Fox News can't handle Rachel Maddow's tax scoop
Source: Washington Post, by Eric Wemple
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“When Donald Trump declared as a presidential candidate that he would not release his tax returns, he became the first president since the Watergate era to refuse to release his returns,” said Maddow as part of a nearly 20-minute riff on presidents, Trump and tax-return releases.
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This morning, Fox News media critic Howard Kurtz picked up on the timing issue: “This was a big-time blunder by Rachel Maddow…. By touting the Twitter and hyping it, she gave the White House time to put out a statement of its own not just criticizing the media but confirming the basic facts that President Trump did in fact pay $38 million in taxes that year, so she fumbled away the scoop.”
That’s one narrow, shallow and ignorant way of looking at the sequence of events. A less narrow, shallow and ignorant perspective would acknowledge that … RACHEL MADDOW AND DAVID CAY JOHNSTON FORCED THE WHITE HOUSE TO ISSUE A STATEMENT DISCLOSING INFORMATION ABOUT PRESIDENT TRUMP’S TAXES. Have you ever pulled off such a stunt, Howard Kurtz? Remember, this is a president who, as Maddow herself highlighted, has bucked decades of tradition by refusing to disclose his taxes. The White House’s Kellyanne Conway in January even sounded a cocky note about the refusal to go transparent: “We litigated this all through the election. People didn’t care,” said Conway. So: Whether the White House issued its statement before Maddow’s show, in the middle of Maddow’s opening monologue, during the first commercial break, right when she was clearing her throat — who cares?
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After playing clips of NBC News/MSNBC clips about Trump, Hannity riffed, “All these conspiracies — it’s a concerted effort by a so-called news organization. Why? Perhaps to take down the president? Steve Bannon, I argue, was right: The alt-left propaganda media is the opposition party in America today. They’re not news anymore. And by the way, did NBC News care when the IRS targeted conservatives specifically to intimidate them?” More: “What Rachel Maddow, if you could stomach — I had to laugh; it actually made me laugh, frankly, harder than I have in ten years — was a flat-out pathetic conspiratorial attempt to smear the president.”
It bears noting that “The Rachel Maddow Show” is starting to best Fox News in a key television rating metric. That is a big deal in the media world. Could we be witnessing the coalescence of the Trump opposition into a bona fide cable-news audience — one that a channel like MSNBC can cultivate? And could the freakout from Hannity, Kurtz & Co. signal that Fox News is very, very worried about this prospect?
Read it all at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2017/03/15/fox-news-cant-handle-rachel-maddows-tax-scoop/?hpid=hp_no-name_opinion-card-f%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.3a90e184929d
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