Attempting to show former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R) as a religious illiterate who doesn't understand Judaism, MSNBC host Alex Wagner this afternoon seems to have betrayed her lack of understanding about kosher dietary restrictions and what makes a kosher deli a kosher deli.
Alex Wagner
By Joseph Rossell | January 28, 2015 | 5:12 PM EST
As a blizzard threatened to bury northeastern U.S. cities with snow, MSNBC blanketed its coverage with connections to man-made climate change.
Repeatedly, the cable network which is part of NBC Universal, tried to link the snowstorm with climate change (a phrase often used synonymously with global warming) in at least five of its shows on Jan. 26. While MSNBC hosts and guests said that "scientists think" climate change could be causing more snow, some actual scientists disagreed. But those views were not represented in those MSNBC discussions.
By Curtis Houck | January 26, 2015 | 7:43 PM EST
During her MSNBC show Now on Monday, Alex Wagner had on guest Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University’s Earth Institute, who took advantage of the blizzard set to strike New York City and New England to invoke climate change and blame the “big oil industry” and Republicans for “voting down science” in a Senate vote last week.
Not to be outdone, Wagner took her own swipe at those who don’t subscribe to the view that the storm was bred by humans and climate change: “[J]ust with the flight delays, the economic impact of travel and travel cancellations, it seems like framing this sort-of changing climate in an economic context is a pretty powerful way to get people to start caring a little bit more about the changes that are happening to the Earth.”
By Matthew Balan | January 20, 2015 | 1:29 PM EST
Arsalan Iftikhar made a bigoted attack on Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal on Monday's Now with Alex Wagner on MSNBC. Iftikhar asserted that the minority Republican politician was trying to make himself more white by hyping "no-go zones" in Europe: "He might be trying to scrub some of the brown off of his skin as he runs to the right – you know, in a Republican presidential exploratory bid."
By Matthew Balan | January 7, 2015 | 7:27 PM EST
On Wednesday's Now With Alex Wagner on MSNBC, Eric Bates raised the specter of censorship by Christian conservatives during a panel discussion on the past Muslim backlash against Charlie Hebdo magazine – the target of an Islamic terrorist attack in Paris earlier in the day. Bates, a former executive editor for Rolling Stone magazine, cited Jerry Falwell's lawsuit against porn magazine Hustler in the 1980s as an apparent example of "religious fundamentalists of all stripes and of nationalities have this penchant to say, we want to be able tell you what you can and can't portray."
By Matthew Balan | November 11, 2014 | 5:37 PM EST
Alex Wagner was noticeably gleeful on her MSNBC program on Monday about Pope Francis reassigning Cardinal Raymond Burke from a prominent role at the Vatican to patron of the Knights of Malta. Wagner hyped this move as "a strong message to arch-conservatives in the Catholic Church – reform or be removed." The left-wing host later underlined that the pontiff "demoted hardline U.S. Cardinal Raymond Burke" and this was supposedly a "clear message to his [Francis's] conservative critics."
By Mark Finkelstein | October 30, 2014 | 5:26 PM EDT
Could this be the most cynical statement of the campaign season? The woman whose recent wedding President Obama attended is okay with stoking the racial fears of black Americans—if that's what it takes to drive them to the polls and secure Dem victories. Alex Wagner devoted a segment of her MSNBC show today to the naked appeals to the racial fears of black Americans that Democrats are making in campaign ads. Wagner discussed Dem ads that seek to stoke black fear toward Republicans by invoking Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown.
You might think Wagner would have condemned these ugly tactics, explicitly aimed at driving Americans apart based on their race. Think again. To the contrary, Wagner concluded the segment by saying that it shouldn't have to be the kind of threats contained in these ads that get people to vote, "but if it does, so much stronger the party is for it."
By Mark Finkelstein | October 23, 2014 | 6:10 PM EDT
On her MSNBC show today, Alex Wagner found it "surprising" and "distressing" that some were seeing the attack on the Canadian Parliament by a Muslim convert as a "terrorist act." Wagner was joined by CAIR's Nihad Awad who said that anyone claiming "that there is an islamic component" in the attack shows either "ignorance or hostility" toward Islam.
Another guest claimed the attack was "much more like ordinary crime." Right. No Islamic extremism here. Zehaf-Bibeau was probably just planning to get the Members of Parliament to empty their pockets.
By Ken Shepherd | October 20, 2014 | 7:07 PM EDT
UPDATED with correction (Oct. 22, 2014) |On her Monday afternoon program, Alex Wagner used B-roll of President Obama casting an early-voting ballot to lead into a segment whereby the MSNBC host and her guests lamented the Supreme Court's decision Saturday to allow Texas's strict voter ID law to remain in effect this election cycle. Wagner noted how a Texas federal judge earlier this month derided the state's photo ID requirement as a "poll tax." Yet the Now host and spouse of White House chef Sam Kass failed to note that the president himself had to produce valid government-issued photo ID in order to cast his ballot.
By Tim Graham | August 29, 2014 | 3:12 PM EDT
MSNBC host Alex Wagner and Sam Kass, the personal chef to the Obama family, will marry this weekend in New York with Barack and Michelle Obama in attendance. This prompted a gushing front-pager on Kass in The New York Times on Friday. The headline is “Obamas’ Foodmaster General.”
Times reporter Jennifer Steinhauer wrote Kass “found himself an astounding beneficiary of luck and timing as he blazed a trail of cruciferous vegetables into the first lady’s heart.” He’s now one of “her top policy advisers.” The Times pulled one of those amazingly selective uses of the jump to keep MSNBC off the front page of this cozy story:
By Connor Williams | August 21, 2014 | 6:31 PM EDT
Channeling Jesse Jackson’s comments earlier this week on Newsmax TV, MSNBC’s Al Sharpton argued that no circumstance justified Michael Brown being shot multiple times, using the logic that he was unarmed. This despite reports that Brown had charged and beat Officer Darren Wilson prior to the fatal shooting.
During a predictably soft interview with host Alex Wagner on the August 20 edition of Now, Sharpton insisted that “there was no life extenuating circumstances that anyone can figure out that required six bullets.” The PoliticsNation host decided to play the role of judge and jury, claiming that no one was even questioning his rush to judgment:
By Laura Flint | August 1, 2014 | 9:55 AM EDT
Although Alex Wagner has donned new glasses for her news show Now, the liberal journalist seems unable to look beyond MSNBC’s favorite response to any Republican: bringing up race. On the July 31 edition, Wagner played a clip of Ari Melber’s July 30 interview with Senators Rand Paul and Cory Booker on their new drug law reform initiative the REDEEM Act – the Record Expungement Designed to ENhance Employment Act – and then asked the co-host of The Cycle why Paul and Booker were so “reticent to take up” the issue of “racial disparities inherent in our criminal justice system” and “plumb further depths of it.”
Even though the Senators were pushing a bipartisan bill on the traditionally liberal cause of criminal justice reform, Melber and Wagner were unable to resist weaseling race into the discussion, seemingly unhappy that both politicians were unwilling to play the race game. [See video below. Click here for MP3 audio]