Morning Joe let McCain campaign manager describe attack ad as “the truth,” despite colleague Mitchell’s reporting that it “literally is not true”: ”

During a July 29 interview on
MSNBC’s Morning Joe,
co-hosts Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough failed to challenge the assertion by Rick Davis, Sen. John McCain’s presidential
campaign manager, that a McCain campaign ad attacking Sen. Barack Obama for not
visiting wounded soldiers at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany is ‘the
truth,’ despite reporting by their colleague, NBC chief foreign
correspondent Andrea Mitchell, contradicting Davis’ assertion.
Scarborough and Brzezinski played a clip from the July 28 edition of Morning Joe in which Obama spokesman
Robert Gibbs reacted to the McCain ad by asserting that McCain ‘is an
honorable man, but running a very dishonorable campaign,’ and that the ad
is ‘beneath the John McCain that we thought we knew.’ Asked to
respond to Gibbs’ assertions, Davis
said, ‘I think that he — sounds like he’s stunned by the
truth.’ Scarborough and Brzezinski did not challenge Davis’ assertion, despite the fact that on at least four occasions on July 28, Mitchell appeared on
MSNBC programs — including Morning Joe
– and debunked the false suggestion in the ad that Obama
‘canceled a visit with wounded troops’ because ‘the Pentagon
wouldn’t allow him to bring cameras,’ at one point saying the
charge ‘literally is not true.’

Brzezinski did not challenge Davis’ claim that
the ad was ‘the truth,’ although
she did say of the ad: ‘I mean there is
some backlash to it. I mean, there are some who would think that the McCain
campaign, you and the McCain campaign are basically trying to deflect in any
desperate way you can from what was a very good trip for Barack Obama, where he
was seen on the international stage with world leaders making it work for
him.’

On the July 28 edition of MSNBC’s Hardball, Mitchell asserted, ‘There
was never any intention — let me be absolutely clear about this. The press was
never going to go. The entourage was never going to go. There was never an
intention to make this political.’ She later said, ‘And the McCain
commercial on this subject is completely wrong, factually wrong.’ During
the 1 p.m. ET hour of the July 28 edition of MSNBC
Live, Mitchell asked Sen. Richard
Burr (R-NC): ‘As someone supporting John McCain, I’ve got to ask you
about this new McCain ad. The McCain ad says, literally, that he could’ve
gone, you know, that he did other things — Obama did other things. He
could’ve visited the troops but not with cameras. That literally is not
true.’ She later said that Obama ‘wasn’t planning to bring an
entourage and he certainly visited the soldiers only four or five days earlier
when he was in Iraq, and he visited them in Walter Reed again without any
notice and without any entourage — so it just seems inexplicable that this
whole thing has become such an issue, but clearly, the McCain campaign wants
this to be an issue.’ In an earlier segment, during the 9 a.m. hour of
MSNBC Live, Mitchell stated, ‘I can
attest to the fact that he did visit troops in Iraq only four or five days
earlier, that there was no notice of it, that I confirmed that it happened, but
they had no video of any type and no reporters. And that he’s been to Walter
Reed. So let’s at least get that off the table.’

(Via Media Matters for America.)