And she is being called out. More please.
In brief, one of MSNBC’s anchor, Ayman Mohyeldin was chastised by correspondent Kelly O’Donnell when he said this:
“We know the president has always had a preference for immigrants from Nordic countries,” Mohyeldin added. “He’s made that very clear as opposed to other more disadvantaged countries. Walk us through the impact on these immigrants. Why now?”
Her rebuke of him was on air:
“I don’t know that the president has expressed a preference for Nordic countries,” she replied. “That is something where I’m not sure where you’re getting that from. He certainly said he has an emphasis on merit-based immigration. And he has talked about that extensively. So that matches up to his rhetoric.”
Mohyeldin did not push back on air. But chef Tom Colicchio did and Mohyeldin thanked him. See the exchange and full story here:
www.thedailybeast.com/...
How does a reporter of O’Donnell’s standing forget Trump’s remark that we need less immigrants from “shit hole countries and more from places like Norway?” The answer is, she didn’t forget at all. Even after being called out, she doubled down and said this:
“Of course I know the reference but there is a difference between something said in private meeting and today’s actual public policy proposal,” she wrote on Twitter after Colicchio highlighted Trump’s comments. “I try to stick to what we can report and not a flip comment.”
A freaking “flip comment?!?!?!”
This dog couldn’t hunt with an entire posse of horses and bugles behind it. O’Donnell knows as do we all that Trump does almost nothing BUT tweet “flip comments,” not to mention there hasn’t been a press secretary or White House press core meeting in how long?! How would we know what’s policy and what’s not?
In this time of daily outrages it may seem this is a very small one. But I took the time to write this diary because I believe O’Donnell represents the worst problem we have with the media today.
Has she become so numb to Trump she actually considers his statement just a “flip comment” not an out and out, completely, totally, absolutely, racist remark?
From what I’ve seen of her, she seems a pretty straight down the line reporter and I have not seen her do this kind of thing before, but perhaps some of you have. Maybe after reporting on the White House for so long she’s caught the no-can-mea-culpa disease. Or she’s stuck in some way back machine of journalistic rules in a time when what she should be covering is how often the rules are being broken. Or maybe she’s just pissed off someone called her out. I don’t really care why.
What I do care about is that this is just one example of the media’s never ending tempering of Donald Trump. Then we have Biden and his gaff last Friday, and it’s all over the place. See today’s ARP for that story. This tweet selected by Greg Dworkin is exactly what it’s about:
A problem for Biden is, when you make a racist statement by mistake (i.e., a gaffe) reporters can talk about it a lot without considering themselves biased. But when Trump makes a racist statement on purpose, pointing out that fact is considered biased reporting by many reporters
Bingo. Took just an hour or two for the perfect example of this to pop right up.
I’m not saying it’s all of the media. I’m saying it’s too many of them. I do think it’s gotten better, but far from good. And I think Ms. O’donnell needs a twitter reminder of that, or a thousand of them.