In an emotional and serious Congressional hearing on Tuesday, Capitol Hill considered efforts to streamline the process for staffers to report sexual misconduct. The reforms came as the nation is in the middle of a conversation about such behavior and abusers were thrust into the spotlight. Of course, discussions about powerful men abusing women could not be had without mentioning former President Bill Clinton, but Jim Warren of the Poynter Institute didn’t want to hear any of it.
During his appearance on MSNBC’s The 11th Hour with Brian Williams later that evening, Warren lamented about how he was on Fox News recently and had to talk about Clinton’s alleged rape of an innocent woman. “I was on Fox the other night and I'm being asked about Juanita Broaddrick. Brian, it's like 20 years ago, the two of us are talking about Juanita Broaddrick,” he bemoaned. “Why are we talking about Juanita Broaddrick?”
According to Warren, it was all a part of Fox News’ coordinated effort to distract from other news items damaging to President Trump. “The battle plan up until this point has been to deflect at all costs. And now it looks like it may be coming to an end,” he opined.
Warren’s whining about having to talk about a topic as serious as rape was teed up by the disgraced Brian Williams, who blamed conservative media for making the life so strange:
Jim Warren, you chronicle conservative media a lot for a living. This has been an interesting time for them. Fox News tonight did a segment on the search for Amelia Earhart. We have new players we didn't have before when you and I were coming up. How far are we from normal, from dead plum normal?
Williams’ complaint about a segment on Earhart was hypocritical because his own network recently went gaga for an Earhart story that turned out to be a bust. But that critique of Fox News wasn’t new. CNN’s Brian Stelter levels it at them routinely because they don’t spend every second between commercial breaks recycling the same commentary slamming Trump.
If Williams was actually objective, he would’ve slammed CNN for running a story hyping a dog who had an ear that looked like Trump, or his MSNBC colleague Rachel Maddow for running a “PSA” to inform an unknown person in Portland, Maine that they left their dentures in a voting booth. Both of these stories also occurred on Tuesday evening.
For all of Warren’s moaning of Fox News being stuck in ‘deflect mode,’ it appeared that he was still stuck in ‘cover of Clinton mode.’ Because on Monday, CNN’s Jake Tapper called out the media for treating Clinton’s many accusers “poorly” and for denying them “the same respect” that they were giving to the accusers of Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore. Even Williams’ MSNBC colleague Chris Hayes drew people’s attention to the difference.
Transcript below:
MSNBC
The 11th Hour
November 14, 2017
11:27:52 PM Eastern(…)
BRIAN WILLIAMS: Jim Warren, you chronicle conservative media a lot for a living. This has been an interesting time for them. Fox News tonight did a segment on the search for Amelia Earhart. We have new players we didn't have before when you and I were coming up. How far are we from normal, from dead plum normal?
JIM WARREN: This is how far we are from dead plum normal: I was on Fox the other night and I'm being asked about Juanita Broaddrick. Brian, it's like 20 years ago, the two of us are talking about Juanita Broaddrick. And I was wondering--
WILLIAMS: We were bigger men back then.
WARREN: Speak for yourself. Why are we talking about Juanita Broaddrick? Because the notion—the battle plan up until this point has been to deflect at all costs. And now it looks like it may be coming to an end.
(…)
