Politics

Scarborough: Media would cover Obama Libya missteps ‘if Mitt Romney had kept his mouth shut’

Jeff Poor Media Reporter
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Mitt Romney is the reason why the press failed to hold President Barack Obama accountable for the four dead Americans in Libya and several missteps by diplomatic staffers at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, according to MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough.

On his Friday morning program, the “Morning Joe” host said the criticism over the media’s focus on Romney over Obama was fair, but that the media that is to blame for the oversight. Instead, he said, it’s Romney’s fault the press focused on his statements rather than the president’s handling of the situation.

“Talk about the conservative critique — and I think it’s a fair critique, the conservative critique that all you guys in the media were talking about Mitt Romney, you should have talked about the warnings with the embassy, etc., etc.,” Scarborough said. “And yes, perhaps we should have. But you know who didn’t allow us to do that? Mitt Romney.”

The reason for Romney getting the blame. according to Scarborough, is that he ran interference for Obama by being a distraction and taking the media focus off of Obama.

“If Mitt Romney had kept his mouth shut, if he had not acted like a rank amateur, if he had not embarrassed himself — and by the way internally the campaign understands they screwed up, he’s moved on, they know that. So no conservative can say, ‘Oh, the mainstream media, blah, blah.’ They know how badly they screwed up, and they were having the fight internally before he even went out and did it.”

“But Romney got in the way of the media looking at the president, going, ‘What happened here? How did this happen?’ Now, those questions are going to be asked in the coming weeks. But they weren’t asked in the first 24 hours because Romney was holding this horrific, irresponsible, press conference.”

(h/t Mark Finkelstein, Newsbusters)

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