OPINION:
It’s rare that a news network publicly acknowledges, through its actions, that it is populated by radicals.
But in the days following the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump, an unexpected twist came when MSNBC demonstrated an awareness of its own place in the national political discourse. The leftist network did preventive damage control by yanking some of its biggest stars off the air on the first weekday morning after the Saturday attack at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
“Morning Joe,” the MSNBC show that regularly fans the flames of fringe discontent, was singled out and barred from the airwaves on Monday.
The reason? According to reporting from rival CNN, it was because the large cast of characters that cycle through the show daily could not be trusted to refrain from saying outrageous things about Mr. Trump following his brush with death.
“A person familiar with the matter told CNN that the decision was made to avoid a scenario in which one of the show’s stable of two dozen-plus guests might make an inappropriate comment on live television that could be used to assail the program and network as a whole,” CNN reported. “Given the breaking news nature of the story, the person said, it made more sense to continue airing rolling breaking news coverage in the fraught political moment.”
Think of all the news that had happened and was happening when this preventive measure was taken.
A former and potential future president of the United States had just survived an attempt on his life. There were many questions about the attacker, who was killed by Secret Service agents and is still largely a mystery today, and even more questions about how the Secret Service protection had failed so miserably. Other people at the rally were also shot, including Corey Comperatore, a husband and father who was killed on the spot.
The Republican National Convention was just about to be gaveled into session that very Monday, the culmination of which would see Mr. Trump renominated to seek the presidency again. At the time, we still didn’t know the identity of the Republican vice presidential nominee, who turned out to be Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio, so speculation was still running hot.
All of that was happening when Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezinski and their leftist flamethrowers were relegated to the bench by the suits at MSNBC because everyone knew they wouldn’t be able to keep themselves from saying offensive things about the man they hate most in the world, Mr. Trump.
Mr. Scarborough was irate and threatened to walk out if it happened again, saying that he had been told that his team was taken off the air because NBC wanted only one news feed across all its television channels. But it didn’t happen that way; only “Morning Joe” got sidelined.
“Next time we’re told there’s gonna be a news feed replacing us, we will be in our chairs,” Mr. Scarborough said on Tuesday morning after his return from exile. “And the news feed will be us, or they can get someone else to host the show.”
But even though “Morning Joe” was put on a timeout, others on the channel didn’t stifle their nuttiness.
When Mr. Trump made a dramatic appearance at the Republican convention, MSNBC host Ari Melber referred to the bandage covering a bullet wound on the former president’s right ear as a “prop.” He said it was part of an effort “to mine and use Donald Trump’s injury,” and he wondered if Republicans would do that in a way that “overextends their credibility.”
Speaking of overextending credibility, MSNBC contributor Michael Steele, who for some reason was once chairman of the Republican National Committee, floated a conspiracy theory that Mr. Trump had not, in fact, been injured by a bullet and was, therefore, exaggerating what happened.
“What about reports that it may not have been a bullet that wounded him but glass from the shattered teleprompter?” Mr. Steele wrote on X.
His colleague Joy Reid piled on in a post on Threads.
“I have many questions! Like where are the medical reports?” she wrote. “What caused Trump’s injury, and what was the injury? Shrapnel? Glass? A bullet?”
(The flying glass theory, incidentally, can be debunked simply by watching a video of the assassination attempt and seeing the teleprompter glass remain intact.)
These are the kinds of things that MSNBC wanted to prevent from going out over the air on Monday morning, and to be honest, these wacky opinions are not surprising.
Most of us know that MSNBC houses some of the most radical elements of the American left.
And since “Morning Joe” was bumped for a day, it’s clear that they know it, too.
• Tim Murtaugh is a Washington Times columnist, a communications consultant, a co-host of the “Line Drive Podcast” and the author of the Amazon bestselling book “Swing Hard in Case You Hit It: My Escape From Addiction and Shot at Redemption on the Trump Campaign.”
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