“Morning Joe” co-host and former Republican Congressman Joe Scarborough declared, “the mainstream media is going to have to realize that they are embarrassing themselves in 2015, because all they do is hire liberals” on Monday.
Scarborough said, “90% of the people that have moderated these debates over the past 50 years have never voted in a Republican primary, and as a Republican, after a while, you get sick and tired of it.”
Panelist Willie Geist agreed that such bias does come across in both the way questions are asked, and the topics that are emphasized, but that isn’t sure what the solution is.
Scarborough added that Democrats would object “if I were moderating the debate for you [Mike Barnicle] and other liberal in Massachusetts, and my first question is ‘Mike, do you know that at six months a little baby inside a mother’s womb has,’ and then I go into details about that. Do you really think you should stop a beating heart, Mike Barnicle, and murder the baby, and then harvest its organs? Do you really think that’s a good thing? Okay, and then that’s the first question, and the next question is, I do a set up about how somebody was slaughtered, and they didn’t have a gun because they had a five-day waiting period.”
After Barnicle said that presidential candidates shouldn’t be “so offended by debate moderators,” Scarborough requested to moderate debates in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Berkeley, California, and “Democrats would never put up with having you and me [Scarborough and Matt Lewis] and Charles Krauthammer moderate the next 20 Democratic debates over the next five years.”
Scarborough did say there were some “valid questions that the candidates just lied about.”
He then pointed out that even respected news anchors were liberals, and “we Republicans have been forced to define objective as people who are objective Democratic voters.”
Scarborough then asked who, aside from Brit Hume, has been a conservative and held a powerful position in mainstream media.
After Bloomberg Politics Managing Editor Mark Halperin pointed to John McWethy of ABC News, Mika Brzezinski remarked, “that’s digging deep, baby.”
Scarborough responded, “you can’t do it, and nobody here can do it, name the single Republican that has hosted a Sunday show, that has been an anchor of a news network, for the big three networks, over the past 50 years. You cannot do it.”
Halperin pointed to former “Fox News Sunday” host Tony Snow, which prompted Brzezinski to say he was “digging” again.
Halperin did say, “I agree with you 100%. … there’s huge liberal media bias, not just in the examples you’ve given, but in less prominent people.” But contended that moderators should be objective journalists.
Scarborough countered, “You can’t, because they’re all Democrats.” He continued, “the definition of objective for we Republicans is, we put up with the BS, and a cultural slant, and the cultural bias…at some point the mainstream media is going to have to realize that they are embarrassing themselves in 2015, because all they do is hire liberals to run Sunday shows and nightly news.”
Halperin and Geist again stated that it should be about finding fair journalists, but Halperin told Scarborough “I agree with you about the widespread liberal media bias. I’ve said it my whole career. Everything you’re saying I think is right, and I understand why conservatives feel that way.” He did continue that there are people, such as Geist who aren’t biased and can be fair, and there should be tough questions asked by unbiased people.
After Barnicle said that if there were fair moderators, Republicans couldn’t run against the media, Brzezinski agreed, and Scarborough said running against the media never works.
He added, “The entire process is rigged against us, because liberal network heads would never, ever dream of allowing, like say, Brit Hume 10 years ago, to run ‘NBC Nightly News,’ or to run ‘CBS Evening News.’ They would never dream it, because there’s such a built in left-wing bias.” Although, he did add Les Moonves of CBS is an exception to this.
Scarborough also said that when there was talk of him and Brzezinski hosting the “Today” show, an executive told him, “Oh, you can’t do that, you’re a Republican. You’re too political.”
(h/t Daily Caller)
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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