Appearing on MSNBC's Jose Diaz-Balart on Thursday, former talk show host and retired Marine Montel Williams scolded the Obama administration for not taking action to free Marine Sergeant Andrew Tahmooressi, held in a Mexican prison for six months on a trumped up weapons charge: "...what I found out was extremely disturbing....Jill Tahmooressi has had a son in prison for six months who is ill. No one from the White House has reached out to her to say, 'We're going to do something.' The State Department hasn't even called her directly to say, 'We're going to do something.'"
Williams, who testified on behalf of Tahmooressi at a congressional hearing on Wednesday, pointed out the President's hypocrisy on the issue: "Remember, when [Sergeant Bowe] Bergdahl was let out, the President said he did so because he was in imminent risk of medical danger. Sergeant Tahmooressi's in the same position. The President should do the same thing. And not trade anybody, just make the call to the president of Mexico." [Listen to the audio]
Jose Diaz-Balart
Sergeant Andrew Tahmooressi has been jailed in a Mexican prison for the past nine months for accidentally crossing the U.S.-Mexico border with several firearms. Since his arrest, the “big three” (ABC, CBS, and NBC) networks have barely covered his story on their morning or evening newscasts despite the numerous efforts by the public to get him freed. On Wednesday, Sergeant Tahmooressi’s mother appeared before a House committee asking Congress to support a resolution calling for her son’s safe return to the United State and unsurprisingly all three network morning newscasts ignored her upcoming testimony on Capitol Hill.
Last week, an Oklahoma man beheaded a former coworker after losing his job, but NBC, and its sister channel MSNBC, have ignored the role that his conversion to Islam may have played in the brutal murder. After NBC failed to acknowledge Alton Nolen’s Muslim faith during its sole report on Friday night, a Monday morning news brief on the murder by MSNBC’s Jose Diaz-Balart also ignored the murderer’s recent conversion to Islam.
Of all the names that it would be embarrassing for an MSNBC network host to blank on, Rick Perry's would have to be at the top of the list. How countless many times has the Lean Forward network had fun at Perry's expense over his "whoops" moment during a 2012 presidential debate?
But that unfortunate fate befell Jose Diaz-Balart today, hosting his own new MSNBC show. The topic was the way in which Ted Cruz and Perry would potentially fight over Texas donor dollars if they were to both run for president. Diaz-Balart got Cruz's name without problem, but when it came time for Perry's, Diaz-Balart stumbled multiple times before giving up and just generically referencing him as the "Governor of Texas." Whoops indeed! View the video after the jump.
In a testament to how slanted MSNBC's coverage of the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri has been, Democratic state senator and left-wing bomb-thrower Maria Chappelle-Nadal praised the channel's activist coverage of the story during an appearance on Monday's Jose Diaz-Balart: "I have to tell you that because your network has been here, a lot of truths have come to light. If the national media was not here, everything would be brushed under the rug....we would not be able to hear the stories of police officers who have called us and treated us like animals." [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]
Chappelle-Nadal proclaimed: "So what I would say nationally is this is the time to have an honest and frank conversation. This is the time to have cultural engagement." On August 14, her idea of "cultural engagement" was tweeting "F**K you" to Governor Jay Nixon over his handling of the protests following the shooting death of Michael Brown.
International human trafficking is a lucrative, exploitative, and deadly criminal enterprise, often operated by ruthless drug cartels who don’t mind branching out into sex trafficking. So it was a little shocking that Jose Diaz-Balart gave a platform to a fellow journalists who evinced some sympathy for the plight of the smugglers.
On the August 14 edition of his eponymous MSNBC program, Diaz-Balart hosted Telemundo’s Julio Vaqueiro, who discussed his recent interview with “a coyote, a member of an international crime syndicate set up to smuggle people across the border.” At no point, however, did Diaz-Balart protest Vaqueiro’s portrayal of the criminal as a necessary helper to “migrants who are putting their lives at risk just to get a better life here in the United States.” [See transcript below. Click here for MP3 audio]
On Tuesday Morning, MSNBC and Telemundo anchor Jose Diaz-Balart brought a guest on his MSNBC show to discuss the targeted killing and persecution of Christians in Iraq at the hands of the ultra-Islamic terrorist group ISIS. The guest, Mark Arabo, who serves as the national spokesman for the Chaldeans, (the sect of Iraqi Christians facing ISIS’s terror), told Diaz-Balart that the actions of ISIS are that of “a full-blown genocide” in targeting 400,000 Christians in Iraq.
