Harold Hutchison
“Morning Joe” co-host Joe Scarborough on Monday praised Axios CEO Jim VandeHei’s profanity-laced rant, during which he called out Tesla CEO Elon Musk, claiming that VandeHei’s criticisms “needed to be said.”
VandeHei’s outburst of critiques came while accepting an award at the National Press Club during its Fourth Estate Gala Thursday evening. During his speech, VandeHei took issue with Musk’s Nov. 6 post telling users of his social media platform X that they were the “media now.”
“I hate this damn debate about, like, oh, we don’t need the media. Like, it is not true. Think about what makes this — I love this country. I’m a beneficiary of this country. Like some bullshit from Wisconsin who can come and start two companies, be up here, win an award, sit next to Mikey, I’m a beneficiary of it,” VandeHei ranted.
“But there’s something about the country,” he continued. “There’s something about it, right? There’s something about freedom, capitalism, the animal spirits of democracy. But at the core of that is maybe transparency, maybe a free press, maybe the ability to do your job without worrying to go to jail. Maybe the ability to sit in a war zone and tell people what’s actually happening so they’re not just looking at distortion matters. It matters profoundly. It’s why — it’s not like we just love getting up at 3 or 4 in the morning doing this every single day. Like we do it because we love it. We do it because it matters. The work that we do matters.”
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“Everything we do is under fire. Elon Musk sits on Twitter every day, or X, today saying like, we are the media. You are the media. My message to Elon Musk is: ‘Bulls**t. You’re not the media,’” VandeHei said. “You having — you having a blue checkmark, a Twitter handle, and 300 words of cleverness doesn’t make you a reporter any more than me looking at your head and seeing that you have a brain and telling you have an awesome set of tools makes me a damn neurosurgeon, right? Like what we do, what journalists do, what you did in Mississippi, what Al Jazeera does in the Middle East, you proclaim yourself to be a reporter? Like that’s nonsense. Like being a reporter is hard, really hard. You have to care. You have to do the hard work.”
Scarborough, who joined his co-host and wife Mika Brzezinski on a trip to Mar-a-Lago to meet with President-elect Donald Trump Nov. 15, praised VandeHei for the rant.
“Come on, slow clap, everybody,” Scarborough said. “First of all, I got to say, extraordinary content. It needed to be said. It continues to need to be said when all of the garbage that is flying around on social media, lying about reporters, lying about the hard work they do, lying about the hard work editors, lying about everything up and down about not only their alternative set of facts, but alternative set of facts about what people like you do.”
“And I love how you connected reporters in Mississippi in the 1960s to reporters fighting for their life to get the story out in the Middle East today. Jim, it was very powerful. Very powerful,” Scarborough continued.
National Review Online editor Philip Klein noted in a post on X that Al-Jazeera, which VandeHei singled out for praise, is funded by the Qatari government.
“The best part of this sanctimonious rant is when he uses Qatari-funded Al Jazeera as an exemplar of a media outlet that does real truth-seeking reporting without fear or favor,” Klein posted.
MSNBC ratings fell by over 50% following former President Donald Trump’s defeat of Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 election. Ratings for “Morning Joe” also started declining after Scarborough revealed he and Brzezinski met with Trump, drawing fire from viewers of his show and fellow MSNBC host Katie Phang.
MSNBC hosts and guests routinely hyped the claims that Trump’s 2016 campaign colluded with the Russian government to defeat former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and repeatedly had Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff of California, who often made claims about alleged collusion between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia, on the air.
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