Stories showing behind the scenes activities of meat processing plants tend to be sensational and shocking, but it appears ABC went too far trying to scare up some viewers for their ‘pink slime’ exposé and it came back to bite them.
MSNBC
Before the 2016 election season began, MSNBC’s viewership was at historic lows with their prime time shows only getting between 25,000 to 103,000 viewers in their demo audience.851 The “demo” audience is the key demographic advertisers are marketing to. The first quarter of 2015 MSNBC averaged only 316,000 total viewers during the day,852 and by the fourth quarter they barely had 500,000 total viewers during prime time.853
With Trump’s election victory and liberals getting whipped up into a frenzy hoping to find some dirt on him that would get him immediately impeached, MSNBC’s viewership dramatically increased as the network became increasingly more radical with their anti-Trump agenda. The primary face of MSNBC is the butch lesbian Rachel Maddow, whose convoluted ramblings appear to be unprepared streams of consciousness she just comes up with off the top of her head once she’s seated at her desk, but somehow her viewers are entertained by her scatterbrained diatribes.
Like CNN, MSNBC often grasps at straws trying to create artificial outrage over minor things◦— a business model that often just leaves them looking ridiculous. Since Donald Trump wouldn’t release his tax returns during the presidential campaign, which is somewhat customary for candidates, the Democrats fixated on them thinking they must contain connections to Russia or that he somehow weaseled out of paying any taxes at all. Then, two months into the Trump administration, Rachel Maddow tweeted she was about to reveal a “bombshell” on her show.
She claimed to have obtained a copy of his tax returns and a countdown clock was put up on screen ticking down to the big moment he would be ‘exposed.’ When her show went to air she began rambling on, and on, for eighteen minutes without actually showing them, or even saying what was in them. The network then went to a commercial break and when the show returned, she revealed two pages of his 2005 returns which showed that he paid $38 million in taxes that year.
That’s it. No bombshell. No controversial revelations. No nothing. In fact they actually debunked the rumors that he hadn’t paid taxes for ‘nearly two decades’ as had been previously reported.854 There hadn’t been such an overhyped television event since Geraldo Rivera opened Al Capone’s vault on live TV back in 1986 to find absolutely nothing, and Rachel Maddow became the laughing stock of the Internet and late night talk shows.855
One Washington Post reporter published an op-ed titled, “Rachel Maddow takes conspiracy theorizing mainstream with Trump tax ‘scoop,’” and said that after she rambled on for 20 minutes, “I realized that we weren’t watching a news broadcast so much as a modern recreation of X’s monologue from Oliver Stone’s ‘JFK.’”856
It’s not just Rachel Maddow; other hosts on MSNBC comprise what is basically a conspiracy carnival on cable. After President Trump launched a few Tomahawk missiles and destroyed a Syrian airfield in response to Bashar al-Assad killing rebels with chemical weapons, MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell dedicated his opening monologue to his conspiracy theory that Vladimir Putin may have ordered Assad to launch the chemical attack to provoke President Trump into a military response to distract the media and “change the subject from Russian influence” on the election.857
It appears that nothing is too crazy for MSNBC. One of their contributors appeared to encourage the bombing of Trump Tower in Turkey.858 Malcolm Nance, who is the channel’s ‘terrorism analyst,’ tweeted, and then later deleted, a photo of Trump Tower in Turkey and added, “This is my nominee for the first ISIS suicide bombing of a Trump property”859 He had previously called Trump the “ISIS candidate” and said that the president is inciting Islamophobia.860
This is the same MSNBC contributor who insinuated that Donald Trump is a Russian KGB agent who was at some point “co-opted by Vladimir Putin,” which caused him to “buy into” and “embrace” a “dictatorial ideology that was done by a spymaster of the KGB.” He then said, “Ten years ago, twenty years ago, there would be treason trials at this point.”861
One of their regular panelists, Donny Deutsch, actually issued a serious fight challenge to the president during one segment, saying, “Donald, if you’re watching, we’re from Queens. I’ll meet you in the schoolyard, brother. You need to be schooled. No, I’m serious. This is where this needs to go. He’s a coward! A coward!”862 He wasn’t fired, or even suspended; giving the impression that MSNBC endorses threats of violence against President Trump.
Host Mika Brzezinski once decried Trump’s influence on Twitter, saying, “He is trying to undermine the media and trying to make up his own facts,” and that “he can actually control exactly what people think. And that, that is our job.”863
Another host apologized for fake news after she falsely claimed that Fox News was having their Christmas party at Donald Trump’s new hotel in Washington D.C. which had recently just opened. “I mean, think about the hotel in Washington right now. The RNC is having their Christmas party there. Fox News had their Christmas party there. That doesn’t feel a little hanky?”864
At the end of the show the host surprisingly apologized, saying, “This is some serious business that I need to share. I need to apologize to the audience. Earlier today in a segment I stated that the Fox network held their holiday party at Trump’s D.C. hotel. I was wrong. We’ve since learned that neither Fox network nor an affiliate held any party at Trump’s Washington hotel. I stand corrected. I apologize for the error. I am truly, truly sorry. The mistake entirely my fault. And of course, I wish all my friends over at Fox a very happy holiday no matter where you have your party.”865
Of course she didn’t say “Merry Christmas” because that might have offended some people, so instead she used the more “inclusive” phrase “happy holiday.”
Host Chris Matthews said that President Trump’s inauguration was “Hitlerian,” meaning it reminded him of an Adolf Hitler rally, and aside from being obsessed with “possible Russian connections” for a year after the election, he has also compared Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner to Saddam Hussein’s murderous sons, Uday and Qusay.866 Chris Matthews is the same guy who said he got a thrill up his leg from hearing Barack Obama speak.867
After a terrorist ran down pedestrians using a van on the London Bridge in England, killing eight people and injuring 48, MSNBC host Thomas Roberts suggested that President Trump was “trying to provoke a domestic terrorist attack” of a similar nature in the U.S. “to prove himself right” about the dangers of radical Islamic terrorism.868 Such an egregious allegation should put an end to someone’s career in the television news business, but these kinds of unhinged statements are a common occurrence on the network.
In the immediate aftermath of the bombing at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England which killed twenty-two people, MSNBC briefly mentioned the attack but quickly cut away from the breaking news to continue covering what they said was “shocking news in Washington tonight” and went on as usual with their nauseating obsession with conspiracy theories about Russia and the 2016 election.869 A bunch of children were blown up at a major pop star’s concert by an ISIS terrorist, but MSNBC thought talking about six-month-old conspiracy theories was more important.