You may have seen this story making the rounds yesterday, in fact it’s still trending on Facebook today.
On Harry Shearer‘s weekly radio show he included 6 minutes of audio recorded during the commercial breaks of Donald Trump‘s town hall on MSNBC last Wednesday. Shearer says the audio is from “the found objects department.”
Gawker, Mediaite and CNN have all reported on the exchanges between Trump and town hall moderators Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski. It’s pretty much what you’d expect: Trump talking about Trump, and Joe and Mika talking about what’s coming up in the next segment. At one point (around the 23:30 mark of Shearer’s show), Brzezinski asks, “You don’t want me to do the ones … um… deportation…” “We really have to go to some questions,” Scarborough interrupts. Sitting across from them, Trump overhears and says: “That’s right. Nothing too hard Mika.”
Insiders tell TVNewser Brzezinski was talking to a producer about where to take the next segment. Brzezinski and Scarborough have both been doing this long enough to know MANY people are listening down the line, from control roof staff, to editors and producers, to executives — and they all were last Wednesday.
The bigger issue is where did that audio come from. When you listen to it, it’s clear that it is broadcast quality, in other words not recorded by someone who happened to be attending the town hall, but by someone who had access to the production feed. The town hall was pre-taped at 2 p.m. Wednesday in South Carolina and fed back to New York for editing. Somewhere along the transmission line, or even someone in some random corner of of the planet who may have had access to the feed, recorded it and dropped it in to Shearer’s hands. Shearer has featured “found objects” for years on My Damn Channel.
MSNBC is not commenting on where the audio may have come from, or whether they’re even looking into it.
Of course, if someone on the inside does have it in for Scarborough and Brzezinski, that’s a whole other issue. (We all remember how things turned out for the Fox News mole).