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NBC News opens a new frontier in 'both sides do it' nonsense [1]

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Date: 2023-02-02  

So here’s the explanation:

On Wednesday, six days after Senate Democrats announced their committee assignments, Senate Republicans followed suit. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said Wednesday the delay was because the GOP committee process was “a little more cumbersome than ours” and that he’s “very hopeful" that the committees can be officially put together on Thursday.

The Senate hasn’t had much to do because it hasn’t had its committees formally set up, and it hasn’t had its committees formally set up because Republicans took an extra six days.

But somehow the three-writer NBC News team’s lead-up to this information involves the second-ranking Republican senator, John Thune, saying, “This certainly is an incredibly slow start,” and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell saying—sorry, make that “quipping”—“The mind-boggling pace of the Senate beginning of this year is certainly astonishing.” McConnell doesn’t “think I’ve ever seen a slower beginning that started a new Congress in the Senate.”

Republican Sen. John Kennedy is also quoted mocking the time-filling votes on “National Stalking Month” and “National Trafficking and Modern Slavery Prevention Month.” Those sure would be silly things to be holding votes on, rather than passing through unanimous consent, if the Senate had committees sending substantive legislation through for consideration! Except, it doesn’t … and that’s on the very people running to the media to snark about how little the Democrats running the show are getting done.

That NBC News—which often has quite good political coverage relative to a lot of other major outlets—ran with this is an embarrassment to the network, to the three reporters who put their names on it, and to whichever editors worked on it.

The article then gets back to dysfunction in the House, but everyone who pays even glancing attention to Congress knows about that. The new information this article was intended to convey was that the Senate also falling down on the job, and with full quotes from three different Republican senators while Schumer gets a couple words buried beneath those quotes, it’s clear where the idea for this came from. Once again, the media needs to do better.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/2/2/2150683/-NBC-News-opens-a-new-frontier-in-both-sides-do-it-nonsense

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