Joe Scarborough Literally Yells at Networks for Not Fact-Checking Trump Press Conference Lies
Joe Scarborough is mad as hell and is not going to take it anymore. And, no, that is not a glib assessment of his stirring criticism of President Donald Trump’s press conferences or exhortation of his own and fellow networks to handle what he clearly sees as dangerous lies and misinformation.
President Trump has hosted daily White House briefings that mostly cover how the federal government is handling the coronavirus outbreak that has effectively shut down the United States and most of the world as well. But Trump has received reasonable criticism for focusing less on specifics, facts, and real data, and spending precious time telling a story that critics see as clear revision history designed solely to benefit him politically, or more to the point, cover his tracks for what many have seen as a slow-to-react and dismissive approach to fighting this outbreak.
The segment above opens with clips that illustrates the notable rhetorical distance President Trump’s comments in February have compared to April. Which brought Morning Joe back to, as Scarborough noted “the president lies so much in these press conferences, I still for the life of me don’t understand why the networks, including our own, allow Donald Trump to lie for two hours to the American people, if he were giving good information, that would be one thing.”
Trump is lying to American citizens even if it’s in his own inconsistent rhetoric. Take one example from Tuesday’s press conference, the president announced that he would be “putting money on hold” to the World Health Organization, but when pressed on that comment just 15 minutes later, he denied saying that, instead claiming that he said, “we’d be looking at it.” (He did not say that he would be looking at it).
Scarborough then exhorted his own networks and others to take a more serious fact-checking approach to post-briefing analysis. And there was lots of yelling. Not hyperbolic, or ironically detached yelling. Just like Howard Beale, the fictional character in Network, Scarborough is mad as hell and isn’t going to take it anymore.
Anything else written about this segment will not do it justice and delays it being shared widely.
Watch above via MSNBC.
