Morton Mintz: A Rubber Room, Not a Green Room, for Gingrich
Posted at 3:12 pm, November 6th, 2010
In an email to Meet the Press on Oct. 26 and in a snail-mail letter the next day, I wrote:
“For an article I am doing for niemanwatchdog.org, I want to ask:
“Why has Newt Gingrich been the most-booked guest on Meet the Press during the first year of Barack Obama’s presidency?
“Why has Speaker Pelosi had zero appearances?”
As of today I’ve had no response.
Some Americans no doubt still think Meet the Press practices reputable journalism and thus the message in Gingrich’s many appearances is that his views not only deserve to be heard but that they are something special.
I’ve got a problem with that.
I want to credit Eric Alterman of The Nation for repeatedly calling attention to the Gingrich-Pelosi Meet the Press puzzle – and for getting to the heart of the matter.
As Alterman put it:
“One would think that a private citizen who professes to believe that America requires a set of laws to prevent the imposition of Sharia law on its citizens, and who also claims to detect a danger from ‘a gay and secular fascism in this country that wants to impose its will on the rest of us,’ should be carted off to a rubber rather than a green room.”
November 7th, 2010 at 6:44 pm |
A big thank you. Coverage of the talking heads of the GOP has been wall-to-wall since January 20, 2009.
November 16th, 2010 at 1:49 pm |
Gingrich has always been noisy and controversial, which is what gets TV ratings. The lack of factual and dispassionate journalism on cable fixtures such as Fox News and MSMBC, are an unfortunate case in point. What worries me the most is that, rather can being carted off to a rubber room, this man has been giving signals that he wants to be ushered into the Oval Office.