MSNBC just can’t help itself, can it? The network could have taken its recent ratings disaster as a wake-up call, maybe even a chance to pivot away from its constant, frothing-at-the-mouth anti-Trump hysteria. Instead, they just swapped out one set of partisan puppets for another.
Joy Reid getting the boot should have been a step toward sanity, but let’s be real—replacing her with Stephanie Ruhle and Ali Velshi isn’t exactly a win for journalistic integrity. That’s like swapping out one flat tire for another and wondering why the car still won’t go anywhere.
Case in point: the latest media malpractice courtesy of Ruhle, Velshi, and their buddies over at the Associated Press. It started when the AP published a hit piece claiming that Tulsi Gabbard had said Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin were “very good friends.” Naturally, MSNBC couldn’t wait to run with it.
Anything that ties Trump to Russia, no matter how flimsy or outright false, is like oxygen to these people. So Ruhle and Velshi eagerly parroted the claim, treating it as yet more proof that Trump is nothing more than Putin’s lapdog.
One problem—Gabbard never said it. Not even close. What she actually said was that Trump and India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi were “very good friends.” A slight difference, right? Just a small, almost imperceptible distinction between reality and the manufactured narrative the left-wing media has been desperately pushing since 2016.
By the time the AP was forced to issue a correction, the damage had already been done. MSNBC’s own ‘Morning Joe’ even had an analyst repeat the lie on air the next day without a single challenge. It wasn’t until Tuesday evening that Ruhle and Velshi begrudgingly issued their so-called corrections—if you can even call them that.
No explanation, no apology, and certainly no accountability. Ruhle in particular delivered hers with all the enthusiasm of someone being forced to eat their vegetables. It was little more than a box-checking exercise, a hurried, insincere afterthought before signing off for the night.
And that’s the real problem, isn’t it? This isn’t just an innocent mistake. This is a pattern, a playbook, a modus operandi. MSNBC, like much of the mainstream media, doesn’t start with the facts and then build a story around them.
No, they start with a conclusion—Trump is bad, Trump is corrupt, Trump is a Russian asset—and then scramble to find (or fabricate) anything that supports it. And when they get caught red-handed? A rushed, half-hearted “correction” is all you’ll get, buried at the end of a show where hardly anyone is still watching.
MSNBC set the record straight last night and corrected false reporting about DNI Tulsi Gabbard. pic.twitter.com/b7MZEW1zwj
— Alex Pfeiffer (@Pfeiffer47) March 19, 2025
But that won’t stop the damage. Because let’s be honest—years from now, when some uninformed liberal on Twitter rants about Trump being besties with Putin, they won’t cite an actual source. They won’t remember that this particular “fact” was debunked. No, they’ll just “know” it to be true because, at some point, they heard it repeated over and over again on networks like MSNBC. It’s the old trick: get the lie out there first, and even when it’s corrected, people will still believe it.
This is exactly why MSNBC is circling the drain. People are tired of the nonstop hysteria, the shameless narrative-pushing, and the utter lack of journalistic ethics. At some point, even their most loyal viewers are going to realize they’re being played. And when that happens, no amount of desperate spin will be able to save them.
