Great job MSNBC! Accolades to Rachel Maddow for making her conspiratorial report on Trump’s tax returns even worse than CNN’s conspiracy theories about Malaysian Flight 370.
NBC is said to be angry with Rachel Maddow and MSNBC for their inane story about Trump’s tax returns this week. NBC allegedly found out about the ‘scoop’ when everyone else did. No one cleared it with them.
Page Six reports that NBC execs are angry with the MSNBC crew.
MSNBC is the nasty little tot to NBC. They do the dirty work NBC can’t do and it’s hard to understand why NBC would be angry unless they are merely trying to distance themselves.
Rachel Maddow likely didn’t clear it with the parent company because she didn’t want Lester Holt to rob her of her big moment.
Rachel Maddow’s humiliating Trump tax reveal actually made Geraldo’s fiasco with al Capone’s safe look not so bad. She spent about 20 minutes shooting out various silly conspiracy theories about Trump’s ties to Vlad Putin as a prelude to the big moment when the Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist presented two pages of a Trump 2005 tax return that showed Trump paid his taxes — a lot of them.
Bill O’Reilly put it aptly when he called them the SciFy channel.
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The pages mysteriously appeared in the investigative journalist’s inbox, we don’t know what inbox, maybe a home mailbox, maybe his office box, maybe his computer inbox, some box. The prize-winning journalist is actually a beat reporter who won the award for his tax code reports – he knows how to collect and read tax forms.
The media is now reporting that Trump himself put the returns into Johnston’s mailbox. If so, and it’s hardly likely, Johnston is pretty stupid to fall for that bait because the returns show Trump paid $38 million in taxes. Maddow is dumber still for making a show of it.
David Cay Johnston isn’t a famous journalist though he is acclaimed for his performance in his field and has worked for major publications for decades.
What made him somewhat famous last year was the book he wrote The Making of Donald Trump in which he portrayed Trump as a shady character. There wasn’t much new in it but certainly nothing positive.
If the exposé of Trump’s tax returns — and his subsequent conspiratorial notion that Trump had someone put them in his box — are any indication of Johnston’s credibility as an investigative journalist, he doesn’t have all that much credibility.
Rachel Maddow tweeted about an hour-and-a-half before the show on Tuesday, causing an eruption on social media. She gave a very wrong impression of what she actually had.
BREAKING: We’ve got Trump tax returns. Tonight, 9pm ET. MSNBC.
(Seriously).
— Rachel Maddow MSNBC (@maddow) March 14, 2017
With that announcement, Trump posted the two pages of tax returns to co-opt her big ‘scoop’.
Page Six of the NY Post said it has caused a battle of sorts between MSNBC and its parent corporation NBC.
“[MSNBC] announced it on Twitter, and [NBC] found out when [the general public] did,” a source reportedly said.
“[MSNBC president] Phil Griffin was trying to undermine [NBC News president] Noah Oppenheim,” the source reportedly added. “There was never a conversation. They overplayed their hand in a huge way.”
She made a fool of herself and the network which many of us think is part and parcel of what it means to be MSNBC.
“It’s their cable network, but it’s still NBC News. [NBC] did not appreciate being kept in the dark … To hype such a big story and not really deliver is a bit embarrassing. Airing a story you’ve hyped 20 minutes into your broadcast makes it a lot less of a ‘breaking news’ story,” the source told the Post.
A rep has since insisted there is no tension between the executives, they’re good friends since college or birth or something.
MSNBC’s Griffin seemed to be a tad condescending, however, when he said, “They’ve been friends for 20 years — ever since Phil hired Noah straight out of college to work on Hardball,” the NBC rep said. “They’re super tight.”
Maddow blamed the viewers for her fiasco, claiming they overreacted.
“Because I have information about the president doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily a scandal,” she said. “It doesn’t mean that it’s damning information. If other people leapt to that conclusion without me indicating that it was, that hype is external to what we did.”
That’s a cop out. She not only tweeted as if it were a big deal, not specifying she had nothing, but she spent 20 minutes hyping the nonsense before showing what she had.
The former Air America failure, Rachel Maddow, really jumped the shark with that story but she’s all MSNBC has. Phil Griffin and Noah Oppenheim aren’t going to be angry for long – they’re on the same page.
Meanwhile, Trump is considering suing MSNBC and David Cay Johnston and we wish him good luck because it is illegal to steal tax returns and the statute says it’s illegal to disclose them.
Trump weighs legal action against MSNBC over tax return release pic.twitter.com/TPBudqaEWP
— FOX & friends (@foxandfriends) March 17, 2017
