As Steve Barton writes at Newsalert, “Go to the 10:05 marker in the video: Rachel Maddow says she’s ‘someone who’s roughly to the left of Mao.'”
It’s just a quip from her little red joke book — I think — but add to Maddow’s expression of her worldview, table-pounding Lawrence O’Donnell who said “I am a socialist,” and “I live to the extreme left,” on the air last year at MSNBC.
Back in 2007, the New York Times dubbed MSNBC “a liberal version of Fox News;” a description that network executive Phil Griffin tacitly concurred with, saying that network finding its ideology “happened naturally,” which it would express overtly in its progressive-themed “Lean Forward” campaign last year (which as critics noted, has an echo of Mao’s Great Leap Forward slogan as well.)
P.J. O’Rourke once wrote that “commies love concrete,” which, if she isn’t kidding, might help to explain Maddow’s otherwise incongruous love of mid-century dam building efforts now eschewed by the rest of today’s environmentally correct far left, including those who staff her employer, General Electric.
But hey, give credit for Maddow and O’Donnell for not biting their Mao Tse-tungs and coming clean on some level about their far left ideology. In its own socialistic way, it makes for a refreshing change from most old media news outfits. At CBS, for years, Walter Cronkite uttered “That’s the way it is” before signing off, his Solomonic vow towards objectivity, before retiring to host fundraisers for an organization devoted to bringing about one-world government. His successor, Dan Rather, clothed his own claims to objectivity inside such goofy Ratherisms as “I’m in favor of strong defense, tight money, and clean water. [Ideologically,] I don’t know what that makes me.” Before being forced out over RatherGate and retiring to host programs on HD-Net, the cable network owned by Mark Cuban, who produced a spate of anti-Bush movies in the naughts, professed to voting for Obama in 2008, and ran the ‘Truther” “documentary” Loose Change on the tenth anniversary of 9/11. Not to mention Rather hosting fundraisers in recent years for far left The Nation magazine.
Of course, perhaps the most objective response to MSNBC’s far left collective ideology came from a rather unlikely source:
“To be fair about it, the NABJ understood that if I didn’t get it, it wouldn’t have gone to a journalist,” Sharpton tells me. “It’s a moot point. There are no journalists [as hosts] after 5 p.m. on MSNBC. Everyone after 5 deals with opinions. So the argument is kind of apples and oranges.”
There are no journalists on MSNBC’s nighttime lineup? No kidding, Reverend Bacon, no kidding.
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