Politicos are addicted to going onto Morning Joe and John McCain is no exception- he was on MSBC’s morning talk show as recently as last Friday.
But Heat Street wouldn’t mind being a fly on the wall the next time the 2008 Republican Presidential candidate encounters host Joe Scarborough in the MSNBC green room.
For McCain has blasted Scarborough for “slobbering” over President Trump in a new book Vote First or Die by Scott Conroy, an irreverent look at the New Hampshire primary.
Conroy interviews McCain about the Trump media phenomenon. McCain says: “Obviously Trump turned the standard procedure of political campaigning on its head.
“I think you cannot overstate the importance of the media love-in with him. Many of them, like Morning Joe, who now have turned completely against him, gave him millions of dollars of free airtime.
“You couldn’t purchase the airtime he got with sixteen or seventeen opponents, sucking all of the oxygen out of the room, while Morning Joe Scarborough and others slobbered all over him every single morning and every night. I just don’t see that happening in the future. I think that in 2020, we will go back.”
Conroy, who went on to create the political TV comedy Embeds, was covering the campaign as a video documentary-maker for the Huffington Post.
In the book- which is out April 18- Conroy supplies an insight into just how badly the Huffington Post misjudged the Trump campaign, even more than most mainstream media outlets.
Conroy writes: “Sam told me about a decision that our site’s founder and editor-in-chief, Ariana Huffington, had announced to editors earlier in the day; although we would continue to cover his campaign, all future HuffPost stories that featured Donald Trump would appear in the site’s entertainment section, rather than in the politics section.
“The reason provided for the change was that Trump’s campaign was nothing more than a media-driven sideshow, fit for Kardashian-level scrutiny rather than the earnest inspection required to scrutinize a real contender for the presidency.
“Trump would soon as fall as quickly as he’d risen, the expectation went, and we would get out ahead of the rest of the media in treating his candidacy as the overt joke that it was.”
“Overt joke” might be a good description of HuffPo’s election coverage…
