Bill Maher may have broken up with MSNBC, but he’s still paying close attention to just how much coverage the network gives to New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R).
Maher brought MSNBC host Rachel Maddow onto his HBO show Friday night and pressed her to explain why the network gives so much airtime to the scandal surrounding the Christie administration’s involvement in closing lanes on the George Washington Bridge.
“I am totally obsessed with the Christie story, unapologetically,” Maddow said, comparing it to her past coverage of disgraced former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich.
Maher wrote in what he called a “tongue-in-cheek” blog post earlier this month that he was going to “start seeing other news organizations” in protest of the network’s wall-to-wall coverage of Christie. He added that MSNBC had become like Fox News and that the so-called Bridgegate scandal had become the network’s version of Benghazi.
“I should have said that, yes, this is not the same as Benghazi,” Maher said. “I made that analogy, I said ‘This is your Benghazi.’ Benghazi is nothing. There is no scandal there. This is an actual scandal. It’s just that it’s not Watergate.”
“When there are gonzo political corruption stories, you cover them,” Maddow responded. “The most interesting thing about the Christie one is that we still don’t know what happened. It’s still not resolved. We still don’t have an explanation.”
National Review writer Charles C.W. Cooke ventured another theory about why MSNBC has hammered Christie in recent weeks: to “get rid of Chris Christie” from the 2016 presidential field.
“So you think that I’ve created the bridge story out of whole cloth in order to elect a Democrat in 2016?” Maddow asked with a mocking laugh, concluding that the bridge scandal was simply “an ongoing story worth covering.”
Watch below:
h/t Raw Story
