One of the questions that a lot of people are struggling with in America right now is how how did it happen that Donald Trump was re elected to the American presidency. There's a lot of answers to the question. There's some simple ones, some big ones. But one of the answers, and one of the causes is the absolute brokenness cynicism of America's corporate access media model. This is the warning now, in a normal time, silliness attached to
journalism is completely harmless. Fatuousness and fecklessness are no big deal. Obviously at some level. If you're the anchor person making ten million dollars a year hosting four hours of morning television, you live in a rarefied space. You are on top of the pyramid. And what comes with that is a lot of people who flatter you. When you're on top, that flattery can have a disorienting effect. It can make you diluted and disoriented. Now, Mika Brazinski is not a
bad person. Mika Brazinski is a television presenter. She's not a diplomat, she's not an elected official, she doesn't hold a position in the society. That's better More enlightened or wiser than anybody else. She is covering on a show which her husband incepted and founded, in which she became
the co host many many years ago. And this show, which I've been on many times, was fresh and exciting and completely different, and people liked it, and the conversations that were had were utterly optive, positional to all of the crapola that John Stewart confronted on shows like Crossfire when he went on and put a finger in Tucker Carlson's face and told him how bad he was for the country. Mourning Joe isn't bad for the country until
it was. Morning Joe is one of the reasons Donald Trump sits in the White House full stop.
It's indisputable.
And the reason for that is is because the prime directive of the Mourning Joe Show is not to explain things to its audience. It's not to explicate the danger and to confront it. It's to hold a position no matter what, at all costs that is proximate to power. And Mika Brazinski talks about this in her podcast with Joanna Coles and Samantha of The Daily Beast.
The freedom to have the debate and the requirement that it is civil was the key, and so my dad and mom would have often many ambassadors, senators, world leaders. We had Deng Choo ping, the leader of China to dinner at our house during the normalizations of relations with China. My father said, let's not do his date dinner at the White House. Let's do it at our farmhouse in McLean. And let me tell you something. There were so many
disasters that night because we were all stressed out. But it went really well, except for the part where I spelled caviare on him and where we didn't close the flu of the fireplace and house Scott's like. We were all so nervous. But it was an incredibly memorable historic experience and it was the greatest example actually, I guess of what it means to talk.
All of that is great.
They're nice experiences, but it doesn't have anything to do with what Mika Brazinski and Joe Scarborough were called to do, which is to tell the truth when telling the truth has consequences. Instead, what they did is flatter power and the ego of Joe Biden. Let's watch this clip. It's one of two. They tell you everything that's broken about the American news media. It's hypocrisy, it's abject dishonesty, and
its utter, absolute sneering condescension. First, let's watch Joe lie to the country before telling the American people.
You start your tape right now, because I'm about to tell you the truth, and FU if you can't handle the truth. This version of Biden, intellectually and a is the best Biden ever, not a close second. And I've known him for years. The Brazenskis have known him for fifty years. If it weren't the truth, I wouldn't say it.
Next, let's watch Don Lemon and his pack.
He also knows deep in his heart that Donald Trump couldn't find you crane on a map if you had the letter you and a picture of an actual physical crane next to it. He knows that this is, you know, an administration defined by ignorance of the world. And so that's partly him playing to their base and playing to their audience. You know, the credulous boomer rube demo that backs Donald Trump, that wants to think that that that Donald Trump's.
A smart one in there. Y'all will lead us for them.
You will lead us with your geography and your maps and your spelling, even though my math. You're reading, yeah, you're reading. You know your geography. Know in other countries lines on the map, only they me lad us know where Ukraine is.
It's appalling, it's dishonest, and it's why we have Trump. We don't need to talk about it much. It's staring us in the face.
Now.
Mika Brazinski is an accomplished woman. There is no question about that. That comes from an accomplished family with accomplished siblings, married to an accomplished man, surrounded by accomplished people. But in order to understand what it is that I'm going to talk about, you have to appreciate something that happens at the beginning of the podcast interview.
So we joined now by our beast of the week, and you know her as the co host of Morning Joe on MSNBC, where her fresh political takes wake you up faster than that first cup of coffee. Mika Brazinski, Mika who is Anything but Meek, is a fierce advocate for women's empowerment, a best selling author, and the visionary behind the Know Your Value initiative.
Is Mika Brazinski a visionary. Joanna Coles thinks so, But does that come from an objective observation or are you witnessing a transaction, a flattering of a powerful person powerful clique by another powerful person in a powerful clique that lived close to each other and practice something that they
call that I don't recognize as journalists. Joanna Coles, for example, when she took over The Daily Beast in a strategy to reinvigorate, it suggested that The Daily Beast hire a full time correspondent to cover the fabulousness of Jeff Bezos his fiance Lauren Sanchez. This matters because Jeff Bezos, the second richest guy in the world, was so scared shitless that he intervened into the Washington Post editorial process to precapitulate to Donald Trump in advance to protect his larger interests.
