Media top headlines June 30
CNN and MSNBC's ratings collapsing, Ilhan Omar telling CNN she doesn't regret equating US and Israel with the Taliban, and an MSNBC legal analyst praising Attorney General Garland for personally scooping ice cream for DOJ employees round out today's top media headlines
New York City mayoral candidate Eric Adams' complaint about possible irregularities in the 2021 Democratic primary drew outrage from some prominent liberal writers, but the city's beleaguered Board of Elections acknowledged a huge disparity in the count Tuesday.
The Brooklyn Borough president and former police chief currently holds a lead in the ranked choice primary, where voters ranked their top five preferred candidates rather than just choosing one, but Adams said the vote total on Tuesday was 100,000 more than the total counted on election night. The NYC Board of Elections acknowledged a "discrepancy" in Tuesday's ranked choice voting count, revealing it counted "both test and election night results, producing approximately 135,000 additional records" and would have to re-tabulate the results.
But before Adams' concerns were validated, left-wing writers attacked him as no better than former President Donald Trump claiming the 2020 election was rigged against him. Their outlets also notably did not push back and even promoted Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams' claims that her 2018 gubernatorial defeat was rigged by Republican opponent Brian Kemp.
Vox writer Ian Millhiser called Adams' statement "some Donald Trump s--t."
MSNBC's Chris Hayes reacted to the situation, "Something to consider is that the corrosive Big Lie conspiracy-theorizing and delegitimization of elections that Trump and the GOP have unleashed, won’t necessarily just stay contained to them."
Like many of his MSNBC colleagues, Hayes was receptive to Abrams' repeated argument that she lost a rigged election to Kemp. On Hayes' podcast in 2020, she told him, "I can't prove I would have won, but it's a pretty solid thing that I would have been the governor of Georgia" if voter suppression, in her view, hadn't taken place.
NYC MAYORAL PRIMMARY LEADER ADAMS CALLS HIMSELF ‘FACE OF THE NEW DEMOCRATIC PARTY’
"It was a 50,000-vote margin," Hayes said sympathetically.
Hayes went onto criticize the Board of Elections on Tuesday as news of the number discrepancy broke.
Another liberal writer, Jeet Heer, wrote sarcastically, "Big shout out to the pundits who celebrated Adams as a "'normie' and the sensible centrist" in response to Adams' statement.
"Everyone's ‘Eric Adams is like Trump’ tweets could use an edit function right now," writer Anthony Fisher tweeted Tuesday night.
Under New York City’s new ranked-choice voting system, voters can choose their top five candidates in order. If no candidate receives a majority of votes in the first round, election officials knock off the candidate with the least amount of first-choice votes and count the second-choice option on the ballots that ranked the losing candidate highest.
It won't be known until July at the earliest who won the Democratic primary. The winner will be the favorite to win the general election this fall to succeed term-limited Bill de Blasio, D.
The fiasco is not only frustrating the candidates and New York City voters who want to know who the Democratic nominee will be, but also CNN.
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The liberal outlet fretted Wednesday that "in flubbing the exercise, the board also risked handing additional fodder to right-wingers in states and municipalities across the country, who might now seek to parlay the error into momentum for suppressive new voting laws."
Fox News' Morgan Phillips contributed to this report.