It would have been ridiculously easy for her to give him enough rope to hang himself. Instead, she ham-handedly attacked him and tried to act smug and innocent about it, and so she just further screwed herself and her viewers out of opportunities for dialogue across the aisle. You guys are saying Art Robison doesn’t matter, which is probably true, but someone who does matter could have been watching and decided never to talk to this woman.
It’s probably a pretty good rule of thumb in life to avoid dealing with people who have nothing to lose.
That interview would have gone off the rails in exactly the same way if she’d started with, “Can you state your name for the record,” with Robinson’s smear accusations, calling into question his opponent’s stand on the question, and claims she’s bringing up 68-year-old on-the-record facts and all.
You’re probably right, because that’s a shithead question, just like a lot of other questions she asked.
I’ve yet to hear anybody defend “hormesis is your idea that low-level radiation is good for us . . . you’re also an advocate for expanded nuclear weapons testing in the United States. Is that because you think it would be beneficial to up the background radiation levels in the United States, because that radiation would be good for us?” I’d like to see Sean Hannity mine everything Barack Obama ever wrote, find two quotes like that, draw a similarly outrageous conclusion, and watch the gnashing of teeth and 12 page BBQ Pit threads ensue around here.
I don’t know whether to laugh or cry at how obvious is was that Maddow was trying to smear this guy, and watching you guys stick your fingers in your ears while screaming LALALALALALALA and pretending she wasn’t. I’m all about calling bullshit on Tea Partiers and conservatives and Glenn Becks and Sarah Palins and Bill O’Reillys, but if you don’t also call it when your guy (or girl, in this case) does it, then you lose credibility and you’re just a partisan lapdog as far as I’m concerned.
I’m pretty sure Obama never stated that he wanted to dump raw nuclear waste into the ocean.
By the way, this dude is the guy with the 31k anti-global warming list. He’s a complete liar and kook. Wanting to make sure that the guy who wants to have a hand in running the US government doesn’t want to dump nuclear waste into the ocean isn’t a bad thing.
She went easy on him. The 31k list alone shows that he’s a dishonest moron.
It’s not her job to let this guy have a platform to run his campaign. It’s her job to get at news. Like a major congressional candidate thinks AIDS is a myth, nuclear waste is good for you and that unverified internet sign-up lists equal a scientific consensus against AGW.
I’m sure he has said things that could be twisted into equally outrageous conclusions by a right-wing talking head. In fact, without knowing for sure, I would bet that Glenn Beck has done it.
Are you under the impression that I’m claiming he’s not?
She utterly failed at getting him to take stands on those issues. Failed so badly, in fact, that I have a hard time even believing that her motivation was to “make sure that the guy who wants to have a hand in running the US government doesn’t want to dump nuclear waste into the ocean.”
I do not think that is her job. If it is, she did an even worse job than I thought.
That seems like a pretty reasonable connection, to me. As I understand it, concerns about the long-term health effects of radiation is one of the major reasons we don’t do above-ground nuclear testing in this country anymore. If it could be demonstrated that low-level radiation has health benefits, that would be a good argument in favor of resuming nuclear testing. I really don’t see the smear, there. His positions on both issues may be unrelated, but if there is a connection between them, I don’t see how that would reflect badly on him.
Overall, I don’t really see how much of the blame for how the interview turned out can be put at Maddow’s feet. A $150,000 anonymous donation is pretty unusual, and campaign finance reform is a perennial issue in US politics. As someone else pointed out, accepting the money is hardly indefensible. Hell, if I were running, I’d sure as hell accept it, and would be happy to explain myself by pointing out that the concern over campaign finance is the idea that the donors would have undue influence on government because of the money they’ve spent. But if I don’t know who gave me the money, they can hardly influence me, can they? But this guy didn’t do that. Instead of answering the question, he immediately went on a rant about his opponent, and when Maddow tried to get the conversation back on track, like a good interviewer ought to do, he instantly went hostile on her. From there on out, the interview just spiraled out of control. Maddow did a yeoman’s job trying to get it back to sanity, but Robinson fought her every step of the way.
