When MSNBC brought Rachel Maddow aboard in 2008, her education at Stanford and Oxford made us hopeful that she’d reverse the trend of lackadaisical journalism we’d grown accustomed to receiving from Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann. But alas, any great contribution Maddow could have made was soon blunted by the fact that she is a leftist through and through.
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Maddow has actually proven to be even more of an ideologue than Matthews, although she still remains a few steps behind Olbermann’s kookiness. She is so eager to stick it conservatives, and particularly conservative Republicans, that she twists the news to benefit herself and her ideologically monolithic listening audience.
How exactly does she twist the news? Mainly by relying on random sources or source fragments that she hopes are true because they paint Republicans in a bad light, instead of testing those sources to be sure they’re true before airing a segment based on them.
For example, amid all the union-manufactured chaos surrounding Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s attempts to avoid a fiscal meltdown in that state, Maddow is on record saying Wisconsin doesn’t face a deficit at all: “Despite what you may have heard about Wisconsin’s finances, the state is on track to have a budget surplus this year.” (In other words, that rascally Governor Walker has concocted the entire “we’re headed for a $137 million deficit” story as a convenient excuse to unleash his conservative aggression on schoolteachers and other public workers.)
On the surface, Maddow’s prediction of a surplus seems to take the heat off the Democrats who ran Wisconsin into the ground and then fled the state instead of facing the dilemma they’d caused when signing off on the pensions, healthcare plans, and unfunded liabilities of state and local unions. But upon deeper examination, Maddow’s predication doesn’t help the Democrats one bit because it’s entirely false and based upon a study, the facts of which appear to have been manipulated so as to support the position Maddow wanted them to support to begin with.
The study on which Maddow based her claim was conducted by Robert Lang. And while it did project a $121 million surplus for the state budget by the end of June, 2011, had Maddow read further she would have seen that Lang also “[outlined] $258 million in unpaid bills or expected shortfalls in programs such as Medicaid services for the needy, [and] the public defender’s office and corrections.”
Hmmm … I’m not great at math but let me try this: $258 million in outstanding payments minus $121 million in state budget “surplus” equals a $137 million shortfall in funds available (which is the very shortfall Governor Walker is trying to forestall when he talks about the pending “$137 million deficit”).
The last time Maddow got something this wrong was just last month, when she mocked Sarah Palin for suggesting that the American military ought to invade Egypt. The problem was that Palin had never suggested such an invasion. (Maddow was eventually forced into the uncomfortable position of admitting that the source she’d used to support the Egyptian invasion theory was from a satire website rather than a news outlet.)
Here’s the bottom line: Palin’s not suggesting we invade Egypt and Maddow’s new math isn’t helping Wisconsin Democrats at all.
With these things said, how would you like to be the MSNBC exec that fired Olbermann but chose to keep Maddow on board?
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