Watch: MSNBC Reporter Hears Soda Can Open, Thinks It's Gunfire... While on the Air
It was the pop heard ‘round the world.
MSNBC hosts have spent years building a reputation for ignorant pontificating — there’s a reason Al Sharpton still has a job there.
But Nicole Wallace’s on-air flub during the network’s coverage of Tuesday’s shooting at YouTube headquarters in San Bruno, California, was one for the books.
Wallace mistook the sound of a can of soda being opened in the studio for sound of a gunshot being fired at the scene.
Clearly, MSNBC hosts haven’t spent a lot of time on the front lines — or even an hour or two at a local gun range.
That might account for the on-air talent’s staggering ignorance when it comes to questions of firearms, but it still shows just how little mainstream media commentators who presume to tell the rest of the country how Americans should think when it comes to Second Amendment issues.
And it says a lot about why liberals in the media have such little credibility.
The moment came when Wallace was trying to fill air time with an interview with political analyst and former John McCain strategist Steve Schmidt by putting the YouTube shooting into The Big Picture — American political “tribes,” 9/11, the whole shebang.
It would be funny if it weren’t so pathetic.
It doesn’t take a gun expert to know that what caught Wallace’s attention sounded nothing like gunfire.
Even accounting for the fact that she probably heard it through an earbud, the knee-jerk assumption that the sound was a gunshot rather than simply, say, static, says more about the wishful thinking that drives the mainstream media than it does about the prevalence of firearms in the United States.
Social media users, naturally, had a field day.
Good points, all.
But for wit and imagination, this one wins hands down.
All kidding aside, the Pavlovian response here speaks volumes about how little thought MSNBC actually puts into its bizarre obsession with inflating news that fits its political agenda — into The Big Picture.
In the same Feb. 15 broadcast, according to The Hill, she said the Republican Party “has blood on its hands” because of its support for Americans’ right to defend themselves.
Those were products of bone-headed thinking, possibly a result of Wallace being marinated in a culture of liberalism since her days as a practicing Republican as the communications director in the George W. Bush White House and serving with Schmidt on the 2008 McCain campaign.
They’ll be forgotten before too long, just a couple more in a long line of MNBC hosts’ inanities.
But Tuesday’s mistaking a soda can for actual gunfire?
That was one for the books.
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