As I reported on the podcast this morning, NBC News may have already launched internal investigations into whether Meet The Press staffers including Kristen Welker and executive producer David Gelles have violated NBC News’s own written guidelines in two serious ways by airing Welker’s ‘interview’ with Trump without significant fact-checking or warnings.
The rules are contained on what is called “The NBC News Employee Handbook” and it prohibits the broadcasting (or if online, the publishing) of provable falsehoods by anyone, on NBC News in any format in which there is sufficient time to confirm those falsehoods and prepare fact-checking, caveats, etc. Obviously a pre-taped interview that provided NBC News three full days to document those falsehoods would constitute circumstances providing that sufficient time.
There is a second, more remote issue: a fear among some at NBC that the lack of an on-TV fact-check was not mere dereliction but may have been part of the arrangement by which NBC got Trump to appear on their air for the first time in four years.
I have a little more this morning on this than I did when I recorded Countdown last night but I still cannot confirm with certainty that these investigations have begun or that they are going to. My sources conflict and I’m not confident I’m going to resolve their disagreements before the story fades behind the next Trump-related journalistic atrocity, so I saw no sense in holding this. What’s new is that the possibility of a deal with Trump to limit fact-checking to almost exclusively online stuff is directly tied to the possibility of an arrangement with the Trump campaign. There were contacts between Welker and senior Trump campaign officials last month in Milwaukee but even those might not be a violation of the NBC News Employee Handbook. Editorial agreements are made all the time (what the interview will be about, who will conduct it, where it will be recorded). The issue only becomes problematic if the agreements themselves (like sabotaging fact-checking) violate the Handbook.
I do know that the Milwaukee Trump staffers’ dinner Welker attended is apparently not considered a breach of the NBC News Employee handbook – the code on which suspensions and terminations are based – if you’re an NBC News Employee. I know this subject intimately and it may ring a distant bell with you because when NBC attempted to suspend me in 2010 for making a series of political mop-up donations to the likes of Raul Grijalva and Gabby Giffords in the waning days of their campaigns and after my coverage of them had ended, it was prevented from doing so and had to rescind the suspension, pay me for the days it benched me, and deal with the fact that it had breached my contract because of the fact that years before in contract negotiations NBC had insisted on making me a non-employee contractor, not a staff, so it didn’t have to pay me dental. Seriously. Thus the NBC News Employee Handbook was a big deal in my life for about three months and actually got me about $18 million from NBC in damages.
So, unresolved: Did NBC News make a deal with Trump’s campaign to make sure that didn’t happen – to NOT materially fact-check him on-the-air during the disastrous Kristen Welker interview? Is NBC News conducting internal investigations, or does it plan to? I do not know for certain the answers to these questions today. I do know they are among many questions being asked inside NBC today, in part because of ONE tweet, and in part because of the awful realization that some sort of illicit pre-arrangement is an almost better explanation than that Welker, and Meet The Press, and NBC News, abrogated virtually every one of its journalistic responsibilities in a Chris Licht-level dumpster fire that has left the long time viability of Welker, and her Executive Producer, and the nearly 76 year old program itself, up in the air.
I also know veterans within NBC News are pushing for investigations based on the following timeline: Welker and NBC News reporter Dasha Burns were among a dozen Washington insiders who were quote “wining and dining” with Trump thugs Jason Miller, Steven Cheung and Chris LaCivita at a steakhouse called “Rare” the night before the Republican presidential debate in Milwaukee. The dinner was August 22nd, Welker had been named the host-in-waiting for Meet The Press on June 5th, the interview was suddenly announced late in the day last Wednesday, the 13th, conducted on Thursday the 14th. The NBC News Employee handbook would have discouraged the Welker-Burns-Trump Staff dinner but if the reporting on it by Politico is correct – that the news employees who attended paid their own expenses – they would not be guilty of violating the code precluding accepting meals or other gifts or other items of value from a political campaign, politician, or officeholder.
The more pressing problem is: at exactly 10 AM Eastern yesterday, NBC News posted on its website, a fact check of Welker’s interview. At 10:13 A-M its “Meet The Press” account tweeted this, verbatim: “Former President Trump made a spate of false and misleading comments about immigration, foreign policy, abortion and more in a wide-ranging interview with Meet The Press moderator Kristen Welker.”
The complication here is that the NBC News Employee handbook requires – or required (I was never given one; they held them close to the vest; though I was given access to one, and I haven’t personally seen a revised copy and am relying on others quoting it to me) that if NBC knowingly broadcast or publish lies false or misleading comments or information by anyone in any non-live format without a disclaimer or caveat or… a fact-check – they have violated the NBC News Employee codes and are potentially subject to punishment up to and including suspension and termination.
