Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
SEE RELATED:
(all emphasis below is mine)
Senator John Kerry, Massachusetts Democrat, joined MSNBC’s Morning Joe on Friday and used the Democratic “hostage” terminology to imply his frustration with both Republicans on Capitol Hill and Tea Party activists during the debt ceiling debate. He also told the Morning Joe crew why he believes points of view different from his should be ignored by the media.
“We have to change the minds of those people in the House of Representatives who have appropriately focused on the deficit but who have completely inappropriately left out any kind of plans whatsoever for how you create jobs and grow America,” he said. “I mean we’ve literally…I mean everybody’s talked about it….yes. The Congress was taken hostage—the country—the economy—it was taken hostage. You had people there who were literally ready to cut the baby in half.”
Senator Pat Toomey, Pennsylvania Republican, previously argued that a default would not happen on August 3 if a debt ceiling bill was not signed by the president before then. Democrats attacked Mr. Toomey for wanting the United States to go into default. Senator Kerry, continued with these attacks on Friday morning
“I’ve heard a lot of criticism of the president and frankly the president had no choice here. Congress had no choice here. We did the same thing the president had to do which is save America from default because a default would have been far more disastrous,” Senator Kerry said. “And what we had was a group of people who are completely unaware or didn’t care about the consequences of their actions. They were actually arguing for a default which would have been more catastrophic with respect of what’s happening in Europe and what’s happen here and all now. So we have to break that.”
Finally, the Massachusetts Senator argued the ideas he believed that would have caused the country to go into a default should not have been covered by the media at all. In fact, Mr. Kerry blamed the media for giving any kind of “balance” or “equal” time to ideas that were different to his own:
“And I have to tell ya, and I say this to you politely, the media in America has a bigger responsibility than it’s exercising today. The media’s got to begin to not give equal time or equal balance to an absolutely absurd notion just because somebody asserts it or simply because somebody says something which everybody knows is not factual. It doesn’t deserve the same credit as a legitimate idea about what you do. The problem is everything is put into this tit for tat equal battle and America’s losing any sense of what’s real—of whose accountable—of whose not accountable— of whose real…who isn’t.—of whose serious and who isn’t. “
How apt that Senator Kerry does not want ideas that different to his own to have “equal time” in the media. After all, Mr. Kerry is a supporter of the fairness doctrine. Human Events reported in 2008 that Senator Kerry told NYC radio’s Brian Lehrer in 2007:
“I think the Fairness Doctrine ought to be there and I also think equal time doctrine ought to come back. I mean these are the people who wiped out one of the most profound changes in the balance of the media is when the conservatives got rid of the equal time requirements,” said Sen. Kerry. “And the result is that, you know, they’ve been able to squeeze down and squeeze out opinion of opposing views and I think it’s been an important transition in the imbalance of our public…
