keith-olbermann.dailykos.comDaily Kos: Keith Olbermann

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Privacy Policy | Terms of Use | DMCA Copyright Notice #donaldtrump #community #joebiden #cartoon #election2024 #israel #openthread #media #russia #michaelcohen #ukraine #gaza #gop #republicans #elections #law #2024 #stormydaniels #georgia #election #trumptrial #democracy #abortion #democrats #politics #music #hushmoney #arizona #culture #florida Change Blog Image Keith Olbermann Keith Olbermann NBC MAY HAVE ALREADY LAUNCHED INVESTIGATIONS INTO WELKER-TRUMP "INTERVIEW" FOR NEWS RULES VIOLATIONS Keith Olbermann Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.) Monday September 18, 2023 · 6:29 AM PDT 2023/09/18 · 06:29 Please log in or sign up to continue. Recommend 1142 Recommend 1142 Unrecommend 1142 Share Tweet 477 Comments I mean talk about cliches come to life: Trump overshadows Welker (photo supplied by NBC News) I mean talk about cliches come to life: Trump overshadows Welker (photo supplied by NBC News) As I reported on the podcast this morning, NBC News may have already launched internal investigations into whether Meet The Press staffers including Kristen Welker and executive producer David Gelles have violated NBC News’s own written guidelines in two serious ways by airing Welker’s ‘interview’ with Trump without significant fact-checking or warnings. The rules are contained on what is called The NBC News Employee Handbook” and it prohibits the broadcasting (or if online, the publishing) of provable falsehoods by anyone, on NBC News in any format in which there is sufficient time to confirm those falsehoods and prepare fact-checking, caveats, etc. Obviously a pre-taped interview that provided NBC News three full days to document those falsehoods would constitute circumstances providing that sufficient time. There is a second, more remote issue: a fear among some at NBC that the lack of an on-TV fact-check was not mere dereliction but may have been part of the arrangement by which NBC got Trump to appear on their air for the first time in four years. I have a little more this morning on this than I did when I recorded Countdown last night but I still cannot confirm with certainty that these investigations have begun or that they are going to. My sources conflict and I’m not confident I’m going to resolve their disagreements before the story fades behind the next Trump-related journalistic atrocity, so I saw no sense in holding this. What’s new is that the possibility of a deal with Trump to limit fact-checking to almost exclusively online stuff is directly tied to the possibility of an arrangement with the Trump campaign. There were contacts between Welker and senior Trump campaign officials last month in Milwaukee but even those might not be a violation of the NBC News Employee Handbook. Editorial agreements are made all the time (what the interview will be about, who will conduct it, where it will be recorded). The issue only becomes problematic if the agreements themselves (like sabotaging fact-checking) violate the Handbook. I do know that the Milwaukee Trump staffers’ dinner Welker attended is apparently not considered a breach of the NBC News Employee handbook – the code on which suspensions and terminations are based – if you’re an NBC News Employee. I know this subject intimately and it may ring a distant bell with you because when NBC attempted to suspend me in 2010 for making a series of political mop-up donations to the likes of Raul Grijalva and Gabby Giffords in the waning days of their campaigns and after my coverage of them had ended, it was prevented from doing so and had to rescind the suspension, pay me for the days it benched me, and deal with the fact that it had breached my contract because of the fact that years before in contract negotiations NBC had insisted on making me a non-employee contractor, not a staff, so it didn’t have to pay me dental. Seriously. Thus the NBC News Employee Handbook was a big deal in my life for about three months and actually got me about $18 million from NBC in damages. So, unresolved: Did NBC News make a deal with Trump’s campaign to make sure that didn’t happen – to NOT materially fact-check him on-the-air during the disastrous Kristen Welker interview? Is NBC News conducting internal investigations, or does it plan to? I do not know for certain the answers to these questions today. I do know they are among many questions being asked inside NBC today, in part because of ONE tweet, and in part because of the awful realization that some sort of illicit pre-arrangement is an almost better explanation than that Welker, and Meet The Press, and NBC News, abrogated virtually every one of its journalistic responsibilities in a Chris Licht-level dumpster fire that has left the long time viability of Welker, and her Executive Producer, and the nearly 76 year old program itself, up in the air. I also know veterans within NBC News are pushing for investigations based on the following timeline: Welker and NBC News reporter Dasha Burns were among a dozen Washington insiders who were quote wining and dining” with Trump thugs Jason Miller, Steven Cheung and Chris LaCivita at a steakhouse called Rare” the night before the Republican presidential debate in Milwaukee. The dinner was August 22 nd , Welker had been named the host-in-waiting for Meet The Press on June 5 th , the interview was suddenly announced late in the day last Wednesday, the 13 th , conducted on Thursday the 14 th . The NBC News Employee handbook would have discouraged the Welker-Burns-Trump Staff dinner but if the reporting on it by Politico is correct – that the news employees who attended paid their own expenses – they would not be guilty of violating the code precluding accepting meals or other gifts or other items of value from a political campaign, politician, or officeholder. The more pressing problem is: at exactly 10 AM Eastern yesterday, NBC News posted on its website, a fact check of Welker’s interview. At 10:13 A-M its Meet The Press” account tweeted this, verbatim:Former President Trump made a spate of false and misleading comments about immigration, foreign policy, abortion and more in a wide-ranging interview with Meet The Press moderator Kristen Welker.” The complication here is that the NBC News Employee handbook requires – or required (I was never given one; they held them close to the vest; though I was given access to one, and I haven’t personally seen a revised copy and am relying on others quoting it to me) that if NBC knowingly broadcast or publish lies false or misleading comments or information by anyone in any non-live format without a disclaimer or caveat or… a fact-check – they have violated the NBC News Employee codes and are potentially subject to punishment up to and including suspension and termination. On the one hand, NBC News is posting a fact-check of what, at 11:30 AM, it tweeted about Trump’s prevarications and said there were quote at least 11 times during President Trump’s interview… here’s our fact...