Decent Humans Tune Out MSNBC
It appears that viewers have had enough of the leftist network’s moral equivalency and anti-Israel bias.
For a moment there, MSNBC was riding relatively high. After years of bringing up the rear, the network had surpassed lowly CNN as the cable news counterweight to Fox News, and its lineup of lefties didn’t seem quite as laughable anymore — especially not after Fox News’s inexplicable decision to fire its most interesting personality, Tucker Carlson. In fact, MSNBC edged out Fox News in early June, in the wake of Donald Trump’s first indictment, breaking Fox’s 120-week streak of first-place prime-time finishes among cable news networks.
And then came The Jewish Question.
On Saturday, October 7, the barbaric Islamist hordes of Hamas attacked Israel in a well-coordinated assault, murdering more than 1,400 Israeli civilians and 30 Americans, and taking 199 others hostage.
As the bestial nature of Hamas’s crimes began filtering out, our nation’s left-leaning news networks found it harder and harder to keep from reporting the truth about the attack — the torture, the gang rape, the shooting of fleeing young concertgoers in the back, the beheading of babies, the posting of atrocities to the victims’ own social media accounts — and we began to get an accurate picture of Hamas as bloodthirsty terrorists and Israelis as innocent victims. Except at MSNBC, where the network’s natural instinct was to blame Israel first, and to create false equivalencies and bemoan the “cycle of violence” that holds both sides equally at fault.
It caught up to them. As the New York Post reports: “MSNBC — which has been slammed for refusing to refer to Hamas attackers as terrorists during its coverage — has lost 33% of its primetime viewers since the deadly attack on Israel. The cable news channel — home to anchors Rachel Maddow, Lawrence O'Donnell, and Joy Reid — saw its total viewer figures plunge 24% for the four days between Oct. 7 and 10, compared to the same period the previous week. Meanwhile, rival Fox News has gotten a 42% jolt in total viewers, and even ratings-challenged CNN saw a 17% spike as new boss Mark Thompson took the reins this week.”
Longtime news veteran Andrea Mitchell, who herself is Jewish and who ought to know better, epitomized MSNBC’s journalistic malpractice when she grotesquely asked a distraught Israeli mother, whose young sons had been abducted by Hamas while she was on the phone with them, about Israeli airstrikes in the Gaza Strip.
Distraught Israeli mom rejects Andrea Mitchell’s play for symmetry: “I can’t be sympathetic to animal human beings” pic.twitter.com/qXZ9gN3nHo
— American Wire News (@americanwire) <a href=“https://twitter.com/americanwire/status/1712234121400045649?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>October 11, 2023
“You’re looking for a symmetrical situation,” the mother replied, “and I must say, it isn’t. … I can’t be sympathetic to animal-human beings who came into my house, broke everything, stole everything, took my children from their bedrooms and took them to the Gaza Strip. Israel has never done that, and it will never do [that]. So there is no symmetry. I’m sorry.”
Perhaps the most humiliating moment for the network came when one of its fellow travelers, Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the hard-left Anti-Defamation League, unloaded on the crew of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” for their false equivalencies: “I’ll be honest,” Greenblatt said. “I am angry. I am angry with a world that allowed the dehumanization of Israelis and sanitized the terrorism of Hamas. I must say, I love this show and I love this network but I gotta ask, who is writing the scripts? Hamas, the people who did this, they are not fighters … they are not militants. And I am looking right at the camera: They are terrorists. It is a barbarian who rapes and brutalizes women, who kills children in front of their parents. … So, I just think, guys, get the story right.”
Jonathan Greenblatt of the ADL rips into MSNBC:
— Alec Sears (@alecsears) <a href=“https://twitter.com/alecsears/status/1711387973365686347?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>October 9, 2023
“Who is writing the scripts?.. The people who did this are not fighters… they are not militants…. they are terrorists.” pic.twitter.com/UkZRqsjMTx
Indeed, get the story right.
But that’s hard to do when your on-air personalities have an axe to grind. As the New York Post’s Jon Levine posted, “MSNBC employs a fleet of former Al Jazeera (Qatar state media) as on-air talent who are now commenting on Israel and making excuses for Hamas.”
As NewsBusters’s Tim Graham noted, that trio of former Al Jazeera propagandists — Mehdi Hasan, Ali Velshi, and Ayman Mohyeldin — were quietly taken off the air for their failure to call out Hamas and their tendency toward “on the one hand” equivocation. Velshi, for example, allowed a Palestinian pundit to propagandize: “I really want to caution your viewers not to be dragged into the good guy versus bad guy equation. We have to look at the bigger picture.”
We wonder: What, exactly, might that “bigger picture” be? If it’s a picture of holding the two parties in this war equally accountable — of legitimizing Hamas terrorists as “fighters” and “militants” rather than murdering dogs, of failing to draw distinctions between Israeli forces who go to great lengths to reduce civilian casualties and Hamas terrorists who use the innocent as human shields — then decent and thoughtful people will want no part of it.
