MSNBC Guests Have Awkward Moment Over Whether They’re ‘Journalists’ or ‘Advocates’
In the midst of criticizing President Barack Obama’s speech about the Affordable Care Act exchange website’s problematic rollout on Now With Alex Wagner Wednesday afternoon, Yahoo! News columnist and MSNBC contributor Jeff Greenfield paused and clarified to the largely liberal panel that he was not speaking as an “advocate” but a “journalist,” prompting a mini-categorical debate over the guests’ identities on the network.
“I have felt this about the president since he was campaigning: he talks too much,” Greenfield began. “A twenty-eight minute speech is twenty-six minutes too long about what happened. Surrounded by the same kind of human props, that poor pregnant diabetic who almost collapsed. It was too long. What he might have learned from Winston Churchill was to begin by saying, ‘We screwed up, and we are going to fix it.'”
“I’ll tell you the other thing,” he continued, and then hesitated a bit over how he wanted to frame his criticism of the administration. “I realize sometimes networks can be—I want to just—I want to be a counter-arguer.”
“You’re allowed to do whatever you want,” Wagner said.
“Because I represent myself as a humble country journalist, not an advocate.”
“I think many people at this table would consider themselves journalists, too,” Wagner objected.
“Who are also advocates,” Greenfeld countered. “Progressives and liberals.”
“Or not,” Wagner said, more seriously, and then moved the segment along: “We can get into that discussion later.”
“My point is, when [Obama] said nobody’s madder than me that this isn’t working, I’m thinking, how about a single working mother whose kid has a pre-existing condition and couldn’t get on the website?” Greenfield said. “I bet she was angrier than Obama that it didn’t work. My feeling was—because he’s president in part because of his eloquence, going back to 2004, that speech—he spoke at great length about this, and, ‘Yes, it’s a great system, and it’s not working because too many people want it.’ I would have much preferred ‘We’ve blown it and we’re going to fix it.'”
Watch the full clip below, via MSNBC:
[Image via screengrab]
