WHAT COULD GO WRONG? Former Obama Aide Ben Rhodes Joins MSNBC, NBC News as Political Contributor. He’ll be right at home there:
“All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus,” he said. “Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”
Rhodes set up a team of staffers who were focused on promoting the deal, which apparently included the feeding of talking points at useful times in the news cycle to foreign policy experts who were favorably disposed toward it. “We created an echo chamber,” he told the magazine. “They [the seemingly independent experts] were saying things that validated what we had given them to say.”
—“Obama official says he pushed a ‘narrative’ to media to sell the Iran nuclear deal,” the Washington Post, May 6, 2016.
As Stephen Miller tweets today, “How can we as a network put an end to a perfect week that has seen our entire credibility shredded?”