How MSNBC Accurately Covered Joe Biden’s Disastrous Debate Performance
In the hour leading up to President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance on Thursday, I peeked inside the flashy studio where MSNBC’s biggest stars were previewing how Donald Trump could derail the proceedings, and I saw megawatt smiles. The hosts were in the middle of a commercial break and clearly savoring one of the biggest political nights of the year; Rachel Maddow made a joke and everyone cracked up.
I was at 30 Rock for an appearance on NBC’s streaming news service. Afterward, out in the hallway, where producers and technicians scooped up free debate night snacks and sodas, I told one of the MSNBC hosts that I’d be watching Fox News after the debate to see how Fox would spin things for Trump. But I was wrong; Fox’s football-spiking was boring to watch. The far more compelling network to watch on Thursday night and Friday morning was Maddow’s network, where Democratic leaders faced the facts about Biden’s halting, even haunting behavior.
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MSNBC was superbly honest about what had gone wrong. In the first minute of post-debate coverage, Maddow cited Biden’s weak voice and “halting delivery” and said it must have “put a shock into the campaign.” In the second minute, Nicolle Wallace reported that Democratic insiders were having “frank conversations.” Maddow asked her: What do you mean? The “conversations range from whether he should be in this race tomorrow morning, to what was wrong with him,” Wallace said.
Joy Reid spoke next. “My phone really never stopped buzzing throughout,” she said. “The universal reaction was somewhere approaching panic.”
Personalities on CNN, CBS and other networks made the same observations, but it was more important coming from MSNBC, the cable giant most closely aligned with the Democratic coalition. As Democrats undertake a debate about the debate — one centering on Biden’s capability to seek re-election — the party’s sometimes awkward conversations are being had on live TV.
MSNBC is many things in one — it features newscasts and documentaries, not just political analysis — but it is best known for its liberal-POV programs. Liberals and moderates flocked to hosts like Maddow and Wallace for reporting and reassurance during the Trump years, making MSNBC one of the highest-rated channels on all of cable, a stat that holds true today. Audience loyalty is key: MSNBC said last month that in an typical week, “the average MSNBC viewer watches the network for 506 minutes from Monday to Friday, beating the Fox News viewer average (498 minutes) and more than doubling the CNN viewer average (248 minutes).”
So at a critical political moment, when the sitting president appears vulnerable, and some Democrats are saying he should be replaced at the top of the ticket, is MSNBC denying reality the way Fox has so often been charged with doing? No, not at all. On Thursday night and Friday morning MSNBC hosts showed compassion and respect for Biden, but they didn’t sugarcoat anything. They didn’t spin. Instead, they accepted the sinking feeling within the Democratic party and conveyed what so many millions of viewers were thinking. The coverage was sober and raw without being sensational.
Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign manager David Plouffe told Maddow that the debate was a “DEFCON 1 moment” for the Biden campaign. “It really pains me to say this: [Trump and Biden] are three years apart. They seemed abut 30 years apart tonight,” he said.
It was especially striking to hear “Morning Joe,” widely known to be Biden’s morning show of choice, take apart his performance on Friday morning. Joe Scarborough, who is personally close to Biden, opened Friday’s show by saying “I love Joe Biden” and calling his presidency “an unqualified success” before saying he “tragically did not rise to the occasion last night.” Scarborough asked: “If he were CEO and he turned in a performance like that, would any corporation in America, any Fortune 500 corporation in America, keep him on as CEO?”
Scarborough’s wife and co-host Mika Brzezinski took a slightly different tone. She admitted Biden had a “terrible night” on stage but urged the Democrats talking about replacing Biden to “slow down.”
“Let’s see how this develops over the next few days,” guest Eugene Robinson said, while asserting that Democrats should be actively thinking about alternative scenarios for the fall. “We know he can be president,” Robinson said, but the question is whether he can effectively run for president.
I occasionally appear as a guest on MSNBC programs, so I know (from the viewer feedback I get after live shots) that some loyal fans want to be comforted, not just informed. But MSNBC does not function as a left-wing “safe space” the way Fox does, with damaging consequences, on the right. Ignorant commentators sometimes pretend the channels are two sides of the same political coin. MSNBC’s critical treatment of Biden is yet another moment that dispels the myth.
“I really have to say, I deeply admire the candor, depth, and insight offered by everyone on @MSNBC tonight in dealing with some tough truths,” liberal commentator David Rothkopf wrote on X overnight.
I thought the single most powerful moment on MSNBC came shortly after midnight, when Maddow brought in former senator Claire McCaskill, who was at the CNN debate site in Atlanta. McCaskill prefaced her remarks by condemning Trump’s lies and insults; “that’s the easy part” to say, she commented. “The hard and heartbreaking part” was about Biden. I sensed that McCaskill, a Democratic insider who was in touch with party bigwigs, knew the import of her words. She also may have sensed that some MSNBC viewers were wincing at all the criticism of Biden. But “my job now is to be really honest,” she said. And then she let it rip:
“Joe Biden had one thing he had to do tonight and he didn’t do it. He had one thing he had to accomplish, and that was reassure America that he was up to the job at his age, and he failed at that tonight.”
“I’m not the only one whose heart is breaking right now,” McCaskill continued, the emotions evident in her voice. “There’s a lot of people who watched this tonight and felt terribly for Joe Biden. And you know, you have to ask, how did we get here?”
McCaskill signaled that she’s been hearing from “a lot of people,” including those in “high elective offices,” who “feel like we are confronting a crisis.”
The confrontation is happening on live TV, it is being facilitated by networks like MSNBC, and it’s not over yet.
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Brian Stelter is the author of three books about the media industry, a former media reporter at The New York Times, and a former anchor of CNN’s Reliable Sources.
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