MSNBC Supports Mandatory Drug Testing for Welfare Recipients

According to MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow’s journalistic *ahem* standards, her own left-wing network, MSNBC, supports mandatory drug testing for Florida welfare recipients. Of course this is no truer than making the claim that the Koch brothers support this legislation. But that didn’t stop Maddow and MSNBC from intentionally smearing the Kochs with the false claim.   

Powerline’s John Hinderaker explains the diabolical logic Maddow used to tell this lie about the Kochs and discovered that if you apply MSNBC’s own journalistic logic to MSNBC, you can make the claim that the Lean Forward network also supports mandatory drug testing for welfare recipients.

After firing off an email for comment to Koch Industries less than an hour before her show, Maddow chose not to wait for the facts and told her audience the fairy tale that the “Koch brothers . . . have been promoting forced drug tests for people on welfare.”

Maddow’s claim is that the Florida Foundation for Government Accountability (FFGA) promoted the mandatory drug testing.

Maddow referred to the FFGA as a “Koch brothers affiliated group.”

The Kochs, however, have no relationship with the FFGA.

The Kochs have, though, donated to an organization known as the State Policy Network.

FFGA is merely a member of the State Policy Network.

The State Policy Network had nothing to do with backing or promoting the legislation in question.

Regardless, according to Hinderaker, guess who else has joined the Kochs in contributing to the State Policy Network? Among others, Microsoft, Facebook, AT&T, Time Warner Cable, and Comcast.

According to Maddow’s logic, each of those companies is just as guilty as the Kochs of wanting to force drug tests on welfare recipients.

But one of those companies, Comcast owns MSNBC.

So according to MSNBC’s own journalistic standards, MSNBC is every bit as guilty of backing legislation to mandate drug testing for welfare recipients as the “evil” Koch brothers.

Koch Industries has requested a retraction from MSNBC.

The train wreck that is MSNBC just got train-wreckier. Apparently, Rachel Maddow is supposed to be the grown up over there, but as Hinderaker asks, if she is the best they got “MSNBC is in even deeper trouble than its steep ratings decline would indicate.”

In just a couple of months the left-wing cable news network has lost two anchors — Martin Bashir and Alec Baldwin — over outrageous comments; anchor Toure has attacked a black CNN anchor as a “white leader”; anchor Melissa Harris-Perry has compared the word “ObamaCare” to the N-word and lied about its origins, and hosted a segment that mocked Mitt Romney’s infant grandson.

MSNBC’s response to all this has been a defiant refusal to change their editorial policies.

 

Follow  John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC