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Rachel Maddow Called Out for Editing Manipulation to Score Lame Hit on Florida Dept. of Health

Brad Slager
Brad Slager  |  Jan 28, 2022
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"Riffed from the Headlines" is Townhall's daily VIP feature with coverage on the deeply flawed aspects of journalism in the nation. We'll look to bring accountability to the mishaps, malaprops, misdeeds, manipulations, malpractice, and manufactured narratives in mainstream media.

01.28.22

Low Octane Gas Lighting – MSNBC

  • The ellipsis tells the whole story…

Rachel Maddow has been in preaching to the choir mode in her perpetual slams on Ron DeSantis. In her latest effort, she has been concocting theories surrounding the Florida Department of Health, and Maddow's team did its part in performing due diligence and reached out to the department's spokesperson for comment. Sort of. Jeremy Redfern exposes just the level of chicanery the MSNBC journalist went to for her "report."

First, she employed the tried method of trying to get a comment in the 11th hour – literally. This is the same method used by "60 Minutes" last year in their failed hit on the governor, providing very little time for a response, then saying in the report, "We reached out for comment, but never heard from…" as a means of implying their target was running from the story in guilty fashion.

Except, Redfern ruined that plan by responding, so Maddow had to resort to another tactic – clipping the correspondence. To start, take a look at Rachel's presentation here.

Now, take a look at the full email, provided by Redfern, and see just why the primetime hostess edited the bulk of the email she had received.

Pre-Written Field Reports – CNN

Jake Tapper is on the case of another example of schools being the site of censorship and book burning. He provides a local story of a school board in Washington that is pulling "To Kill A Mockingbird" from required reading lists over offensive content. The issue here is Jake, and many on the left, assume that anyone banning books is automatically from the conservative base. (Yeah, um - recall a year ago Dr. Seuss was being pulled for being offensive?!)

This time as well, it is not those intolerant white folks taking up the torches and pitchforks. This is a POC member taking offense at the racial contents in the book.

Presentation Paraadox – MSNBC

Hey, gang, MSNBC has done it – they managed to find something substantial from the January 6 Commission. That is if we are to believe their claims in the headline. But, this being MSNBC, there is very little reason to believe them on anything.

What we are dealing with is the batch of documents from the Trump White House that the Supreme Court recently said could be turned over and not shielded by Executive Privilege. Well, if this is the type of scathing detail to be gleaned from these previously classified documents…color us unimpressed. Okay, sure, the blaring headline sounds grave and serious. But as we have learned during the Trump years, there is a huge difference between a bombshell report, and a bombshell actually detonating.

Someone in the administration drew up a draft order that suggested the secretary of defense could confiscate voting machines in select states. While this sounds like a serious overstep, what it appears to be is part of a flurry of items being kicked around in the administration; various theories they were trying out. That is, instead of this being a distinct plan, it was actually brainstorming.

- "We don't yet know the full story behind the EO. We don't know who was involved in writing it…and whether it received serious consideration. Trump never signed it, despite other dogged efforts to try to recapture a lost election."

Sooooo…nothing came of this.

Gilded Reframe – CNN

  • CNN's president indicates the new streaming service will move away from… CNN's usual content.

This one could have straddled a few categories, or maybe a hybrid called Avoidance of the News Mirror Syndrome.

The New York Times spoke with the head of CNN, Jeff Zucker, and he described what will be the focus of their new streaming offering, CNN+, beginning in March.

-" 'We do want a service that has a wider aperture and is broader than just today's bleak news,' CNN's president, Jeff Zucker, said in an interview."

This is a curious admission from the man in charge of the network that has subsisted on Covid porn, a full year of January 6 hysteria, and is currently running a series dubbed "Democracy In Peril."

Blue-Anon – THE DAILY BEAST

  • One of these days these predictions of racism will come true.

Wajahat Ali is a solitary-trick equine, in that most every news item must be approached through the prism of race. And when he does almost every time, Ali gets things completely wrong, via assumptions. With the recent synagogue hostage situation, when the aggressor was found to be Islamic, Wajahat commented on the arrival of an anti-Muslim backlash that never arrived. In the Virginia elections, he adroitly saw results of the GOP electing a POC lieutenant governor and a Hispanic attorney general, and he promptly declared Republicans to be racist for not electing the Elmer's Glue-hued Terry McAuliffe.

Now, Ali is poised once again to raise an accusatory racism finger – when nothing at all has been spoken. As Joe Biden has announced he will be nominating a black female to the Supreme Court, Wajahat manages to see something that has not even taken place.

The irony here is that Joe Biden himself employed the "racist filibuster" to block the appointment of Janice Rodgers Brown to the D.C. Court of Appeals. Likewise, the Democrats blocked the appointment of Miguel Estrada, on the basis of his being Hispanic.

As for the sexism charge, Mr. Ali should look into who became the most recent just appointed to SCOTUS.

Prose & Contradictions – THE DAILY BEAST

  • Maybe peer back just a little bit farther in your history.

This is about the level you can expect from The Daily Beast guy who covers "politics stuff." The news of Justice Breyer retiring has plenty of people in the media excited – even though the liberal being replaced by a liberal will alter very little. But this was enough to have Matt Fuller performing what he thought was a dunk on the GOP, regarding the vote threshold to get a justice confirmed for the Court.

I mean, Harry Reid just recently passed away; how did you miss all the nuclear option talk in his obituary?!

Editor’s Note: A source with knowledge from inside CNN informs us that this entry carries some misinformation. They have confirmed to Townhall that despite the use of "again" in his tweet, Mr. Tapper was not conflating this book incident with those of previous CRT book removal efforts. In addition, as a response to the question asked, Mr. Tapper did, in fact, watch the video in the link he supplied. We wanted to correct the record to show these details.