On the one hand, NBC News is posting a fact-check of what, at 11:30 AM, it tweeted about Trump’s prevarications and said there were quote “at least 11 times during President Trump’s interview… here’s our fact check” with Welker. While on the other hand, someone in a position of authority at NBC News decided – made certain – that there was no SIMILAR fact check ON the television broadcast itself, other than a passing mention directing viewers to the website. But in confirming Trump quote “made a spate of false and misleading comments” in a piece posted ON THE NBC NEWS WEBSITE, they are underscoring that they failed to clearly flag and disclaim and caveat – and warn – that Trump was making those “false and misleading comments” on their television network, and in all the clips shown on MSNBC, CNBC, and the NBC owned and affiliated statements. The Meet The Press telecast, of course, skipped anything resembling the online fact-check, and instead had Peter Baker of The New York Times on for a self-rationalizing interview about why NBC News wasn’t committing journalistic suicide by platforming a skilled, practiced, professional, psychopathic liar. The Baker segment amounted to several minutes of the Shrug Emoji, only in a suit.
Again: I cannot CONFIRM that NBC News is investigating Kristen Welker or Meet The Press Executive Producer David Gelles or anybody else within that unit or the news division as a whole for violating the written NBC News journalistic guidelines. I do know there is reason to believe those internal NBC News guidelines HAVE been violated.
Amazingly, that is the GOOD news for NBC and Meet The Press and Welker. Because the SUBSTANCE of the Trump interview was at or near the level of the CNN live Town Hall. In fact it might be WORSE because while the judgment to do that live was disastrous, the calamities – as a result – all happened LIVE. The NBC disasters sat there for nearly 72 hours after the interview was recorded and they were STILL put on the air. THAT is an extinction-level event. Reviewing the interview is like reaching for a book on the top shelf and two dozen of them falling on your head, one by one. Followed by the shelf. Trump lies and says Biden “told the justice department to indict me” and instead of pushing back in any way, and without NBC putting up any graphic warning they are transmitting provably false statements, and without NBC coming back to the studio for. Live fact-check, Welker instead then says quote “Let me ask you this, Mr. President. I just want to hear from YOU on this. I want to know what’s in your head. When you go to bed at night, do you worry about going to jail?”
There WAS an on-air fact check of Trump’s lie on NBC that the President ordered his indictments AND his lie on NBC that Biden profited from his son’s business dealings – those took a total of just 28 seconds. As an aside she called him “Mr. President” at least twice and that appellation is, journalistically, reserved for the sitting president. “President Trump” is maddening – but acceptable. She didn’t call him that.
There was one other in-progress fact-check, and NBC screwed it up. Trump tells Welker “They don’t want to kill a baby in the 7th month or the 9th month or after birth and they’re allowed to do that and you can’t do that.” Instead of responding that abortions do not occur after birth, that Trump has just lied about that and non-specifically accused countless medical professionals of the murder of breathing children, Welker comes back on camera and says “One important fact check we DO want to highlight: abortions later in pregnancy are extremely rare. When we come back…”
Trump lies again about Biden and says “Everything he says is like a lie, it’s terrible” and instead of pushing back against in any way, and again without any NBC caveat, Welker inanely says “I want to stay focused on you… because it’s important to hear from you. Mr. President? Tell me what you see when you look at your mugshot.” I mean they wouldn’t have run this tripe on Dateline.
Trump lied about immigrants flooding this country. There was no factcheck on Meet The Press. Trump lied about a record number of terrorists among them. There was no factcheck on Meet The Press. Trump lied about the U-S giving the Taliban 85 billion dollars worth of equipment. There was no factcheck on Meet The Press. Trump lied about January 6th insurrectionists getting record sentences. There was no factcheck on Meet The Press. Trump lied about his tax cuts producing revenue. There was no factcheck on Meet The Press. Trump lied that the media is no longer covering Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. There was no factcheck on Meet The Press. Trump lied that Covid and not HE drove up the defecit. There was no factcheck on Meet The Press. Trump lied more than a dozen times that the 2020 election was quote “rigged.” There was no factcheck on Meet The Press. Trump lied about his ability to decide whether or not to, if elected next year, to seek a third term when he is constitutionally ineligible to do so. There was no factcheck on Meet The Press. Trump lied that the price of bacon has quintupled. Seriously. There was no factcheck on Meet The Press and for the record the price us up not 500 percent but 12 percent and Trump ought to lay off the effing bacon.
All of those lies are fact checked in the NBC News digital piece — but weren’t on television. That is at the heart of the investigation/push for an investigation. Why the one and not the other? Why not more live in-studio interruptions of Trump’s lies? Or a longer item-by-item list of them after the taped interview instead of the Baker self-perpetuating Media-Political Industrial Complex auto-fluff segment? The lead evidence that something violated the NBC News Employee Handbook is NBC’s own online fact-check.
