On Wednesday’s Morning Joe, MSNBC news anchor and NBC News correspondent Katy Tur joined her fellow pundits to lament the current state of political affairs in America after a year of Donald Trump’s presidency. In spite of her long history of false claims, distortions, and apologia on behalf of liberal politicians and causes, Tur had the audacity to complain that “we’re in our tribes. We’re screaming across social media. And we’re allowing it to divide us.”
Without a hint of self-awareness, Tur also wondered aloud: “[H]ow do we combat against disinformation, against the spreading of actual fake news?” Of course, no one called Tur out for her own role in fomenting political tribalism by promoting rank partisan propaganda. See her comments for yourself in context:
7:44 AM EST
GEIST: And we’ve seen time and again here, Katy Tur, whether it’s from Attorney General Sessions or Jared Kushner, down the list of people associated with the President, uh, forgetting to put contacts with Russians on disclosure forms, forgetting about meetings they had in the case of Attorney General Sessions with Ambassador Kislyak. There does seem to be something about Russia that they don’t want to talk about.
KATY TUR: Well, a lot of memory loss. There’s a whole lot of memory loss. And, if they really had nothing there, then why would they just not release-
GEIST: Right.
TUR: -all the information at one time and get it over with? So there’s a lot of questions. At the very least, uh, they were trying to cover something up. I don't know how big it was. At the very least, it seems that they were trying to cover something up and might get caught up in that. The bigger issue though ‒ it's not just: Did Donald Trump collude or coordinate or did he obstruct ‒ is: What are we gonna do going forward? And how are we going to defend against this? The Washington Post had a great article just detailing, um, the steps that the U.S. did not take-
GEIST: Right.
TUR: -after the fall of the Soviet Union after the Cold War to make sure that Russian influence didn't get peddled again in an effective way. And Putin really brought that up. But how do we, how do we combat against disinformation, against the spreading of actual fake news? How do we guard our social media? How do we tell who is a real person and who is not a real person? I mean, this is, this is an attack that, that can last for decades longer than Donald Trump ever lasts in this office. And we haven’t figured out an effective way going forward because we are so angry at each other. We’re all in our, in our holes. We’re, we’re in our tribes. We’re screaming across social media. And we’re allowing it to divide us. It’s a problem that we, um, have got to figure out how to, how to solve by coming together as a country, and we need a leader who will help us come together.
GEIST: And as Clint pointed out earlier, that Russian interference has continued completely unabated since the election of last year as we fight with each other on social media.
Unfortunately, it would probably take a book-length treatise to fully explore Tur’s penchant for dishonesty, but just a few brief examples should suffice to demonstrate her extreme bias and hypocrisy [all of the following stories come from NewsBusters coverage of various MSNBC shows this year].
On March 6, Tur tried to deny the existence of any news outlets claiming direct links between Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and Russian intelligence agents, ignoring a then widely-publicized New York Times report making that precise claim.
On August 15th, during an interview with Republican Representative Mike Turner, Tur repeatedly denied that Trump had disavowed white nationalists and the Alt-Right during his presidential bid, even though the then-candidate did so multiple times on the record both with journalists and during live debates. It seemed unlikely that Tur did not know about this given that she followed Trump on the campaign trail for more than 500 days.
On August 29th, Tur falsely claimed that hurricanes will become both more intense and more frequent out of season in the future. This contradicts multiple reports by climatologists and meteorologists who typically warn about the dangers of human-caused climate change, but readily admit that they “don't know how global warming will affect the number of hurricanes and their intensity” due to conflicting data and scientific models.
On November 7th, while hosting MTP Daily, Tur incorrectly asserted that background checks for purchasing guns were “not consistent around the entire country,” failing to grasp even the basics of federal gun purchasing requirements that have been in place for nearly two decades.
Just this past Friday, on December 22nd, Tur told another whopper when she mocked Trump for holding only one press conference as President. Tur claimed that “[Trump]’s been dodging questions from the press for months now, really. He hasn’t had a press conference since what, February?” In reality, Trump’s last press conference was on October 16th, and the President regularly answers press questions in informal sessions on the White House lawn. This hardly constitutes a “laughable” fear of the press, as Tur characterized it.
In addition to the various lies and false claims in service of her liberal agenda, Tur has also been a repeat offender when it comes to pure, unadulterated liberal lunacy.
On February 6th, Tur suggested that Trump might start an assassination campaign against journalists who have reported negatively about him.
In a similar segment from November 7th, Tur and New York Times columnist Nick Kristof upped the ante by speculating that Trump might start a nuclear war in North Korea and kill millions of people there just to boost his domestic poll numbers.
Tur has also done shameless damage control specifically on behalf of the Clinton political machine.
On November 15th, Tur bragged about herself and other journalists repeatedly trying to discredit and dismiss the Clinton-Uranium One scandal during the presidential campaign and accused Trump of using the story solely for the purpose of “taking some of the heat off his own shoulders.” Just the day before, she had whined about the number of times that Hillary Clinton and her husband have been investigated for criminal activity and pondered: “When will there be enough investigations into the Clintons?” Tur did not bother to consider the possibility that the Clintons might be under investigation so often because of their shady business and political dealings.
But don’t worry about any of the above concerns or criticisms. As Tur herself reassured her audience on MSNBC just a couple of weeks ago:
Let's be clear about something. Reporters make mistakes. We're human. Sometimes our sources aren't as good as they should be. Sometimes we speak too soon. Sometimes we mess up. And when the mistake is serious enough, we are suspended or we're fired.
What exactly qualifies as a “serious” mistake? Does a long-standing pattern of misinformation and political bias count?
Apparently, not at MSNBC.
