Fox News can't handle Rachel Maddow's tax scoop

[DonViejo]

By Erik Wemple March 15 at 12:50 PM

The world would be a much better place if cable-news outlets would act like newspapers when they have scoops. Which is to say, just publish them. Cable news, however, is cable news — an industry that tussles over ratings to such a degree that quiet humility has ceased to be an option. If your show has something new, it behooves you to hype it. And so, early yesterday evening, the Twitter account of the “Rachel Maddow Show” promised viewers this:

Link to tweet

And once Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC program started, the host didn’t exactly get right into the nitty-gritty. Instead, she behaved like Rachel Maddow. “You may have heard, we’ve got some significant breaking news tonight. Donald Trump’s tax returns have surfaced, at least a portion of Donald Trump’s past tax returns. What we have tonight has been turned over to a reporter,” said Maddow, referring to former New York Times reporter David Cay Johnston. It marks the first time that a news organization would publish portions of Trump’s federal tax returns, though the New York Times last year published tidbits of some state returns.

“When Donald Trump declared as a presidential candidate that he would not release his tax returns, he became the first president since the Watergate era to refuse to release his returns,” said Maddow as part of a nearly 20-minute riff on presidents, Trump and tax-return releases.

Only later, after a commercial break, did Maddow address the specifics, along with Johnston himself, a tax expert and author of a book on Trump. For this delay, Maddow has taken an unquantifiable measure of guff. “Rachel Maddow Lands a Scoop, Then Makes Viewers Wait,” reads the headline on a story in the New York Times. Twitter had fun with it:

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