The New York Times has started cracking down on the shows that its reporters can appear on as the newspaper has recently decided to ban reporters from multiple shows on hyper-partisan cable news networks CNN and MSNBC.
Vanity Fair reported that New York Times finance editor David Enrich recently had to cancel an appearance on MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show” because the newspaper “was wary of how viewers might perceive a down-the-middle journalist like Enrich talking politics” with a hyper-partisan host like Maddow.
Vanity Fair noted that MSNBC’s “The Last Word With Lawrence O’Donnell” and CNN’s “CNN Tonight” with host Don Lemon are also blacklisted by The Times for being too partisan.
“Sources told the magazine the Times’ executive editor Dean Baquet expressed concerns certain primetime shows are becoming more opinionated and that reporters who appear on their shows would be ‘perceived as being aligned’ with the show’s politics,” Fox News reported. “Both MSNBC and CNN have hired several prominent New York Times reporters as contributors in recent years, but it is unclear from the Vanity Fair report if they would be discouraged from appearing on shows deemed ‘too partisan.'”
The decision by The Times comes a few weeks after Special Counsel Robert Mueller released the report from his Russia investigation, which largely contradicted much of Maddow’s programming from the last two years.
Maddow, in particular, saw a massive decline in ratings, losing “half-a-million viewers in just one week after special counsel Robert Mueller’s report indicated that he did not find enough evidence to support collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia,” The Daily Caller reported.
CNN’s ratings were so devastated following Attorney General William Barr’s letter to Congress that Fox News host Tucker Carlson beat CNN’s entire prime time lineup combined by more than 1,000,000 viewers.
Maddow faced widespread criticism over many of the salacious and unverified claims she pushed on her show during Mueller’s investigation.
Reporter Aaron Maté documented dozens of Maddow’s wild claims following the release of Barr’s letter to Congress:
“1/ If YouTube were to recommend your show, it’d be recommending the leading purveyor of now debunked Trump-Russia conspiracy theories, falsehoods & innuendo of the last 2+ years. Here’s a sample:”
“2/ Just recently you were caught in real-time lying to your audience. You claimed Barr was handling the redactions by himself. But the chyron — on screen right below — told viewers the truth, that Mueller was in fact “assisting” w/ the redactions:”
“3/ There was that time in Jan 2017 when you speculated that Putin may use the pee tape & other kompromat to force Trump into withdrawing US troops near Russia. How did that one turn out?”
“4/ BTW, just last week you falsely said that ‘the one thing I refused to let myself think about’ was that Putin had tapes of Trump — the very prospect you had previously floated to posit that Putin may blackmail Trump into withdrawing troops.”
“5/ Who could forget that time this past winter when you seized on life-threatening cold temperatures to fear-monger that Russia could kill Americans by knocking out their heat?”
“6/ There was that time when you explored the scenario under which Putin “gives orders” to his puppet Trump at an upcoming meeting. Do you think Putin ordered Trump to stage a coup in Venezuela/try to kill the German-Russia gas pipeline/nix the INF treaty?”
“7/ How about that time when you speculated — citing the Steele dossier — that Cohen billed Trump $50k for “tech services” to pay off Russian hackers? It was actually to pay a US firm”
“8/ How about when you suggested that Putin has gotten Trump to ‘bleed out’ the FBI? If Mueller and the FBI found proof of that, I missed that part of their report.”
“9/ How about the time when you speculated that Putin installed Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State?”
Continue reading Maté’s tweet thread blasting Maddow here.