A lot of conservatives think that “class warfare” is motivated by jealousy. Joe Scarborough—who, as you might have noticed, is on TV a lot—thinks the two reporters arrested during the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, last night just wanted “to get on TV.”
Wesley Lowery of The Washington Post and Ryan Reilly of the Huffington Post had been covering the ongoing protests over Saturday’s fatal shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed young black man. They had dipped into a local McDonald’s yesterday to work and recharge, when police officers entered and demanded they leave immediately. “Officers decided we weren’t leaving McDonalds quickly enough, shouldn’t have been taping them,” Lowery tweeted. He says police slammed him into a soda machine; Lowery and Reilly were both arrested and later released without being charged.
On Morning Joe today, Scarborough characterized Lowery and Reilly as some kind of disobedient fame-seekers. “There is a lot of unanswered questions here, but I do know this,” Scarborough said. “When a police officer asks you to pick up—I’ve been in places where police officers said, ‘All right, you know what? This is cordoned off, you guys need to move along.’ You know what I do? I go, ‘Yes, sir,’ or ‘Yes, ma’am.’ I don’t sit there and have a debate and film the police officer, unless I want to get on TV and have people talk about me the next day.”
Lowery hit back later this morning, telling Kate Bolduan, co-host of CNN’s New Day (which runs opposite Morning Joe):
Well, I would invite Joe Scarborough to come down to Ferguson and get out of 30 Rock where he’s sitting and sipping his Starbucks smugly, I invite him to come and talk to the residents of Ferguson, where I’ve been since Monday afternoon having tear gas shot at me, having rubber bullets shot at me, having mothers and daughters crying, having a 19-year-old boy crying, [pulling] his sister out from a cloud of tear gas thinking she was going to die. I would invite Joe Scarborough down here to do some reporting on the ground, then maybe we can have an educated conversation about what’s happening here.
“I have little patience for talking heads,” Lowery added. “This is too important, this is a community in the United States of America where things are on fire, things are on fire, this community is on edge. There’s so much happening here, and instead of putting more reporters on the ground we have people like Joe Scarborough who are running their mouth and who have no idea what they’re talking about.”
When Scarborough made his comments and claimed there were riots outside the McDonald’s, he got some push back from a guest, Nick Confessore of The New York Times.
“I didn’t see any evidence, Joe, that there were riots outside that McDonald’s,” Confessore said. “I’m just concerned by what seems to be this common misconception that it’s illegal to video a law enforcement officer or take pictures of them—it’s not.”
Joe went on to ask rhetorically, “Am I a sucker for when the police officer comes in and says, ‘Hey, we need you to move along?’ Am I a sucker for actually listening and moving along, or should I sit there and question him?”
OK, let’s grant that Joe’s a sucker. It’s one thing to be a political talking head cum journalist who reads the news, debates it vehemently and interviews newsmakers from behind a desk for three hours a day, five days a week, on cable television. But to then accuse reporters who are doing their job by videotaping police at the center of an increasingly militarized racial conflagration of just wanting “to get on TV” is something else. What exactly, I don’t know.
Watch Scarborough here and Lowery below:
