Legal Commentary

Clinton Campaign Calls Out NBC

By Big Tent Democrat

By Big Tent Democrat

And they are right to. Via TPM:

This is really something. The Hillary campaign has just gone to war with MSNBC, dispatching a top Hillary adviser to launch a lacerating attack on the network on a conference call with reporters moments ago.

On the call, top Hillary adviser Howard Wolfson suggested that there's a "pattern" of reprehensible comments by MSNBC personalities, and said outright that the Hillary campaign could no longer "envision a scenario where we would debate on that network given the comments that were made and have been made."

I think any honest observer of NBC's coverage has to admit that NBC has been incredibly anti-Hillary. Greg Sargent previously wrote:

In the days before the [Super Tuesday] voting . . . an extraordinary amount of good press rained down on Barack Obama. And no network has done more to push absurdly over-the-top story-lines favorable to Obama than MSNBC has.

The network took the lead in pumping the Ted Kennedy endorsement into an event of truly cosmic significance. Chris Matthews repeatedly hailed Obama as a kind of cross between Jesus, JFK, and Muhammad Ali. One commentator after another predicted that Bill Clinton's antics would mortally wound Hillary's candidacy. In a perfect set-up to the pratfall that followed, The Washington Post's Eugene Robinson went on MSNBC and flatly predicted that last night's results would be a "repudiation of Bill Clinton." Like, not.

. . . Tom Brokaw went on MSNBC and chastised his colleagues for getting so far ahead of themselves. “Once again,” Brokaw intoned, “in all of our conventional and collective wisdom, we were wrong.” Taylor Marsh rightly noted that Brokaw was "babysitting" his MSNBC colleagues.

. . . The results repudiated the style of punditry that MSNBC traffics in, perhaps more so than any other network this cycle -- the constant speculation, the borderline-pathological obsession with Bill Clinton, the embarrassing Obama worship, the refusal to let the voters have their say.

What will make MSNBC -- and like-minded colleagues -- stop with this stuff? At this point, multiple journalistic worthies have pleaded for sanity. Brokaw did this just last night. . . . Maybe the MSNBC folks and others like them can be induced to stop this sort of stuff for Obama's sake?

As I say, any honest observer should see this. The Clinton campaign is completely right here. Keith Olbermann and Company have become a variant of the Fox Noise he so often likes to ridicule.

Full post as published by TalkLeft on February 08, 2008 (boomark / email).