Deflecting blame has become an art form by not just failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, but also by the left-wing media. MSNBC host, and former campaign reporter, Katy Tur spent time on Monday’s The Daily Show doing exactly that, laying cover for the media’s lack of attention on serious policy differences between the candidates during 2016. Instead, Tur said it was Trump’s fault that the media obsessively covered his tweets, because he “buried” their coverage of other topics.
Tur, who spent the majority of 2015 and 2016 covering Trump’s campaign for MSNBC, was on the show to promote her new book about the campaign trail, entitled Unbelievable.
Host Trevor Noah began the interview by joking that the intimate nature of the book’s stories, sharing firsthand accounts of Tur’s encounters with then-candidate Trump, was like a “weird romantic story with no romance, involving yourself and now President Donald Trump.”
“That's the weirdest way anyone's ever described the book,” she laughed. Noah continued, noting there was “a strange connection” between herself and Trump.
Tur acknowledged that they had a connection because, Tur claimed, she was one of the only reporters there on the campaign trail from the beginning, since no other media took Trump seriously when he announced his run for presidency:
TUR: Listen, I was there from the very beginning. Donald Trump, I don't know if you remember this, was not taken seriously when he announced his candidacy
NOAH: Oh, we remember. ( Laughter )
TUR: Donald Trump running for president, it’s going to be so hilarious. That’s what the headlines were like.
NOAH: Right.
TUR: People were calling him a carnival barker, a sideshow and the like. I was there almost from day one, from June 30th of 2015, I was the only national news correspondent that was following him full time, the only person really taking his campaign seriously. So he would see me for months on end as the only familiar face in a crowd full of strangers for months and months and months and months, and he would call me out over and over again, he would berate me from the stage when he didn't like my reporting which was often. ( Laughter ) He would try to charm me behind the scenes, or if I did something he liked or said something that he liked, one time he kissed me on the cheek.
Noah seized on that comment, gushing that Tur’s description of that encounter “reminded” him of the infamous Access Hollywood tape:
That story, I feel like you say now, and he kissed me on the cheek, but it wasn't like a welcomed kiss on the cheek. When you read the story in the book it really is a harrowing moment that for me reminded me of the Access Hollywood tape, you see that tape were Donald Trump got off the bus after the pussy grab, and then says I'm going to put in tic tacs because you never know sometimes I just kiss a woman and can't control it. You tell the story in a similar fashion, he just kissed you out of nowhere.
Tur explained that the same gesture would’ve been appropriate if the Daily Show host had done it because she was “a guest” on his show and not “a journalist:”
TUR: This was many, many months before that, this was November 2015. I was on the Morning Joe set, a remote show we were doing from New Hampshire, I was talking about Donald Trump's change in tone from the debate the previous night. He wasn't going after people the same way he had been the previous week, not the same amount of vitriol. I get off the stage, waiting for trump and his team to arrive, he walks in the side door, sees me immediately, walks right up to me, puts his arms on my shoulders and kiss me on the cheek. If you kiss me on the cheek, Trevor, that's fine, that’s nice, we are essentially colleagues, I'm a guest on your show, you're not covering me as a journalist, I'm not running for president.
NOAH: You're telling me this now, I wasted an opportunity, but okay. ( Laughter ) I went in with a hug, but okay. Now you tell me, thanks, Katy.
TUR: It's just inappropriate in that setting. It's not a social situation. It is not a -- I'm not a member of his family, I'm not his friend, I'm not somebody that he works with. I'm covering a presidential campaign, and I remember in that moment, the first thing I felt was ‘nobody is going to take me seriously if anybody sees that.’
NOAH: Wow.
TUR: Luckily, the cameras weren't rolling, but a minute later Donald Trump is on set with Joe and Mika saying ‘what happened to Katy? She was so great, I just had to kiss her’ on national television.
NOAH: He bragged about it immediately afterwards.
After cringing over that story, Noah asked Tur if the media could’ve done better about covering policy during the campaign, or was it Trump’s fault for “scandalizing the entire election?” Of course there was only one right answer to that question:
NOAH: There's a step that you have in the book that was really eye opening to me in talking about the evening broadcast, like, you know, the national news, and how Donald Trump got way more coverage than Hillary Clinton, but only 32 minutes was about policy.
TUR: Yes.
NOAH: I think in previous election years it was like 114 minutes and 200 minutes on policy, whereas with Donald Trump it was only 32 minutes. Do you think that journalists could have done a better job of keeping it on policy or was Trump the first person who was willing to risk scandalizing the entire election and getting it away from that conversation?
The MSNBC host claimed Trump provided nothing but tweets, a “Muslim ban” and a “pseudo tax plan” to cover, so of course his tweets would “bury” any policy coverage from the media:
TUR: Donald Trump had no policy. There wasn't policy to cover with him. It was very limited.
NOAH: Right.
TUR: He had a Muslim ban proposal, and he had a tax plan, a pseudo tax plan, but he didn't really get into policy on the campaign trail, and whenever he did he would immediately bury it with another controversy or getting into some sort personal fight with Ted Cruz or Hillary Clinton or Marco Rubio or Ben Carson or the pope or the podium in the Oval Office. (Laughter) I mean, the list goes on and on.
Tur went on to say she wished they could have covered more policy but Trump made it “really difficult to do so.” She even claimed she wanted to interview Trump supporters but because he was always picking fights, the media “could not ignore” that:
So would have liked to have covered more policy? Absolutely! But he was making it really difficult to do so. I wanted to talk and put Donald Trump supporters on TV every night on NBC Nightly News but the man just kept saying things we could not ignore. He's fighting with a gold star family, you can't ignore that. He's calling on Russia to hack into Hillary Clinton's email, you can't ignore that. It was one after the other after the other. Looking back, though, and really, you know, analyzing how we covered this campaign, I think it's is discussion that we have to have to figure out how in the world we're going to cover 2020, especially if Donald Trump is the Republican candidate.
But some reporters have proved that even in the midst of Trump tweet controversies, they can still find time to cover serious issues. NBC Nightly News anchor Lester Holt, for example, reported live from the capital city of San Juan Monday night, covering Hurricane Maria’s devastation there, in the midst of the media’s obsession over the feud between the NFL and Trump.
