Morning Joe’s Mika Brzezinski, who along with co-host Joe Scarborough perhaps did more than anyone in cable news to aid Donald Trump’s early rise, slammed Facebook and Twitter without a hint of self-reflection on Monday, blaming the unrest at the Capitol on the social-media outlets’ failure to curb “misinformation” and “disinformation” during the Trump presidency.
“You have shown that you should have done this a long time ago. And perhaps there wouldn’t be people dead,” she said. “Perhaps there wouldn’t be people following false scientific information about the coronavirus. Perhaps there wouldn’t have been some sort of insurrection at the Capitol that was promulgated all over your sites. Perhaps there wouldn’t be so much hatred and disinformation!”
Brzezinski also trained her fire on Facebook executives Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, calling them “pathetic.”
“You need to be shut down! Nobody needs what you have to offer! You have destroyed this country!” she declared. Scarborough, her husband as well as her co-host, joined in, saying that the social-media “business model is having algorithms that promote radicalism, that promote anti-Americanism, that promote violence against this country. They are the problem.”
Of course, left unmentioned was Morning Joe’s own “business model,” which prompted the future Resistance heroes to host Trump incessantly for the first half of the 2016 campaign. “If you’re running for office and you want to call in, call in, we’ll take your call anytime,” Scarborough recently said of his approach to then-candidate Trump, while justifying the welcoming posture on the grounds that he extended the same invitation to the entire field.
To hear Scarborough now, his show had nothing to do with the rise of Trump — instead, you get lines such as “throughout 2016, I was attacking him” and “I wish it hadn’t happened, but it’s not like prime time.”
But if Joe and Mika were doing their best to challenge Trump — a man who is famously attuned to whether he’s being treated “fairly” by the press — the candidate himself didn’t notice: He thanked the pair as “supporters” after winning the New Hampshire primary.
And while Facebook and Twitter may have certainly allowed QAnon to fester — and Trump used social media to raise his own baseless claims about Scarborough — Morning Joe has spent plenty of time over the last four years stewing its own crackpot theories.
Whether it be giving air time to useful idiots such as Eric Swalwell — himself the subject of foreign espionage — to argue that Trump directly colluded with the Russians, or hosting segments to discuss how Christopher Steele’s infamous dossier, which contained suspected Russian disinformation, was “piece by piece by piece . . . falling into place.”
Conspiracy theories for me, but not for thee.