‘We Have No Idea What’s Going On’: How Not to Cover Ferguson, in One Morning Joe Clip

Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough got called out last week for long-distance punditry by on-the-ground reporter Wesley Lowery, who told Scarborough get to Ferguson before he sounded off on events there. Alas, the morning show’s Monday coverage was an even worse case study in how to run a cable news segment on a real-time centrifugal situation.

Things took a turn for the worse when cohost Mika Brzezinski showed a clip of an officer threatening a radio reporter, from a video that went viral Sunday night. Scarborough, showing he appreciates context when he wants to, immediately called foul. “Hold on a second, we have no idea what is going on there! We show thirty seconds of clips and, by the way, we don’t know what is happening in the street! …We show a three-second clip up and then there is a pregnant pause that hangs over the set? We aren’t in their positions, and we don’t know what they are going through!”

Brzezinski replied that her point was not the crackdown on reporters, but the vulnerability of police officers who were forced to view anybody they came across as a potential threat. “I’m saying you could hear the panic in his voice because things are so bad there, one other concept may be, what else would you do at this point if you see anybody out past the curfew?” she said. “You panic.”

There followed an argument with Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, who told Scarborough that just as the MJ crew couldn’t tell what was happening in the video, they knew even less about the years-long tensions in places like Ferguson that built to the current conflict, causing Scarborough to say oh-yes-he-did.

Not to be outdone, MJ-regular and former Bush official Nicolle Wallace speculated that the officer was yelling out of concern for the reporter’s own safety, as military members often do to foreign correspondents in war zones. Everybody agreed this was a good explanation, though Brzezisnki did add that it was odd the officer would threaten to shoot or tear gas the reporter in that case. “We just don’t know what is going on,” Wallace replied. She meant it as a defense of her own speculation.

All in all about six minutes were spent on the truncated video, and if possible the viewer knew less about it after the segment ended than she did when it began. At least three times panelists announced that they had too little context to speculate on what was happening in the video before going on to do just that. No attempt was made to find out more about the video, or the events surrounding it. Even the brief description on the YouTube link was more informative.

This was especially pointless, as MSNBC has reporters on the ground. Sure enough, at the top of the previous hour, Morning Joe interviewed Trymaine Lee, who’s been in Ferguson from the very beginning, and who gave detailed reporting and analysis of last night’s events. It was world’s apart from the previous segment, suggesting that if Morning Joe and its peers can’t take Lowery’s advice get to Ferguson themselves, they should stick like glue to their correspondents who are there, and who can make it more than a minute without admitting “We don’t know what’s going on.”

Watch the clip below, via MSNBC:

[Image via screengrab]

——
>> Follow Evan McMurry (@evanmcmurry) on Twitter

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.