Nicolle Wallace said on MSNBC Tuesday that President Barack Obama didn't have a network that distorted the truth for it when he was in office.
The "Deadline: White House" host made the remark after reading out a tweet by former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul. McFaul wrote he watched Sean Hannity's Fox News program and was distressed that the outspokenly pro-Donald Trump host would make the same "whataboutism argument" as Vladimir Putin's propaganda channels regarding alleged American election interference in other countries.
Caught @seanhannity at the gym tonight. Didn’t know he was taking about American alleged interference in other countries’ elections as an excuse for Russia violating our sovereignty. That’s exactly the whataboutism argument Putin’s tv channels make. Exactly.
— Michael McFaul (@McFaul) February 20, 2018
"So, you know, I guess one of the differences between any stipulated lack of fulsomeness in the Obama-era response was it didn’t have a network distorting the truth for it. Donald Trump does," Wallace said.
Wallace's point was curious, given her place of employment and its coverage of the Obama administration.
In the final week of the 2012 presidential campaign, MSNBC did no negative stories about Obama while 51 percent of them were explicitly positive, according to analysis by the PEW Research Center. That same week, 68 percent of MSNBC's stories about Republican challenger Mitt Romney were negative, and zero percent were positive.
Al Sharpton, who hosted "PoliticsNation" during the 6 p.m. EST hour on MSNBC from 2011 to 2015, literally would repeat Obama's points verbatim, served as an informal White House adviser, and said publicly he would never use his program to criticize Obama.
"Hardball" host Chris Matthews once stated Obama had "never done anything wrong in his life" and famously remarked "I felt this thrill going up my leg" while the then-senator gave a speech in 2008.
Former MSNBC host-turned RT employee Ed Schultz lambasted opponents of the Obama administration on a nightly basis. He once stated the famously botched rollout of Obamacare was a Fox News myth, saying repeatedly, "there are no glitches."
After Obama won reelection in 2012, MSNBC ran a Rachel Maddow-narrated "Lean Forward" ad touting the Obama-era measures that were protected by his victory, played over images of jubilant Obama supporters.
Wallace's program frequently criticizes Fox News for the overtly pro-Trump stance taken by the hosts of "Fox & Friends" and the network's primetime pundits.