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MSNBC & The Media’s Third Rail

Cable news has always struggled to balance moral clarity with the view from nowhere, especially when it pertains to Israel and Palestine. For many, the atrocities of the past week have validated the importance of on-the-ground reporting in an era where success is too often determined by style over substance.

MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough took his “friends at Axios” to task over a headline that characterized the students’ letter as “pro-Palestinian,” rather than “pro-Hamas.”
MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough took his “friends at Axios” to task over a headline that characterized the students’ letter as “pro-Palestinian,” rather than “pro-Hamas.” Photo: Shannon Finney/WireImage
Dylan Byers
October 13, 2023

On Friday, I was sitting in an Israeli-American café just off Harvard Square, trying to fathom the fraught scene taking place outside my window. Parked immediately outside the café was a now infamous mobile billboard truck that has been driving around campus, displaying the names and faces of undergrads from the thirty-four student groups that signed a letter by the Harvard Palestine Solidarity Committee blaming Israel for Hamas’s vicious, barbaric attack.