January 3, 2019

Chris Hayes made a New Year's Resolution on Wednesday's "All In":

CHRIS HAYES: You've probably heard by now that Senator Elizabeth Warren has made it official, she will be running for President in 2020. You've also likely heard a lot of the by now standard punditizing about what it all means with various hot takes about whether she can avoid being pinned as unlikable. Or whether her drinking a beer in her kitchen was sufficiently authentic. Or whether because she didn't run in 2016 she's missed her moment. Now as someone in the business of covering and analyzing American politics, I am genuinely sympathetic to the ways in which the insatiable demands for content means a fair optics and electability, what have you, but I want to offer some advice to you, the viewer and voter and really out loud to myself as a kind of new year's resolution, as we enter the presidential campaign. Ignore that nonsense. Seriously. 2016 represented the political-media industrial complex addicted to the spectacle and personal drama and it is our job, all of our jobs, to do better this time around. So, while there will be plenty of reasons to legitimately scrutinize the political successes and failures of various candidates, their messages, strategies, approaches, inconsistencies, what should count most for us doing the covering and for you out there make bing the decisions about who to support and vote for ultimately is what the candidate's worldview is, what their platform calls for concretely, how they've conducted themselves in the past as a window into how they might be in the future, and what we can best find out about their mettle and their judgment. Who will they fight for, what will they fight for? Can they be trusted to do what they say? Everything else is noise. And trust me, there will be an awful lot of noise in the next 22 months. We're committed to try to turn down the din and listen and ask and get questions and answers about what matters.

This seems to be a shared commitment among the MSNBC prime time hosts. Lawrence O'Donnell gave a truly substantive interview to hopeful Julian Castro in December and his ground rules for the interview also reflected Haye's resolution.

We at Crooks and Liars are equally committed to "helping" you stay true to your goal, guys.

It will be easier to NOT air whole segments of an empty Trump podium because 2019 is Russiagate Summer. :D

Also, you should fire Hugh Hewitt.

Can you help us out?

For nearly 20 years we have been exposing Washington lies and untangling media deceit, but now Facebook is drowning us in an ocean of right wing lies. Please give a one-time or recurring donation, or buy a year's subscription for an ad-free experience. Thank you.

Discussion

We welcome relevant, respectful comments. Any comments that are sexist or in any other way deemed hateful by our staff will be deleted and constitute grounds for a ban from posting on the site. Please refer to our Terms of Service for information on our posting policy.
Mastodon