The issue is very simple. There are only a couple of possibilities. It is either a the case that Joe Scarborough and Mika Brazinski called Donald Trump hitler and compared Maga to the Third Reich over and over and over again, because they're frauds who thought that inciting and dividing by comparing him to Hitler would be good for them, while not meaning it, not a word of it. If they
did that, it has destroyed their credibility. Or alternatively, Mika and Joe believe that Donald Trump is Hitler, evaluated him as a fascist, and in the immediate aftermath of the election, instead of figuring out how to meet the moment having a philosophy of truth telling about how they will explain what is happening, contextualize it, bring guests on to help their audience comprehend it, what they did was fashion a capitulation campaign and went tomorrow a lago to meet with Trump,
not to get insight, not to report. There's no discernible public benefit from the meeting whatsoever, in any form or fashion that anybody anywhere on the planet Earth can articulate. The purpose of the meeting was because Mika and Joe are afraid, which was reported by Dylan Buyers accurately, precisely, and devastatingly. Let's watch Mika say that the criticism of all of this is because we're afraid.
I was trying to think through it, and I just think everyone is so scared. People, whether they're in the media or they are citizens of this great country. I think everybody is feeling scared, disoriented, fearful of the future. And I think I think, just for a quick moment, I might be like the punching bag for that, but I'd like to believe we're going to get through this.
We are at the hour of death for corporate media because running a newsroom speaking out against Trump in this moment is something that's going to require stamina, guts, and fortitude. That's not what you get at morning Joel. Now, it's interesting to watch Mika Brazinski in this interview, and I say this to somebody who has prepared presidents, prime ministers, the greatest quarterbacks of all time, senators, congressmen, ambassadors, CEOs,
you name it for all manner of interviews. Now, at the beginning of this, Mika says, I don't have much to say before going on an extended filibuster. That justifies the rationale for the capitulation.
It's my job to interview and talk to people I disagree with, feel threatened by, or who have hurt my feelings in some way. So there's how I do it. I do my job. I mean, do I really not go in there? Because he tweeted about me bleeding badly from a facelift at mar A Lago. I don't know eight nine years ago. I mean, we haven't talked in seven years, and I will say that's a problem too. So I'm worried about myself and how I conduct myself in this media universe that we're in, taking stock of
everything that has happened. I don't regret anything I've said during the campaign, and I stand by it, but I'm also looking at how to do things differently. And I would never turned down an opportunity to gain insider information never. So how I handle mean tweets or the personal stuff is that that's just not something I'm supposed to worry about. That's my job. If I let not get in the way of me doing my job. I don't think my viewers would appreciate that.
Mika went on a show and was celebrated as being a journalist by people who call themselves journalists, not Samantha Bee but Joanna Calls.
And they'd didn't.
Talk about, for example, the Secretary of Defense nominee Pete Hagsath, who's an accused rapist. Instead, they talked about the issue that matters to them, which is them not you. The justifications for the meeting fall flat because the meeting wasn't about insight. It was about as covering, which meant selling out an audience.
It depends on those.
Two people that they came to trust until it imploded, that they would tell them what was happening, and those two gave that away in this election cycle. And it's
really sad and it's really pathetic to watch. But now that it happened, it has to be called out because pretending that that is the news in a moment when there's an information crisis and somebody is trying to obliterate the checks and balances, the people who control so much of the conversation space on morning television don't get an allowance to suddenly, now in their self interest, say now
we all have to come together. Not when he's appointing Christy Nome to Homeland Security, Not when he's appointing a Katari registered agent to be Attorney General. After Pensacola, Prince Andrew flamed out. This moment Mika's right about is an urgent one. In Late Night eineteen nineties, a few years before nine to eleven, John Miller, now a CNN analyst, former New York City Deputy Police commissioner but then a journalist with ABC News traveled to the Hindu Kush in
Afghanistan to interview Osama bin Lauden. He was living in a cave. He had declared war on the United States. That journey was long, it was risky, and it was dangerous. Osama bin Laden was an evil man, a killer, but he deserved an interview, and he deserved one before he got shot in the head by Navy seal team. If a journalist could have found him, it could have gotten to him. Good for them. That's not what happened in mare A Lago. It wasn't an interview. It wasn't about
telling you what's going on. It was about vanity. In vanity and self interest is crippling the country and it made it possible for Donald Trump to take power, and in order to take it back from him, this era, a fatuousness of effecklessness where people will debase themselves and call it courage, must end.
It must.
The news business is vital in a democracy. If people cannot know, cannot tell what's real and what's not, what's dangerous and what's not because everything that they're exposed to is performative bullshittery, and no one means anything. We get to where we're at. The kaboom is the sound of the implosion of the connections between institutions and leaders and people and the American people regarding trust. Joe and Mika broke the trust and they know it, and the show
won't make it. And that's too bad, because once upon a time it was fresh. It was good, It was invigorating, and it made politics understandable, explicable, brought people together, and it was good. Wasn't because and this is the truth, if you grow up in the sunlight where you sat at a table as a kid and you spilled caviar on Deang Shaoping, then the idea that you're not at the center of a world revolving around you is anethma and the worst thing that could happen. It's not that
Hitler became president. It's that you didn't have a seated Hitler's table. And I think it's despicable. And I think the attack on the motives of critics who have pointed out the hypocrisy is absurd. I think the audience thinks
it's absurd. I think the entire business model is absurd, and the tragedy of it is that the people with conviction and principal at NBC, like Rachel Maddow, like Nicole Wallace, all of them are degraded by the debasements that have been imposed on them by colleagues who have the gall to say they get it for us, which they most certainly did not.
I'm Steve Schmidt.
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