It’s been a rough week for America’s left, and particularly for the media. All day Tuesday, TV journalists used their national platform to vent all of their despair and rage over the leaked Supreme Court draft opinion heralding the death of Roe v. Wade. And boy, did it get emotional:
On MSNBC’s Morning Joe, legal analyst Neal Katyal offered this lawyerly take about the draft leak: “Honestly, I wanna cry. I wanna cry in so many ways.”
Later that afternoon on Deadline: White House, both Senator-turned-MSNBC contributor Claire McCaskill and “Amicus” podcast host Dahlia Lithwick complained of high blood pressure on account of the pending ruling. “It’s going to be very hard for me today because my blood pressure is so high, and there’re so many things I want to say with anger and passion,” McCaskill warned.
Joy Behar, longtime co-host of ABC’s The View, was equally disturbed:
I woke up in the middle of the night to pee and while I was up, I see my phone’s lighting up. People are texting me, you know, “look what happened here.” I couldn’t go back to sleep. It’s that devastating.
Behar later theorized that the Supreme Court might set their sights next on overturning gay marriage and Brown v. Board of Education.
CNN chief political analyst Gloria Borger made a similar prediction during the 3pm ET hour of CNN Newsroom: “This ruling, as it is written so far… can affect everything, including previous rulings on gay marriage, maybe even interracial marriage.”
These hyperbolic takes were just the tip of the iceberg. it’s difficult to accurately portray the level of panic and dismay seen on TV news yesterday. For more of the meltdown, watch the video near the top of the blog.