I’m surprised that you think Maddow came out so badly, here. I thought she did very well. Had I been in her chair, I’d have ended up screaming, “What the fuck is wrong with you?!” at him over and over. That she maintained so much of her composure in the face of such outright hostility and lack of integrity on Robinson’s part was very impressive.
Conservatives have investigated the school that Obama attended in Indonesia when he was 9. If there was anyting in his more recent writings, I’m pretty sure we’d have heard about it by now.
I saw this interview on the internet at work yesterday. What an unpleasant, argumentative fellow! But again I note 538 gives him a 0.0% chance of winning.
Yes, it is her job to get at the news, and here’s the news: there is so much right wing money flooding over the electoral plain that there is one hundred and fifty thousand dollars available to squander on a batshit pizza like this guy. This is not targeted, sophisticated strategy type spending, this is throwing money in every direction because, what the fuck, you got buckets of bucks. Its like Mickey Mouse a the Sorcerers Apprentice in Fantasia, but not water, benjamins. Gosh, wonder where all that money is coming from.
Welcome to Citizens United States, citizen. You have the right to remain silent. For now.
Well, hell, I got it. 'Course, I may be conflating, saw the second segment she ran the next night, and that was very heavily focused on that particular issue. Plus, I have a very suspicious frame of mind when it comes to the Forces of Darkness. The idea that some nutbar is running for elective office isn’t all that interesting. That somebody gave him a shitload of money is intriguing, like that dark door at the top of the stairs.
How Oregonians might be being cut off from there forests and fisheries. How Oregonians might be subject to increased regulations. How DiFazio urged Oregonians to buy American while he shipped his investments overseas. I’d even like to hear more about hormesis, which I’ve never heard of before. But she felt the need to interrupt him when he was in mid-sentence.
I don’t follow Oregon politics, but that stuff would have been more interesting to me. As well as the actual positions Robinson has o those issues and others that are actually part of the campaign. All she is trying to do is smear him. He’s absolutely right about her. She’s just as bad as Hannity and Olberman.
I just re-watched that part of the interview again to make sure of this, and she does not, in fact, interrupt him in the middle of a sentence. Check it out here starting at 5:05. Maddow asks the question, pauses for a moment, then ads a short elaboration. Because of the satellite delay, her second comment overlaps Robinson’s, but note that she’s started to elaborate before Robinson starts to answer. It happens again at 5:20. Robinson says, “Hormesis is the study of the effect of radiation on human health,” full stop. Maddow immediately asks for clarification, but Robinson has already continued his explanation, and, again because of the satellite delay, they end up talking over each other again. But, like the previous examples, Maddow has actually started talking before Robinson.
I think one could argue that Maddow’s partly to blame for the overlap, because she’s not allowing enough time for the satellite transmission, and keeps trying to cover the dead air while she waits for a response. I don’t watch enough cable news to know if this is common for satellite interviews, or if Maddow is just bad at this part of her job. Maddow’s comment about satellite interviews seems to indicate that this sort of overlap is par for the course. But there’s no question that she’s interrupting him in this segment of the interview, because in each instance where Robinson complains about being interrupted, she’s actually started talking before he does.
I grant that she does plainly interrupt him in other parts of the interview, but that seems to only be when he’s completely dodging her questions. And, of course, he’s never shy about interrupting her when she’s asking something he doesn’t want to have to own up to, such as his previously expressed views that AIDS is a government conspiracy.
What exactly is the smear, though? All the negative stuff she brings up is directly quoted from the guy’s own newsletter. Can you smear someone by pointing out the batshit crazy stuff they’ve freely professed to?
I buy your explanation for the first time you cite. But the second is different. And if you buy the whole delay thing, then you have to accept that there is a delay also when Robinson stops talking. This is crucial. (Again, I’m referring to the 5:20 instance.) But the way she jumps right in indicates that she was not just trying to fill dead air. There was none from what she was hearing. She simply interrupted him. In fact, any delay makes the interruption seem less egregious, not more. No, she wanted no explanations. She was playing to the Olberman crowd. Looking to be the hero of the water cooler of the left echo chamber the next day, “Ohhh, did you see what Maddow did to Robinson last night!!! She pwned him!!!.”
