A Look Inside the Bush-Hating Bias of NBC News

Here is another reason to mistrust the media. Apparently trashing the Bush administration is a hobby for the folks of NBC News. I'm not talking about the obvious people like Keith Olbermann according the Joe Scarborough the entire MSNBC newsroom was booing pres Bush's State of the Union address in 2003 Cyberalerts covers NBC's Bias below.

Joe Scarborough Reveals MSNBC Newsroom Booed Bush Speech

MSNBC's Joe Scarborough revealed Thursday morning that on his first day at MSNBC, on the night of President Bush's 2003 State of the Union address, "people in the newsroom...were booing the President basically from the beginning to the end." A couple of minutes into his Morning Joe show, Scarborough praised the Executive Editor of the Seattle Times for scolding his staff for applauding Karl Rove's resignation. Scarborough then

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recalled: "My first night here at MSNBC was the President's State of the Union address in 2003, and I was shocked because there were actually people in the newsroom that were booing the President basically from the beginning to the end." In doing so, they were just following the tradition set in 2000 when those at the NBC News flagship were on election night 2000 openly, according the then-General Electric Chairman Jack Welch, "all cheering for Gore."

The August 16 CyberAlert recounted: In an e-mail to his staff, Seattle Times Executive Editor Dave Boardman reported that in Monday's news meeting about planned story assignments, "when word came in of Karl Rove's resignation, several people in the meeting started cheering." In quite an understatement, Boardman scolded: "That sort of expression is simply not appropriate for a newsroom." Boardman conceded the display matched the overall politics at the paper: "If we wore our politics on our sleeves in here, I have no doubt that in this and in most other mainstream newsrooms in America, the majority of those sleeves would be of the same color: blue....That is not particularly surprising, given how people make career decisions and that social service and activism is a primary driver for many journalists." See: www.mrc.org

At about 6:02am EDT on Thursday, August 16, Scarborough related, as he sat across from news reader Mika Brzezinksi:
"There is a story out of Seattle, and the reason I love it is because it's transparency in the news. You have an editor who was actually outing his own people. The Seattle Times newsroom broke into applause when Karl Rove resigned. And of course that's bad. What I like about it is that the editor actually wrote about it and went in and told the people in the newsroom that was unacceptable.
"And I've got to say, my first night here at MSNBC was the President's State of the Union address in 2003, and I was shocked because there were actually people in the newsroom that were booing the President basically from the beginning to the end. And I actually talked to [NBC/MSNBC executive] Phil Griffin about it, and he said 'well, how was it last night?' Because he was the one that called me out of the Ace Hardware store, got my vest on. He said 'how was it last night?' I said 'well, it's okay, I understand it's a little bit different up here than it is down in northwest Florida, but you had people in the newsroom actively booing the President of the United States.' Phil turned red very quickly. That didn't happen again."

Mark Finkelstein of the MRC's NewsBusters blog caught Scarborough's disclosure and posted an item on Thursday morning: media.newsbusters.org

Check the posted version of this CyberAlert for an audio and video clip of Scarborough's comment.

As the MRC's Rich Noyes reminded me, the MRC's August 31, 2001 CyberAlert recounted:

On the election night, the NBC News control room was full of people "all cheering for Gore," retiring General Electric CEO Jack Welch told Vanity Fair as he denied he pressured anyone to call the election for Bush, "and two or three of us cheering for George Bush."

Welch's revelation about the candidate preference of most NBC News staffers came in reaction to, as the Names & Faces column in the August 29 Washington Post reported, "rumors that he asked the men supervising computer projections, 'What would I have to give you to call the race for Bush?' Rep. Henry Waxman, a California Democrat, is threatening to subpoena a video recording of that night from NBC." (General Electric owns NBC.)

The Post quoted Welch as calling that "a crazy story." An August 28 Reuters dispatch quoted from the interview in the upcoming October issue of Vanity Fair as Welch, apparently referring to at least NBC News President Andy Lack, maintained: "To think you could ever influence two old pros who wouldn't call an election for anyone if their lives depended on it, is just plain silliness. The facts are there was a room there (at NBC on election night) of young kids all cheering for Gore and two or three of us cheering for George Bush. That's all that happened."

As anyone who has seen appearances by Welch on C-SPAN knows, he describes his 20-something and 30-something employees as "young kids.