As my own caveat: a lot of coverage of the Welker-Trump disaster insisted that she got Trump to admit he had lost the 2020 election. In fact he said he needed more votes because the election was rigged. She then replied “Are you acknowledging you didn’t win?” He then replies “They rigged the election. I’m not acknowledging, no. I say we won the election.” Also: The Vice President of NBC News digital boasted that Welker got Trump to say he ignored legal advice from the attorneys who told him he lost and to continue to lie that he won, in 2020, “It was my decision,” he said. This has been presented in some quarters as excellent evidence for Special Counsel Jack Smith and while it can’t hurt, it merely echoes the evidence a Grand Jury has been hearing – quotes from Trump; testimony from others – for months.
In short: NBC News, Meet The Press, and Kristen Welker will never live down their premeditated decision to forfeit 75 years of journalistic credibility built up by their predecessors. The best SHE can hope for is to be viewed as damaged goods, or a punchline, much as Kaitlan Collins has been viewed since the Town Hall fiasco at CNN. What becomes of the program now is anybody’s guess. These uncertainties would only be amplified if there is an internal investigation and it DOES find violations of extant NBC News rules. But all this still misses the bigger picture. Of all the news organizations that Republicans and MAGAs and Fascists view inside their fantasy world as the quote “liberal media” or quote “fake news” they view National Public Radio’s “net untrustworthiness” at about a minus 21 and The New York Times at a net minus 30, according to a YouGov poll conducted last spring.
They view CNN and MSNBC at minus 37. As a separate entity, NBC News is a minus 17. I don’t know if that makes the combination of MSNBC and NBC News – they BOTH televised Meet The Press – a minus 54 or a minus 27 but from the lunatic right, NBC and CNN are the worst. And yet in the last 132 days both organizations have each engaged their networks in shocking and disgraceful episodes in which they prostituted their platforms to give Donald Trump – a candidate vowing political revenge, destruction of democratic institutions, and the wholesale pardoning of violent and even murderous insurrectionists – unfettered access to poison literally millions of viewers with what was truly nothing RESEMBLING effective fact-checking or pushback or even a large flashing red letter “L” in the corner when he was lying. And more over they have put their stamp of approval on him, on the process of letting him lie and falsely calling the result a quote “interview,” and on the very idea that any American can stand by and operate as if it’s business as usual – in this case the new business – when there is a dangerous force loose among us which previously tried to overthrow the government of the United States in a form of violent revolution – and which is seeking to completely hijack the very institutions designed to protect freedom in this nation, and use those institutions to destroy themselves and democracy.
And the question becomes… why? CNN’s new masters made no secret of their intent: to curry favor with Trump and to afford him an avenue to spread the corporate fascism they have openly endorsed. NBC’s motives may be more obscure and opaque but they are no less evil. They are either, like CNN, positioning themselves to survive in a world in which the Trumpists prevail and this nation goes FULLY fascist in the years to come, or – perhaps even more disgustingly – they are too greedy and too blind to see that Trump has exploited them and manipulated them into pimping for him and for evil. There are only two choices — complicity or stupidity. It would be entirely appropriate for Kristen Welker and the Executive Producer David Gelles and NBC News Chairman Cesar Conde and the new NBC News Editorial President Rebecca Blumenstein to be fired and for their careers in journalism to be ended in the shame they have drenched themselves in. But it’s insufficient. Just as the firing of Chris Licht by CNN was insufficient.
The issue is: what can be done to destroy the corporations which OWN NBC and CNN after they have taken these actions against representative government in this country – actions that hit differently and perhaps worse than the actions of the Murdochs of this world whose intent and amorality is well known, even to many of those addicted to their swill? CNN and NBC have defiled their own previously more-or-less reliably neutral, more-or-less reliably truthful platforms – and the faces of those platforms have remained largely silent or worse still, moronically supportive of management – Anderson Cooper, Wolf Blitzer, Lester Holt, Savannah Guthrie, and – scheduled to broadcast tonight and facing a choice of standing up for her principles or standing up for her 30 million dollar salary, Rachel Maddow.
I’m very sorry to say this about someone I long ago hired for MSNBC out of my own pocket – and I will be happy to the point of tears if she proves me wrong and I will devote tomorrow’s podcast to an apology. ButI am not hopeful.
As an aside let me take this opportunity to thank the community for the support of the podcast. We’re completing our 14th month of the daily 45 minutes and it’s grown from an audience of about 30,000 a day to where we hit 3,167,000 downloads and verified YouTube plays in August. It’s a lot of work, but on the other hand I can stop whenever I want to walk the dogs, and that it has found such a large audience (some episodes literally are consumed by more people than consume some evening hours on CNN) is very gratifying. Thank you. It's available now without a prescription.