Politico co-founder Jim VandeHei joined MSNBC’s Morning Joe panel Tuesday in lambasting major media reporters for showing their bias and bad behavior on Twitter.
Co-host Joe Scarborough said that reporters across the country are already doing "end-zone dancing," which he called irresponsible. Vandehei agreed.
"I think the accusations of bias are usually overdone and it’s out the door in this campaign, and reporters have become so biased, particularly on Twitter," VandeHei said. "Go look at the Twitter feeds and tell me if those are things they would say on TV or that would ever have been acceptable in previous campaigns."
Scarborough went after the New York Times for often having opinions in the ledes of their stories and said he could not imagine this happening in the Boston Globe newsroom in 1985.
"They are not speaking truth to power. They are not saying anything we don’t already know," VandeHei said. "They are not helping by doing not just an end-zone dance but their little shimmy, and they all slap each other on the back [saying], ‘Haha, you’re even wittier than I was."
Co-host Mika Brzezinski said that her job on Morning Joe, along with Scarborough’s, is to voice her opinion and prognosticate on the news of the day.
NBC’s Willie Geist said the public should be tough on both candidates and that the story in the New York Times about Trump’s taxes from 1995 should have been in the paper as well as the story on Hillary Clinton’s private email server.
"I think objectivity is a totally false premise–people are humans; they come with their biases and your job is to cover the race fairly," Geist said. "I don’t want to hear what you think about it on Twitter. If you’re a reporter, an opinion business, go for it."
Scarborough said that when reporters "overshoot the runway," they feed into Trump and his supporters, who believe that the media is biased against the Republican nominee.