Jimmy Carter Repeats Wage Gap Myth on ‘Morning Joe’ Appearance; MSNBCers Fail to Correct Record

March 24th, 2014 1:18 PM

President Jimmy Carter must watch a lot of MSNBC because he did an excellent job pushing their liberal talking points. The Georgia Democrat appeared on the March 23rd “Morning Joe” to promote his latest book and subsequently repeated MSNBC’s liberal agenda.  

Appearing on Monday, Carter falsely claimed that “Women get about 23% less pay for men for the same job" an incorrect statistic that MSNBC has been peddling across the network as of late. [See video below.]

Carter then doubled down on his comments and argued that “Of the Fortune 500 companies, only 25 of them have women as executive officers and they get about 42% less pay than men and so forth. So in the United States, it's very bad.” Unfortunately, no one on the “Morning Joe” set, including Joe Scarborough bothered to correct the former president’s lie that women get paid 23 percent less than men.

MSNBC’s willingness to agree with Carter should come as no surprise given that Mika Brzezinski took to the airwaves last week to push that same lie. On March 18, Brzezinski bemoaned that “of course women get paid 77 cents for every dollar men earn for the same exact job so it's something that needs to be rectified obviously.

On March 19, MSNBC’s Al Sharpton appeared on “Morning Joe” to further the MSNBC lie when he claimed that, “It’s painful. I mean when you look at how they are avoiding the issue. The issue is 77 cents to a dollar women to men in the country.” Later that afternoon, Ronan Farrow continued to push the narrative by incorrectly arguing that “Across the nation, women working full-time are still paid just 77 percent of what men are paid.”

This statistic has been refuted numerous times, yet MSNBC, and now President Carter, refuse to acknowledge that they are hyping a bogus statistic to claim women get paid 23 percent less than men. MSNBC’s attempts to portray conservatives as engaging in a “war on women” has now stretched into promoting false statistics to scare their viewers into thinking women are being paid less than men.
 

See relevant transcript below.


MSNBC

Morning Joe

March 24, 2014

7:27 a.m. Eastern

JOE SCARBOROUGH: We have so much to talk about, let’s start though, with “The Call to Action.” This is such an extraordinary book. You and Mrs. Carter, you guys have visited 145 countries because of the remarkable work that the Carter Center has done through the years, remarkable work. Won a Nobel Prize for your post presidency. Talk about what you now call the greatest -- really the greatest moral threat in this world right now? I think you said it's the most serious and unaddressed worldwide challenge that we're facing?

JIMMY CARTER: Well, it’s the most gross abuse of human rights on Earth and it is basically unaddressed because a lot of people don't want to look at it and they don't want to commit what is going on with women. It's bad enough in the United States where we discriminate against women grossly every day and where there are multiple rapes and sexual abuses on the campuses of our great universities and in the military, as you well know. Women get about 23% less pay for men for the same job. Of the Fortune 500 companies, only 25 of them have women as executive officers and they get about 42% less pay than men and so forth. So in the United States, it's very bad.