Truth is, I think Maddow is her own worst enemy. I think she’s pretty smart and I think probably could make a good journalist, but she’s interested in the sarcasm, the “gotcha”, the oh-we’re-so-smart-and-they’re-so-stupid nonsense that Olberman and Hannity trade in. I’ve seen her when she’s impressive. But this was a bad showing. Both for what she did. And the fact that it backfired. She was the host, a rude one, and Robinson called a spade a spade and pointed out the truth, that she was just trying to smear him.
She does herself a disservice by interviewing a candidate and not covering any of the issues that each candidate has a different take on. Like the things I mentioned. He said the quote about HIV was him commenting on one theory, when their was less certainty about HiV. He claimed that he wrote about other theories, too, and seemed to indicate that the one theory she shared was not something he believes. As far as hormesis, I could be wrong about this because I haven’t bothered to look it up, but evidently it some theory that acknowledges that we live in a world filled with low-level radiation, so it may not be deadly or harmful to us. But conflating that with making it okay to explode nuclear bombs—because that would emit the same low-level radiation he was talking about is either just bad logic or an intentional intent to deceive people on her part. She just wanted to hang the crazy sign around his neck. He may be. But he certainly didn’t come off that way to me in that interview. I saw a man refusing to play her childish game and calling her on it. I never saw him before or even heard of him, but I liked the way he handled her shit.
Maddow didn’t give him shit. I heard clips from the interviews from Friday’s podcast and she doesn’t come off badly at all. Robinson didn’t give her an opportunity to ask for clarification on his points and apparently thought he could ignore her questions, just hit his talking points, and got pissy when she tried to bring the interview back under her control. I also have to wonder if this debacle is going to be used as another example of the evil left-wing media who treated poor right-wing candidates badly.
And, frankly, some interviewees are just lousy. Robinson obviously hadn’t been prepared for this interview and probably isn’t used to being interviewed at all. I have to think about Terry Gross’s interviews with Bill O’Reilly and Gene Simmons. O’Reilly tried to be his usual combative how-dare-you-question-me self (although Gross screwed up with the empty-chair stuff at the end, after he walked off the set), and Simmons was just an asshole. You can anticipate a certain amount of bullshit from some people, and celebrities like O’Reilly and Simmons are known for the crap they pull. On the other hand, a guy like Robinson is an unknown quantity. Maddow had no reason to anticipate that he would behave the way he did toward her because most people don’t behave that way. She did her best to try to rein in an out-of-control interview, but Robinson wouldn’t cooperate. Now, predictably, the right thinks poor widdle Robinson was mistreated and the rest of us can see and understand what really happened.
That has to be one of the stupidest judgments I’ve seen in recent memory. In fact, if you were a Republican of any prominence, it deserves to be in the “Stupid Republican idea of the day” thread.
Personally, I thought she blew this interview. While she recovered her composure a few minutes in, at the beginning both of them were terrible, and she never brought him back to sanity (heh – as if that were possible). But this is only the second time (in over 2 years) I’ve thought she did a poor interview job, and I’ve never heard her present a blatant untruth. Unlike Hannity, where the spin is the show.
No, your equivalence only exists in bizarro Fox News viewer world.
The election is three weeks away. One of the candidates is interviewed for 18 minutes. During that entire time he is not asked one question about any of the actual campaign issues, even after he threw some out to her. That’s not just a shitty interview, and a shitty interviewer, it’s and interview in which the interviewer has an agenda other than helping the voters make an informed decision. And her agenda—which could not be more obvious—was to try to paint him as crazy. Like I said, I never heard of this guy before, but he came off better in the interview. She came off as nothing but snide and sarcastic. She was oh-so-sure her little trap was going to work, but then it started to backfire and she kept doubling down. It’s text-book Hannity, when he tries his little game of “gothca” with a quote from a decade or two ago. But whereas I’ve seen him have the sense to retreat when it doesn’t go well, she puts her nose to the grindstone. And that might be admirable if she was grilling him on an actual campaign issue, but she didn’t go anywhere near one.