Clinton Calls Out MSNBC

Yesterday, David Shuster did a fine job filling Tucker Carlson's shoes, in the sense of being just as big an ass as Tucker is:

SHUSTER: There's just something a little bit unseemly to me that Chelsea's out there calling up celebrities, saying support my mom, and she's apparently also calling these super delegates.

PRESS: Hey, she's working for her mom. What's unseemly about that? During the last campaign, the Bush twins were out working for their dad. I think it's great, I think she's grown up in a political family—

PRESS: —she's got politics in her blood, she loves her mom, she thinks she'd make a great president [crosstalk]

SHUSTER: But doesn't it seem like Chelsea's sort of being pimped out in some weird sort of way? [laughter]
(transcript via digby)

There is no way to defend a comment applying the language of prostitution to Chelsea Clinton because she does what almost every other adult or nearly-adult child of a presidential candidate does. (Digby has a good preliminary list of other candidates' children and their campaign activities.) Shuster's "apology" is as lame as you would expect from someone who would say that in the first place:

"Well, last night, I used a phrase -- some slang about her efforts. I didn't think that people would take it literally, but some people have. ... [T]o the extent that people feel I was being pejorative, I apologize for that. I should have seen that people might view it that way, and for that, then I'm sorry." - Media Matters

On a conference call today, the Clinton campaign called out MSNBC for this remark and the larger pattern of offensive remarks from the network's employees. In fact, they went a step beyond saying it was unacceptable to doing something about it. Howard Wolfson said Hillary Clinton would not debate on MSNBC:

Then, unbidden, he concluded: "I'll say this. We've done a number of debates on that network...I at this point can't envision a scenario where we would debate on that network given the comments that were made and have been made."

Good move. Chris Matthews, David Shuster, Andrea Mitchell - these are all people who've shown themselves unable to "report" or offer opinions on Hillary Clinton or her campaign in a responsible way, and the network has obviously failed to put pressure on them to do better. MSNBC needs to either force them toward some semblance of fairness, or disallow them from talking about Clinton.

And Hillary Clinton is absolutely right to call them on this. There's just one thing: Apparently, she's still willing to debate on Fox, a network that rose to prominence bashing her and her husband. So, good start, but keep on going.