After weeks of breathless coverage of White House scandals, political intrigue, and gun control, the hosts of MSNBC’s Morning Joe appear to have gotten high on their own supply and inadvertently incited themselves with their own rhetoric. On Friday’s panel, Mika Brzezinski abandoned all pretense of objectivity – what little remained – and deemed Democratic turnout in the 2018 midterms “our hope for the future of this country.”
Media bias is a game of plausible deniability. For news personalities and journalists alike, the key to injecting a political agenda into one’s reporting is to remain implicit with one’s words, toeing the line between suggestion and outright advocacy. So when MSNBC Washington Correspondent Kasie Hunt issued an impassioned plea that viewers “get out there and vote,” (perhaps implying support for Democrats, though never specifying for which party), nothing seemed out of the ordinary.
Hosts Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough, however, were more than happy to fill in the blanks for Ms. Hunt. While attempting to extrapolate 2018 voter turnout from past midterm elections, journalist John Heilemann brought up the so-called coalition of the ascendant – the DNC’s pet term for white college-educated women and ethnic minorities who comprise the majority of the Democratic Party’s base. Scarborough enthusiastically commented that this coalition was “energized,” citing the recent Alabama special election:
Black turnout [was] higher in Doug Jones’s off-year special election race than it was for Barack Obama. That remains the most remarkable statistic of this year and the reason why Republicans should be shaking in their boots right now.
Brzezinski added, “It also remains our hope for the future of this country.”
“Yeah,” Scarborough agreed. “Hope.”
Princeton Professor Eddie Glaude concurred and decided to approach the issue from the opposite side – admonishing congressional Republicans. He caricatured a series of GOP platform issues in succession, including immigration and firearm regulation:
Even when Democrats come to the table and compromise that will put them in jeopardy with their Progressive base it's rejected on the basis of an extreme position with regards to immigration. You think about what's driving the attack on the FBI, it's this extreme position about the deep state. You think about what's driving the position with regards to gun control, it's this extreme position about the federal government coming in to take our guns so that we can't protect ourselves.
"The Republican Party," he concluded, "has been hijacked by extremists." Glaude then claimed that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer had given his Republican counterparts “leverage” on the issue of DACA recipients in a bid for “good faith,” which he felt they had been summarily denied. “What we see now is that Mitch McConnell and the Republicans are who we thought they were,” he remarked dourly.
