David Frum just shared a disturbing anecdote from an appearance this morning on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. According to his short article at The Atlantic, he made a flippant reference to reporting that Pentagon nominee Pete Hegseth was known for drinking on the job at Fox News. The specific line was: “If you’re too drunk for Fox News, you’re very, very drunk indeed.”
He went on to compare the case to that of John Tower in 1989, a long-serving senator whose Secretary of Defense nomination (Dick Cheney got the nod after Tower bowed out) was torpedoed over claims of drinking and womanizing. According to David, after he said this, an MSNBC producer piped up in his ear objecting to his comments and warning him not to repeat them. Not long after, David was ushered off the set, apparently sooner than expected. Then Mika Brzezinski read out an apology for what he’d said.
Bizarre.
Let me share a few thoughts about this.
Everybody is already bummed at Mika and Joe over their seemingly contrite pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago, and very understandably so. But this sounds like something in a different category. It sounds like something coming down from corporate at MSNBC.
Let’s focus specifically on what David said. He was talking about drinking.
Defamation law is a curious thing. The ins and outs of it aren’t as predictable as you might think. There is pretty clear case law, for instance, which holds that calling someone a “Nazi” cannot be defamatory. It’s like calling someone a “big dummy head.” It’s just an opinion. By definition it can’t be defamatory.
Needless to say, I’m not a lawyer. And I’m definitely not YOUR lawyer. But I’m not pulling this stuff out of my hat. In my job I’ve had to work closely with very experienced First Amendment lawyers for many years. Accusing someone of being a drunk isn’t just different in the sense that it is a factual issue — it’s true or it’s not. It’s also something that can be professionally damaging. That elevates it in terms of reputational damage, which is what defamation and libel law are about. Someone with a reputation as an alcoholic might easily not get hired for jobs because they’re viewed as unreliable. It’s not just a matter of hurt feelings. The potential damage is tangible, even quantifiable.
The point is that defamation law isn’t always linear and commonsensical. Some things you’d think would be no-nos are fine and others that seem like locker room banter can be big no-nos.
Needless to say, under Sullivan this shouldn’t matter. Hegseth is a textbook public figure. The speech is in a clearly political context in which the First Amendment protections are strongest. And there’s lots of reporting on which David could base that remark.
The point of going into all of this is that Trump specifically and the MAGA world generally has been putting everyone on notice for years that they’re going to flood the zone with lawsuits. So watch out, basically. And now with Trump coming back in, the assumption is that the threat jumps up dramatically.
So on first blush, this seems like hyper-caution over potential lawsuits. But there are a couple problems with that theory. The first is that MSNBC — or its now spun-off parent company — aren’t some tiny operation that could be sunk by a lawsuit. Perhaps Sullivan isn’t long for this world. But for now it’s the law. And it should make any potential suit manageable for a company of that size. But then there’s also the specific apology from Brzezinski. It seemed to be directed not at Hegseth but rather at Fox News. Here’s the relevant part.
The comment was a little too flippant for this moment that we’re in. We just want to make that comment as well. We want to make that clear. We have differences in coverage with Fox News, and that’s a good debate that we should have often, but right now I just want to say there’s a lot of good people who work at Fox News who care about Pete Hegseth, and we will want to leave it at that.
Is Fox going to sue the show? Are they going to get into a morning ratings war with them? It’s weird isn’t it? You would have expected some comment like saying “we don’t know whether these allegations are true,” etc. But unless I’m missing something, this seems like wanting to keep the peace with Fox News — “a lot of good people who work at Fox News who care about Pete Hegseth.”
I can’t really decode that at all. Not legally, or politically or journalistically.
The final thought I had is this. I don’t watch a lot of political TV. In fact, I’ve been laid up for the last three days with a bad cold. (Almost all better, thanks for asking.) So I haven’t seen any other MSNBC shows. But it’s hard for me to imagine that the allegations about Hegseth’s drinking haven’t come up in the 24/7 talk at MSNBC and often in at least somewhat flippant ways.
Have all the guests there gotten the same message but not said anything?
Is this really just something going on at Morning Joe?
