A few weeks after one of its most prized voices was forced to apologize for comparing Bernie Sanders’ Nevada caucus win to the Nazi takeover of France in World War II, MSNBC is again trending for some deeply stupid reasons.
During Thursday night’s broadcast, anchor Brian Williams—who you may also remember for lying about being on a downed helicopter during the U.S. invasion of Iraq—and, sigh, New York Times editorial board member Mara Gay, praised a tweet from a comedian that erroneously posited that Mike “Moves Like” Bloomberg could’ve given all 327 million American citizens $1 million each with the $500 million he spent on ads.
“Bloomberg spent $500 million on ads,” reads the post, which originated at an account that now protects its tweets. “The U.S. population is 327 million. He could have given each American $1 million and still have money left over, I feel like a $1 million check would be life-changing for people. Yet he wasted it all on ads and STILL LOST.”
Take it away, Jonathan Frakes.
This is so egregiously, aggressively wrong—look, we’re not number crunchers over here, but we know 327 million times one million is 327 trillion—that brows across the world wrinkled inside out when Williams went on to call the tweet “an incredible way of putting it.”
“It’s an incredible way of putting it. It’s true,” Gay replied. “It’s disturbing.”
But, as many critics were quick to point out, this isn’t simply a demonstration of idiocy by Williams and Gay, but of an entire organization, one that’s ostensibly meant to be a voice of insight and reason in this, an election year.
Fuck it, we’re getting all our news from TikTok now.
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