Last updated on February 8th, 2013 at 02:53 pm
Paul Ryan’s introduction of Mitt Romney after the Wisconsin primary was so full of lies and inaccuracies that Rachel Maddow cut away from it and deemed it not newsworthy.
Here is the full Ryan introduction:
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Paul Ryan accused President Obama of dividing us instead of uniting us. Ryan claimed that Obama makes excuses and blames everyone else and that the country was off the path to prosperity due to Obama. Ryan also accused Obama of being un-American and against the American idea.
The problem is that Paul Ryan got it wrong. It was George W. Bush who claimed to be a uniter not a divider, not Barack Obama.
Apparently, Ryan’s factually challenged intro was too much for Rachel Maddow because she broke in and cut off MSNBC’s live coverage of Ryan.
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Maddow said, “Obviously, had Congressman Ryan been making any news there, I would have stuck with him, but once he got into the string of bumper stickers, I decided to maybe we’d go for some substance to Dan Bice of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.” Maddow used Ryan’s lack of newsworthiness as a reason to cut him, but later on when she appeared on The Last Word she mentioned that Ryan had attributed uniter not a divider to the wrong president.
Was Paul Ryan’s introduction so bad and inaccurate that Maddow felt compelled to pull the plug? Maybe, but she also knew that she was up against it in terms of time. Sure enough moments after pulling the plug on Ryan, Mitt Romney took the stage and wiped out the remaining minutes of her show. Some on the right will immediately scream liberal bias, and claim that Maddow was doing the same thing to Ryan that Fox News does to Obama. They will ask why it is okay for Rachel Maddow to do it, but not Fox News.
The difference is simple. Paul Ryan is not the president. In fact, without his blood lust to kill Medicare, no one would even know who he is. Fox News is the same network that once invented their own breaking news story in order to cut away from a speech by President Obama, so no they aren’t the same thing. Rachel Maddow made an editorial decision on her own program that what Paul Ryan was doing had no news value at all.
She was right. No network has video up of Ryan’s introduction of Romney. I had to find the clip from C-SPAN via YouTube in order to present it to you. Rachel Maddow should be commended for having journalistic standards that would not allow her to insult her viewers by making them watch a flop sweat drenched congressman, who was in way over his head, lie about the president. (Ryan was so bad that even Romney commented on how terrible he was).
Maddow believed her viewers deserved better. When she saw Ryan offering nothing, she dropped him. Rachel Maddow’s editorial decision was the perfect metaphor for what voters are going to do the Republican Party in November.
Just like Rachel Maddow did to Paul Ryan tonight, if Republicans offer us nothing, we will drop them.
Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
