‘Morning Joe’ Slams Hunter Pardon Coverage: ‘So Hysterically Imbalanced’

BRZEZINSKI: “I also think that no matter what you think of this pardon, the coverage of this is as if — I mean, you look at what has happened on the Trump side, especially if you even parallel pardons that Trump has done himself, it’s just always so — it seems so hysterically imbalanced. I just — you know, when you read how they’re covering this and then you look at the things that are happening on the other side, it is, again, completely out of step with reality.”
SCARBOROUGH: “And, Dave, that’s something that you’re hearing. I know you’re not a media critic, but I know you’ve heard this complaint. You know, The New York Times, like, the top six stories online today were all about the pardon. You looked at The Washington Post yesterday, you expected, like, ‘WAR IS OVER’ in massive headlines.”
BRZEZINSKI: “Right.”
SCARBOROUGH: “On the same day, Donald Trump said he’s going to nominate a guy who said he had an enemies list he was going to go after and he was going to arrest journalists. I don’t remember headlines this large when Donald Trump commuted the sentence of Roger Stone, then let him run the Stop the Steal — help the Stop the Steal campaign, and then pardoned him after that. Again, I’m not asking you to take sides here. I’m just saying, talk about the frustration that many Democrats are having on The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, a lot of mainstream organizations blowing this up to the size that they believe is really out of proportion, given everything Donald Trump has done in the past and what he’s doing right now.”
WEIGEL: “This has actually come up in my conversations with people running to lead the DNC, the Democratic Party after the election, because one big conversation they’re having is, ‘How do we reach out to people who just believed everything Donald Trump said, didn’t believe what our candidate said, don’t believe the media?’ And they don’t have a good answer because the country has gotten so segmented. You just talked about what’s on the front page of The New York Times. That’s never going to get to a lot of voters. They’re not going to subscribe to the paper. They’re not going to see the paper in print, they’re not going to care what’s leading the website because they don’t trust it. And I’m not saying they’re correct about that. I’m saying this is something that’s been happening for five or six years. And finally, when you talk to with Republican voters, they will fixate or they’ll remember a couple of incidents where Trump was accused of something and it didn’t pan out. We mentioned the Trump-Russia investigation. That comes up again and again. ‘Oh, they said Russia stole the election for him and I heard that it didn’t, therefore I don’t trust the media, the media was hyperventilating.’ There was just a lot of people, millions of people who may not even read the paper, but they heard about what was in it, they had some sense of what the big nightly news networks were running, and they tune that out, they read social media now, they don’t trust any accusation against not just Trump, but they’re not going to trust the reports about Pete Hegseth, they’re not going to trust criticism of Kash Patel or other Trump nominees. And that is a problem for Democrats that they don’t fix. If they convince The New York Times to run headlines just the way they wanted, that wouldn’t fix that problem at all.”