When asked by Diaz-Balart for his take on the actions of the Obama administration so far in Iraq, Arabo said that he and the Iraqi community in Southern California near San Diego (which is the second largest in the country) first “sounded this alarm from San Diego eight weeks ago and we’ve been as clear as we are today: This is a full-blown genocide.” [MP3 audio here; Video below]
Ronan Farrow could barely contain his glee on his August 7 program at being able to work an odd twist in a border-crisis story that ensured the segment was a two-fer involving illegal immigrants and, wait for it, the transgendered.
As “schools across the country are bracing for up to 50,000" “undocumented migrants” -- MSNBC no longer refers to them as immigrants, let alone illegal ones -- the host of Ronan Farrow Daily reports, “an interesting wrinkle" has occurred in the form of Marichuy Leal Gamino, “an undocumented transgender woman held in custody with men.” [See video below. Click here for MP3 audio]
On his MSNBC show Tuesday morning, Jose Diaz-Balart invited on conservative commentator and film maker Dennis Michael Lynch to discuss a series of documentaries he has made that are critical of U.S. immigration policy and illegal immigration. From the start of the segment, it was clear that Diaz-Balart would be at odds with Lynch’s viewpoints and only grew to the point where he hounded Lynch on whether illegal immigrants have committed terrorist attacks on U.S. soil.
After airing an excerpt from one of the documentaries highlighting concerns about illegal immigrants causing a competition for jobs with American citizens, Diaz-Balart told Lynch that “there are a lot of studies from both the left and right that show that undocumented immigrants don’t take American jobs” and asked him why he thought this was not the case. [MP3 audio here; Video below]
On the Monday edition of his MSNBC show, Jose Diaz-Balart rolled out the red carpet for liberal activists in favor of amnesty by broadcasting from the National Council of La Raza’s (NCLR) conference in Los Angeles. This included inviting an illegal immigrant activist to promote her agenda and pushing another guest to blame House Republicans for the lack of immigration reform. Oh, and he failed to mention that the NCLR was giving him an award at the conference’s closing gala.
Towards the end of a second segment on immigration (more on the first later), he was congratulated by the NCLR’s Clarissa Martinez de Castro for something neither Diaz-Balart nor his guests mentioned. What was the "congratulations" for? Well, turns out, the congratulations was for the NCLR selecting him to receive the Ruben Salazar Award for Communication, which is given “each year to an outstanding communications professional dedicated to portraying news relevant to US Hispanics.” With this being the only mentioning of it on his show (and a vague one at that), talk about a major conflict of interest. [MP3 audio here; Video below]
Talking to MSNBC's Jose Diaz-Balart on Friday, Los Angeles Times reporter Sonia Nazario demanded that tens of thousands of unaccompanied illegal immigrant children from Central America be allowed to stay in the U.S. and condemned anyone opposed to the idea: "Because if you put this decision of sending these children back in the hands of the Border Patrol, many of these children who really should be protected by our government will instead be hurtled back to these countries where they will die. And we will have blood on our hands." [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]
On the third day of José Díaz-Balart, the latest program to enter the Lean Forward network’s lineup, the former Telemundo host began the July 16 edition with a 9 minute discussion of the immigration crisis. Díaz-Balart, who in a TVNewser blog claimed that his show was “about opening up lines of dialogue, opening up to other communities, opening up to other thoughts across the board,” gave 6 minutes and 43 seconds of air time to liberal immigration advocates.
Of the 9 minutes and 33 seconds of discussion, 15 seconds were given to the opposing point of view by two random protesters in Oracle, Arizona. [See video below. Click here for MP3 audio]