MSNBC Host Slams "Cheeto Eating" Bloggers For Highlighting Use Of White House Talking Points

“It’s actually called reporting” according to Joe Scarborough
Steve Watson
Prison Planet
Jun. 22, 2010

Following our article highlighting the use of a file of White House talking points by MSNBC Morning Joe host Mika Brzezinski, her co-host Joe Scarborough hit back today, describing it as “reporting”.

Brzezinski yesterday admitted that she was reading from White House talking points she had been advised to include in MSNBC news programming regarding the ongoing BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Ironically, it was only following repeated raillery from Scarborough and the other guests on the show that Brzezinski admitted she had been “working with the White House” on a file of talking points:

“You keep reading these… you keep reading these… these…”

“White House talking points.” said Brzezinski, finishing Scarborough’s sentence.

“You keep reading these talking points,” Scarborough continued, “but there is no evidence whatsoever, from looking through all the evidence, that they had from the very beginning, that they had for the first 56 days a concerted plan and a war room to fix this.”

“Do you want to know why I have a file that I’ve been working on with the White House--and I’ll be very transparent about that?” Brzezinski, said.

“Because of your friend Rudy Giuliani who came here last week spewing out a whole bunch of nothing.”

It seems that following that interview with Giuliani, in which he was overtly critical of Obama’s handling of the spill, Mika, the daughter of Trilateral Commission co-founder and and former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, was called to the White House to work on oil spill talking points.

Today, however, Scarborough changed his tune somewhat, following Infowars coverage of the incident, in addition to blogs at Newsbusters.org and a video posting at Breitbart.tv:

“Mika yesterday, she gets pounded by--you know, I won’t even call them names--because then they’ll say ‘Scarborough called us mwa mwa mwa’ while they’re eating the Cheetos.” the MSNBC host said.

“But bloggers said oh, Mika is just reading White House talking points. Well, it’s actually called reporting.” Scarborough continued. “We asked. Because Rudy came on here and said [Obama] hasn’t talked to any industry people, and so I said, let’s call the White House and get a list of all the meetings. And that’s exactly what we did. And we got the list. And it said that actually he had been reaching out to industry types from the beginning. And so, we read the list. Now, we read the list differently. Mika interpreted it one way and I another…”

Watch the video:

So, according to Scarborough, this is now what real reporting is – going to the White House and asking them what they would like passed off as news.

MSNBC could have asked a White House representative to come on to the program and address Rudy Giuliani’s comments, clearly putting the other side of the story across to the viewer. That would have been real reporting. But no.

It is precisely because of the distinct lack of real reporting on MSNBC’s behalf that blogs and alternative media outlets have to fill in the gaps.

No Joe Scarborough, what you are doing is not “actually reporting” – it is repeating, and no amount of Cheeto munching name calling will change that.

As we continue to highlight, the fact that corporate TV outlets are openly writing scripts and editing news and entertainment content to incorporate government propaganda, added to the fact that they act like this is some kind of wonderful service to the American people, is a damning indictment of just how deep the alphabet soup networks are in the pocket of the establishment.

It also underscores exactly why they are losing viewers to the Internet and alternative media at an alarming speed while constantly attacking and attempting to smear grassroots outlets as untrustworthy, and even as violent and racist.

MSNBC has become the most pro-establishment network over the past two years, picking up the mantle from Fox news, which ran similar shows for eight years depicting the alternative media and anti-establishment figures as dangerous left wing communists while George W. Bush was in office.

MSNBC is the epitome of the controlled corporate mainstream media, being as it is 80% owned by General Electric, operated by military industrial complex giant General Dynamics, whose primary business comes from supplying arms and weapons systems to the US government and its international allies.

News in the form of government talking points from an arms dealer owned monolithic corporation is not “actually reporting”.

Give me the Cheeto munchers any day.