During Tuesday’s edition of Morning Joe, MSNBC co-host Joe Scarborough had a surprising recommendation for viewers: “If you don’t want to hear the truth, you can change the channel!”
Scarborough made the remark after fiancé and fellow co-host Mika Brzezinski finished an interview with anti-Trump Republican Max Boot, who noted in a Washington Post opinion column “the five political norms that President Trump violated in just the past week.”
Of course, the discussion centered around items boldly displayed on the TV screen for all to see. The first one was “revealing intelligence sources,” which Brzezinski stated “involves Congressman Devin Nunes demanding the name of an FBI informant.”
By the end of the segment, the list had expanded to include politically motivated prosecutions, mixing private and government business, foreign interference in U.S. elections and undermining the First Amendment.
“You can’t get used to this,” Brzezinski said before asserting: “You see shock, and you see horror in our voices. It’s because we love this country, and we’re not going to get used to this.”
It apparently didn’t dawn on her that no one sees anything in another person’s voice, but the co-host nevertheless continued: “Coming up: how to rig an election. Brian Klaas will take us through his new book and why he compares elections to a game of Whac-A-Mole, and [Presidential historian] Jon Meacham joins the conversation” to predict that Trump’s administration will reach its “season finale” with impeachment.
Before going to a commercial, Scarborough felt the need to state:
If you’re thinking it’s just one note. Morning Joe is just one note. Yeah! Yeah, guess what? A fire department has one focus when there’s a four-alarm fire, alright? So if you don’t want to hear the truth, you can change the channel!
It didn’t take long for former NewsBusters colleague Mark Finkelstein to call the outburst an example of “One-Note Trump Hatred.”
Finkelstein also noted that the MSNBC co-host “surely had in mind” columns like one from Republican strategist Alex Castellanos entitled “IT’S OFFICIAL: Morning Joe Is Dead.”
In that column, Castellanos noted that Morning Joe used to be “great television,” and the co-hosts’ “clashing views” gave the show “dramatic power.” Now, however, the program “has become a sea of sameness,” he stated. “The performers play indistinguishable parts, predictable bobble-head dolls that hate Donald John Trump.”
“Castellanos is anything but a big Trump fan,” Finkelstein noted. “He’s co-founder, with Dem strategist Steve McMahon, of a consulting group called Purple Strategies, which, as its name suggests, is a middle-of-the-road outfit.”
NewsBusters has followed the MSNBC program since 2007, when Scarborough said he wanted to “write a campaign check” for former Senator Bob Kerrey because “we need” the Nebraska Democrat “in Washington very badly.”
Of course, it doesn’t take long to find examples of liberal bias from the Morning Joe co-hosts.
In early April, Scarborough attempted to take President Donald Trump to task by reciting a slew of negative words that had appeared in his Twitter posts over the previous 24 hours, after which he suffered a full-scale meltdown over Trump’s most recent tweet storm.
Soon after that, the former Republican claimed that Trump supporters should not handle “anything sharp because you will hurt yourself because you are too incompetent actually to use any basic household appliances.”
However, it’s still hard to top Scarborough when it comes to slamming the President. On May 18, the MSNBC co-host almost seemed happy that the President’s planned summit with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un might not pan out because Trump is “allergic to complexity” and “contemptuous of history.”
Perhaps the MSNBC co-host could have a part in a remake of A Few Good Men since Jack Nicholson’s character in that movie was also fond of a similar phrase “[y]ou can’t handle the truth!”
