The establishment press, which clearly planned to push the idea that anyone who isn't in their club is producing "fake news" just before and after last year's presidential election, never expected that the label could and would be so successfully pointed back at them to the point that they're now stuck with it.
That they still don't get it was demonstrated with Friday morning's Morning Joe show on MSNBC, as the hosts and cast faked a live presentation, complete with contrived conversations about how everyone's Thanksgiving dinners went — even though the show was actually pre-taped on Wednesday.
Tipped off by a "flabbergasted" viewer, Paul Farhi at the Washington Post covered the story with a headline that didn't need a question mark (bolds are mine):
‘Morning Joe,’ did you really just pretape your post-Thanksgiving banter?
... The program that aired Friday morning was taped Wednesday, but made to look and sound as if it was airing live.
Friday’s program had all the earmarks of a typical “Morning Joe” and few viewers seemed to notice that it wasn’t happening in real time. MSNBC offered no announcement or statement to viewers that it was a taped program. The only indirect clue was at the bottom of the screen: The “Live” graphic that normally appears was removed.
The rest was cooked up to appear as if it was happening in real time.
"Cooked" is right, as we shall see:
Brezinski (pictured at right with Scarborough) opened the program by saying, “Day after Thanksgiving! Hoo! I’m stuffed.”
The second segment picked up the after-holiday theme.
“I always cook the turkey with the guts in it!” said Brzezinski.
“Joe didn’t notice. He ate the bag,” quipped co-host Willie Geist, pretending that Scarborough had consumed Brzezinski’s theoretical turkey.
“It was good!” said Scarborough. He added, “Well, you know, the game made up for it ...”
... The panel then swung into a discussion of the pedophile controversy surrounding Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore.
So far, we've seen lies about having already eaten Thanksgiving dinner and having already watched Thanksgiving football. (Astute observers might have noticed that the NFL had three games on Thursday, leaving one to wonder which "game" was the subject of Scarborough's comment. It would be easy to guess the New York Giants-Washington Redskins contest, but even the Associated Press called it a "turkey of a Thanksgiving game.")
Farhi noted a more serious shortcoming:
The illusion that the discussion was live was fostered by the news crawl at the bottom of the screen, which was added over the taped discussion, and a clock showing the time in various time zones.
The hosts never got around to talking about Friday’s morning’s biggest story, the deadly terrorist attack on a mosque in Egypt — because it hadn’t happened yet when they taped. The crawl mentioned it.
... an executive confirmed that the program wasn’t live. “There was no intention to trick viewers,” she said. “Would it have helped if there was a disclaimer,” referencing it as a delayed broadcast? “Maybe. But that’s not typically done.”
As is, she said, “They’re having fun” with the pretense that it’s live.
There are many ways to have fun, but most of them don't involve deliberately lying to your audience.
Note that Joe, Mika et al effectively decided two days in advance that Roy Moore, who may have been the big story on Wednesday, would still the big story on Friday, and therefore that any subsequent news, no matter how important, would not be worthy of discussion. That conveniently fits the press's agenda, doesn't it?
As seen here, the crawl during the fake-live show also included the story of Iran sending warships to the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico — a Wednesday afternoon development which one would have expected the early Friday Morning Joe show to address.
Oh, and one more thing: Joy Behar was a guest on the Friday show which was taped Wednesday. At the end of the segment in which she appeared, Scarborough told her, “Joy, you have a show to get to.”
Friday's The View was a repeat of the show which originally aired on October 6.
Earlier this year, the Morning Joe crew suggested that President Trump decrying the media as "fake news" would somehow enable a terrorist attack.
So we've gone from establishment press presentations containing some fake news to entire fake broadcasts.
Farhi's informant was not pleased: "I was quite flabbergasted by the way they were so deceptive about this .... especially when they are always so quick to castigate lying [or] deception they attribute to others."
Amen.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
