Scarborough Ducks Fairness Doctrine Talk

Amanda Carpenter | February 26, 2009 3:51 PM

Editors' note: ?Townhall.com has learned that a specific speech topic request -- the fairness doctrine -- was not communicated directly to Joe Scarborough prior to his presentation. He gave his speech as he had prepared.

Ok, this is strange.

MSNBC's resident Republican Joe Scarborough was booked for CPAC to talk about the Fairness Doctrine. That's what it has said on the agenda for several days. And, as I blogged below there was even important action on it today in the Senate.

So, after a wonderful introduction by MRC's Seton Motley where he explained what happened this morning on the Hill, Scarborough totally dropped the ball.

He basically came out and said "I didn't know I was here to talk about the Fairness Doctrine, so let me say I'm against it....Now, I'm going to talk about what I was going to talk about."

Then, Scarborough proceeded to start talking about how great it was when he came to Congress in 1994. A basic, red meat speech on "the power of positive thinking in politics" and how even his dear old dad wouldn't vote for him.

But why is Scarborough ducking Fairness Doctrine talk? Did MSNBC put the tether on him? Does his new radio show with Mika have anything to do with it? Do they hope the single-host, conservative shows go down so Joe and Mika's ratings go up? I'm just speculating here, but why not. I wanted to hear him talk about conservative media.

Regardless, it's really poor tact to duck the topic you were billed to talk about to just, well, talk about yourself.

I hope he was misinformed.