The Daily Show on Joe Scarborough’s Outraged Defense of Elitism

Reason #253 why MSNBC is not a left-leaning partisan alternative to the far-right political activism of Fox Republican News, is that MSNBC allows the establishment conservative Joe Scarborough to host more hours on their network than anyone else. Could you imagine Fox allowing an establishment liberal like Chris Matthews to host their morning show?

It’s part of a fairly common media double standard against progressives, one which Scarborough embraces wholeheartedly when he attacks The New York Times for reporting on Mitt Romney’s opulent homes, in their “Home” section. The Daily Show played clips of an outraged Scarborough wanting to know when the Times had ever applied the same standard to John Kerry.

SCARBOROUGH: Did the New York Times ever dispatch reporters to John Kerry’s homes — because John Kerry’s worth a lot more money, obviously, than Mitt Romney…

The answer, as pointed out on Morning Joe by Willie Geist, is that of course The New York Times ran with the conservative meme that John Kerry was an out-of-touch elitist. (It’s totally fine to attack people for being elitists so long as they’re Democrats.) Geist quoted from an October 10, 2004 New York Times article which reads, in part:

ROBERT F. WORTH Mr. Kerry’s life is defined against similarly grand settings. In winter, he goes helicopter skiing while staying at his wife’s Idaho retreat, a 15th-century farmhouse transported from England and reassembled on the banks of the Big Wood River in Sun Valley. In summer, he windsurfs and sails off the coast of Nantucket, where she has another home. The couple have an 18th-century town house in Boston where the kitchen is two stories high. There is a 23-room town house in Washington, an 88-acre Pittsburgh area estate, a private Gulfstream jet and a personal staff of six, including caretakers and a cook.

Scarborough is right. There is a discrepancy. As Jon Stewart points out, The Times went after John Kerry on their front page, a month before the presidential election in 2004. What provoked Scarborough’s outrage was when they went after Mitt Romney in the Home section, six months before the election.

Scarborough and the rest of the wealthy media elite love to point out when politicians don’t act like they’re good old working class folk who enjoy drinking beer or performing other acts of empathy such as, you know, bowling. Just don’t look into someone’s actual wealth! Bill O’Reilly would have to admit that he’s part of the wealthy elite. And no matter how uncomfortable that it makes the wealthy elite, it is perfectly legitimate to point out that the people running politics and the media are, you know, wealthy elite.

Just make sure to also delve into their policies regarding wealth. That, of course, is why Scarborough and friends don’t want anyone pointing out Romney’s elitism. It’s because Romney’s policies favor his fellow elite far more than Kerry’s did. Sure, it’s possible to be a member of the wealthy elite and advocate for the people who actually work for a living. But it’s apparently not possible for Mittens.