December 4, 2017

MSNBC Cuts Off Sam Seder Over a Single Lame Joke From Eight Years Ago

Chris Hayes:

Hayes is responding to the fact that MSNBC has “severed ties” with Sam Seder. And why did they do that? Because eight years ago Seder made a joke on Twitter about Roman Polanski:

Was it a dumb joke? Sure, I guess so. Should people be blackballed for making dumb jokes? Nope. Should anybody really care about this tweet? Nope. Even some conservatives agree that nobody should care about this.

So why does MSNBC care about it? Apparently because the man who brought us Pizzagate—the story that Hillary Clinton was running a pedophile ring out of a Washington DC pizza joint—has spent the last month demanding that they care.

Let’s tot up the scorecard here. NBC News passed on the Harvey Weinstein story. They harbored a sexual abuser for years even though “everyone knew” what Matt Lauer was up to. Ditto for Mark Halperin.

But thanks to the demands of a lunatic conservative, they cut off Sam Seder for a single lame joke made on Twitter in 2009. What the hell is in the water these days at 30 Rock?

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We've never been very good at being conservative.

And usually, that serves us well in doing the ambitious, hard-hitting journalism that you turn to Mother Jones for. But it also means we can't afford to come up short when it comes to scratching together the funds it takes to keep our team firing on all cylinders, and the truth is, we finished our budgeting cycle on June 30 about $100,000 short of our online goal.

This is no time to come up short. It's time to fight like hell, as our namesake would tell us to do, for a democracy where minority rule cannot impose an extreme agenda, where facts matter, and where accountability has a chance at the polls and in the press. If you value our reporting and you can right now, please help us dig out of the $100,000 hole we're starting our new budgeting cycle in with an always-needed and always-appreciated donation today.

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