Vanity Fair wrote a piece yesterday evening that reveals how some of the opinion shows on CNN and MSNBC are so partisan that they are preventing some of their journalists from appearing on them:
On Sunday, May 19, New York Times finance editor David Enrich got a request from a producer at MSNBC to appear on Rachel Maddow’s show the following night. Enrich had a red-hot front-page story for Monday’s paper, about anti-money-laundering specialists at Deutsche Bank flagging suspicious transactions involving Donald Trump and Jared Kushner, and Maddow wanted to bring him on air to talk about it.
Maddow is MSNBC’s ratings queen, jostling with Sean Hannity every night for the crown of most-watched time slot in cable news. That’s why reporters tend to relish the exposure they get from doing her show. Enrich said yes, but after mentioning the planned appearance to the Times’s communications department, he was told he would have to retroactively decline. The reason? The Times was wary of how viewers might perceive a down-the-middle journalist like Enrich talking politics with a mega-ideological host like Maddow. The producer, who was informed that the Times asks members of the newsroom not to appear on opinionated shows to discuss political subjects, was miffed about the cancellation, sources said. Enrich declined to comment.
It’s not just Maddow. The Times has come to “prefer,” as sources put it, that its reporters steer clear of any cable-news shows that the masthead perceives as too partisan, and managers have lately been advising people not to go on what they see as highly opinionated programs. It’s not clear how many shows fall under that umbrella in the eyes of Times brass, but two others that definitely do are Lawrence O’Donnell’s and Don Lemon’s, according to people familiar with management’s thinking.
If the New York Times, a left-wing paper, is preventing its reporters from going on these left-wing opinion shows, what does that say about CNN and MSNBC?
The Times feels the same about opinion shows on Fox News, right? Well maybe. But as Vanity Fair points out, the New York Times doesn’t normally send people to opinion shows on Fox News:
Hannity’s or Tucker Carlson’s shows would likewise make the cut, but it’s not like Times reporters ever do those anyway. I’m told that over the past couple of months, executive editor Dean Baquet has felt that opinionated cable-news show are getting, well, even more opinionated. Baquet and other managers have become increasingly concerned that if a Times reporter were to go on one of these shows, his or her appearance could be perceived as being aligned with that show’s political leanings.
The point is that these big prime-time opinion shows on CNN and MSNBC have become so toxic in the age of Trump that even the New York Times is worried about their reputation if their reporters appear on these shows. Wow.