MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough and editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, live in such thick bubbles that they unironically argued on Tuesday’s Morning Joe that the news media is pretending this election is just like any other election and that they are creating a “false moral equivalency” between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.
Scarborough lamented that, “Jeff, you made the point to your guests that Donald Trump will be brutish at Arlington, going places that no other politician has gone. He will have bizarre tweets daily that suggest he is deeply unwell. He will flip-flop on issues like abortion and immigration and just about everything else, lie constantly, and yet, the media will pretend like this is 1996 and its Clinton-Dole and they'll go, ‘Yes, but Kamala Harris had Tim Walz with her in her first interview.’”
He further mourned, “This is -- I notice the pace of -- and I hate criticizing the mainstream media because, mainly, they do things right, but there is almost a desperation for them to pretend this race is like every other race, and the false moral equivalency is getting pretty bad, and we're just one day past Labor Day. Talk about that, if you will.”
Back on Planet Earth, 89 percent of Trump’s coverage has been negative, while 84 percent of Harris’s has been positive. The media is constantly hyping Harris’s “joyful” campaign while attacking Trump’s “dark” campaign.
For his part, Goldberg decried, “I mean, it should have struck all of us about nine years ago, right? But it really struck me when he did his long soliloquy on batteries and electricity and sharks, remember that? Whether it is better to be killed by a shark or by a battery falling into the ocean.”
He added, “And then, you know, last week, it was this -- another, sort of, incredible disposition about irrelevant things, and I’m thinking, “My god, if Kamala Harris spent ten minutes on stage randomly talking about whether” -- first of all, he doesn't even understand how batteries work and how stored energy works, and he spends last week talking about how people don't eat bacon anymore because of windmills. That’s not normal. I mean, it's not normal, and we can't act as if it's normal, and so we’re operating with a double standard.”
On the contrary, when Harris has her Harris-isms the media try to argue that makes her appealing to young people. Nevertheless, Goldberg rolled on:
Kamala Harris, we parse her speeches, her interviews as if she is a serious human being who is taking slightly different positions on X or Y or Z, and we're holding her accountable, and that's fine. It's especially fine in a normal circumstance. But here, we have a situation where she's talking about things within a normal bandwidth of political discussion, and he is saying abnormal things, and we're treating them the same, and there's two different races going on and there's two very different candidates. I'm just saying, say what it is, which is, this person is outside the bandwidth of what politicians have been like through our modern era.
No wonder Harris chose Morning Joe for her last interview before the CNN-Dana Bash sit down.
Here is a transcript for the September 3 show:
MSNBC Morning Joe
9/3/2024
7:33 AM ET
JOE SCARBOROUGH: Jeff, you made the point to your guests that Donald Trump will be brutish at Arlington, going places that no other politician has gone. He will have bizarre tweets daily that suggest he is deeply unwell. He will flip-flop on issues like abortion and immigration and just about everything else, lie constantly, and yet, the media will pretend like this is 1996 and its Clinton-Dole and they'll go, “yes, but Kamala Harris had Tim Walz with her in her first interview.”
And this is -- I notice the pace of -- and I hate criticizing the mainstream media because, mainly, they do things right, but there is almost a desperation for them to pretend this race is like every other race, and the false moral equivalency is getting pretty bad, and we're just one day past Labor Day. Talk about that, if you will.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yeah, no, I mean, this really struck me. I mean, it should have struck all of us about nine years ago, right? But it really struck me when he did his long soliloquy on batteries and electricity and sharks, remember that? Whether it is better to be killed by a shark or by a battery falling into the ocean.
And then, you know, last week, it was this -- another, sort of, incredible disposition about irrelevant things, and I’m thinking, “My god, if Kamala Harris spent ten minutes on stage randomly talking about whether” -- first of all, he doesn't even understand how batteries work and how stored energy works, and he spends last week talking about how people don't eat bacon anymore because of windmills. That’s not normal. I mean, it's not normal, and we can't act as if it's normal and, so we’re operating with a double standard.
Kamala Harris, we parse her speeches, her interviews as if she is a serious human being who is taking slightly different positions on X or Y or Z, and we're holding her accountable, and that's fine. It's especially fine in a normal circumstance.
But here, we have a situation where she's talking about things within a normal bandwidth of political discussion, and he is saying abnormal things, and we're treating them the same, and there's two different races going on and there's two very different candidates. I'm just saying, say what it is, which is, this person is outside the bandwidth of what politicians have been like through our modern era.
