MSNBC’s Ari Melber tonight criticized the media narrative surrounding the “blue wave,” and even threw a little shade at a cable news competitor.
Melber claimed it was a big wave overall, first bringing up comments from James Carville (made on MSNBC) downplaying the idea of a blue wave before showing how large the 2018 wave was when put in historical perspective.
“If these facts we have been reporting depart from what you hear elsewhere this week,” Melber said, “that’s because Donald Trump and his allies have been downplaying and lying about the results.”
But it wasn’t just Republicans and Fox Newsers downplaying the blue wave, he noted, and that’s when the clip of Tapper came in.
On election night at one point, Tapper said, “When you look at what’s going on here tonight, this is not a blue wave. This is not a wave that is knocking out all sorts of Republican incumbents.”
“That was on election night,” Melber said. “Did we hear that right?”
He ran the clip again before saying, “The point here is not which particular people missed the wave or hyped early predictions instead of waiting to see what the voters actually said. You could see the headlines, some of the best outlets in the press did that, including the Washington Post, and we rely on their reporting all the time. All of this matters because some in the media still don’t get it.”
(One of the headlines in particular he called out belonged to New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, an MSNBC contributor.)
The media’s problem in 2016, Melber argued, was not in predicting the wrong election outcome, but in predicting in the first place in place of actually listening.
Tapper did say later on election night that the Democrats taking the House would definitely be a “big problem for President Trump going forward.” And, of course, Tapper was far from the only one on cable news who have expressed doubts about the extent of the “blue wave.”
Watch above, via MSNBC.
[image via screengrab]
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