long Island, Queens, Brooklyn – everywhere so I think it's a state of mind..."
SCARBOROUGH: Everywhere!
