The hosts of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” did the usual day-after Thanksgiving kibitzing on the air on Friday morning, telling viewers about their turkey dinners and mentioning the big football game the night before.
However, The Washington Post reports one problem: None of those things had actually happened at the time Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezinski and Co. started talking about them. The program that aired Friday morning was taped Wednesday, but made to look and sound as if it was airing live.
“Morning Joe” airs live on MSNBC five days a week. It features discussions of breaking or very recent news events.
Friday’s program had all the earmarks of a typical “Morning Joe” and few viewers seemed to notice that it wasn’t happening in real time. MSNBC offered no announcement or statement to viewers that it was a taped program. The only indirect clue was at the bottom of the screen: The “Live” graphic that normally appears was removed.
The rest was cooked up to appear as if it was happening in real time.
Brezinski opened the program by saying, “Day after Thanksgiving! Hoo! I’m stuffed.”
The illusion that the discussion was live was fostered by the news crawl at the bottom of the screen, which was added over the taped discussion, and a clock showing the time in various time zones.
The hosts never got around to talking about Friday’s morning’s biggest story, the deadly terrorist attack on a mosque in Egypt — because it hadn’t happened yet when they taped. The crawl mentioned it.
A longtime viewer of the program noticed that Friday’s edition had none of the usual discussion of breaking news and contacted The Washington Post to inquire if “Morning Joe” was presenting “fake news.” He said he was surprised to see Scarborough and Brzezinski appearing in a New York studio on the Friday after Thanksgiving.
“I was quite flabbergasted by the way they were so deceptive about this . . . especially when they are always so quick to castigate lying [or] deception they attribute to others,” said the viewer, who asked not to be identified.
No comments:
Post a Comment