Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough and panelist Mark Halperin pilloried the New York Times on Thursday for a headline that spoke to the newspaper's persistent bias against Republicans and Donald Trump in particular.
While both men said they "love the New York Times," they held up copies of Thursday's paper with the blaring front-page headline, "Democrats, Students and Foreign Allies Face the Reality of a Trump Presidency."
"This is the day after a surprising, underdog, sweeping victory, and their headline is not, 'Disaffected Americans Have a Champion Going to the White House,' or 'The Country Votes for Fundamental Change,'" Halperin said. "The headline's about how disappointed the friends of the people who run the New York Times are about what's happened. It's amazing. It's amazing to me that this is the headline of the New York Times."
Scarborough called it "staggering," and Halperin likened it to a real-life example of the satirical paper The Onion.
"They don't get it," Scarborough said. "This is actually a Saturday Night Live skit. You went to a cocktail party the night before, and you decided to write this."
Liberal co-host Mika Brzezinski added, "That's their newsroom."
Halperin pointed out the tenor would have been quite different if a Democrat had flipped red states the way Trump flipped blue states. Trump won Michigan, Pennsylvania, Iowa, Ohio, and Florida, all states Barack Obama won in 2008 and 2012.
"If a Democratic candidate who was thought to have a 10 percent chance of winning by the New York Times that ended up winning, and winning red states as Trump won blue states, I don't think that would have been the headline," Halperin said. "And I'll just say again, the responsibility of journalists is to not report on their biases. It's to go out and understand the country through the prism of the election and say, 'Why are people feeling the way they're feeling?'"