Pile of MSNBC Hosts Go to White House for Coffee Talk with Obama

December 20th, 2011 8:40 AM

On his blog Political Punch, ABC's Jake Tapper reported "an all-star list of progressive and liberal media folks" had coffee with President Obama in the Roosevelt Room on Monday -- including MSNBC hosts Ed Schultz, Rachel Maddow, and Chris Hayes. In the Bush years, it was considered a major scandal for Roger Ailes to send a note to the White House, but MSNBC stars meet with Obama, and it's just another day of "hope and change."

Tapper added the conversation included Obama's economic messaging, fighting corporate influence in politics, the Obama agenda for 2012, the arguments against different GOP candidates, the desire among some Democrats for Obama to highlight his foreign policy accomplishments, and "the 'crappiness' of the Senate filibuster , as one attendee put it." The fairly nonpartisan blog Inside Cable News also underlined "frequent MSNBC contributors Ezra Klein and Joy-Ann Reid" and doesn't like the chumminess of  it all:

 

All I’ll say is that if that many of FNC’s hosts and contributors had shown up at the same time for a Bush chat, it would be all over the web and probably the media as well. I don’t like it. It makes me uncomfortable for MSNBC to let that many of its people have open access to the President. It may be innocuous but at the very least it looks bad/smells fishy, especially when we don’t really know what goes on at these things beyond the most cursory of summaries.

The list also included Washington Post blogger Greg Sargent, Frank Bruni of The New York Times, Nation magazine editor/publisher Katrina Vanden Heuvel, and “stars of the interwebs Arianna Huffington, Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo, [and] Faiz Shakir of ThinkProgress.”