Baltimore Sun media critic David Zurawik, during a discussion about the media's coverage of the terrorist attack in London, first laid into Trump for his response on Twitter and his “echo chamber” Fox News Channel for parroting his politicization of the event.
ZURAWIK: You know, we've been living in this universe for a while, but it's really problematic with an event like this. And I'll tell you something. The way those tweets, with talk of political correctness, were picked up, I watched Fox and Friends during the eight o'clock hour. Brian, and there were two people on: Nigel Farage, a contributor from the U.K. and Dan Bongino, a former Secret Service agent, and they both echoed...it was an echo chamber for Trump.
Bongino called it 'garbage political correctness,' raising the rhetoric to an angrier... that's not where we should be at this point after an event like that. Immediately... but, the interesting thing to me is that it generated out of the White House now. It's not coming from the media. It's not coming from polarizing media places. The president opens the door with his tweets and then the echo chambers jump in with it and immediately, the debate goes to the angry, partisan, really problematic level.
After Zurawik went after the yakkers over on Fox over their push for internment camps, host Brian Stelter showed a clip of them already backtracking, and Fox & Friends co-host Clayton Morris telling the audience that he and his bosses at the network do not actually support internment camps, despite the fact that they allowed several of their guests to do exactly that earlier that same morning.
Stelter then showed a tweet from MSNBC's Joe Scarborough, who criticized the networks for their endless breaking news and ambulance chasing-style coverage of these events (which I agree with, by the way). Zurawik defended the coverage, but then got in some righteous digs on Scarborough and his part in helping his buddy Orange Julius get elected in the first place.
ZURAWIK: I don't think it's worsening the problem. And any media news executive who takes advice from Joe Scarborough, needs to have his or her head examined. Because look at how his show covered Trump during the campaign.
Nobody gave Trump a bigger foothold early on than Joe Scarborough and now he hates him. He was back and forth, back and forth through the whole thing. He knows nothing about news judgment and what we should be doing. […]
His performance is not a news performance.
Amen to that, David.
