Morning Joe’s Crusade Against Political Division Is Like Marlboro’s Against Lung Cancer

Joe Scarborough and his colleagues at Morning Joe devoted a sizable segment on Wednesday to lamenting political division.

Tracing the ideological sorting of the parties and political polarization back to the 1990s and Rush Limbaugh’s radio show, Scarborough blasted the late commentator for pioneering a “pointed” kind of “infotainment” that was “ideologically boxed off from the rest of the world” and emulated by cable news.

“So now you could listen to what you wanted to listen to to reinforce all of your views on radio, then you could go home at night, watch it on television, and then of course by the late 90s people were really getting more on the internet,” continued Scarborough, who then came close achieving some semblance of self-awareness.

“We should look at the media, we should look at ourselves, we should look at the world that was created starting in the early 1990s and see the sorting,” he offered.

But shortly after Willie Geist argued that conservative media often failed to include “the facts” in its reporting and noted that “just telling the audience what it wants to hear, that is what sells, whether it’s ratings or clicks or anything else,” Scarborough revealed that he of course sees himself as part of the solution, not the problem.

“You know our numbers, we were the number one show, I guess in August, is this right, Alex? We were the number one show in the morning on all of cable news, all of cable news,” boasted Scarborough — before attributing that feat to his supposed fairness:

More than ESPN, more than I don’t know, home garden network, USA, whatever, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, I mean that doesn’t just happen in a vacuum, that happens because people are coming, they hear you and me talk about not only Donald Trump and the problems with Donald Trump, they hear us talking about how Joe Biden screwed up Afghanistan, how he needs to get serious with the southern border, how we’re sick and tired of watching cities, a lot of cities but not all of them run by liberal DAs descend into crime and madness..”

Joe Scarborough’s case for being a crusader against political division should be taken as seriously as a pack of Marlboro reds’ for being a crusader against lung cancer.

Of course the occasional Democrat takes heat on a show that runs for four hours, five days a week. But the program is, by and large, designed to delight MSNBC’s progressive audience.

Panels are almost exclusively filled with guests who leap to the defense of Democrats and jump down the throats of Republicans. Take one comprised of Jonathan Lemire, two Democratic congressmen, and the Washington Post‘s Eugene Robinson last month assembled to address the damning testimony of Hunter Biden’s business associate Devon Archer last month as an example.

No one could so much as bring themselves to admit that a sitting vice president should not have hopped on frequent conference calls with his son’s business partners.

“We should put this in context, this is a time when Beau Biden, the president’s other son was ill and then dying,” said Lemire.

“I think it’s pretty clear there is nothing there,” insisted Robinson.

“Joe Biden was doing nothing to benefit his son,” asserted Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY) in spite of the almost textbook example of influence peddling before him.

And yet, when a conservative’s name comes up, the seemingly bottomless well of charity dries up instantaneously.

Republican Senate candidate Mehmet Oz learned as much last year when he pledged not to vote for a national abortion ban during a debate with John Fetterman, a supporter of abortion on demand until birth. Last October, Scarborough twisted Oz’s position beyond recognition in an effort to portray him as the radical one, pillorying Oz for supposedly “talking about people in the Water Management District making decisions about life or death, life-or-death decisions on rape, incest, life of the mother.”

What Oz had actually said was “I am not gonna support federal — federal rules that block the ability of states to do what they wish to do. The abortion decision should be left up to states,” and “I want women, doctors, local political leaders, letting the democracy that’s always allowed our nation to thrive to put the best ideas forward so states can decide for themselves.”

No honest observer could possibly construe these statements — as Scarborough did — to mean that Oz “wanted the Parks and Recreation people to make decisions on the local level for abortions.” But Scarborough, who once voted for a federal ban on late-term abortions, had an audience to please and Democrats to help elect.

Such distortions are typical of the eponymous host.

Morning Joe is not the driving force behind polarization, but its turn toward rank partisanship in recent years is both a symptom and one of many contributing factors to its worsening.

Scarborough is free to delight in his ratings success and the wealth it means for him and his cohorts. But he shouldn’t delude himself — or fool anyone else — into thinking he’s doing anything other than pandering to his own ideologically-sorted audience.

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

New: The Mediaite One-Sheet "Newsletter of Newsletters"
Your daily summary and analysis of what the many, many media newsletters are saying and reporting. Subscribe now!