Mika Brzezinski and her “Morning Joe” colleagues stood up for Lesley Stahl Monday morning in the aftermath of her controversial sit-down with Georgian representative Marjorie Taylor Greene.
The veteran journalist and CBS news magazine program are facing down blowback from their Sunday night interview, with many viewers taking issue that the far-right Republican representative was given airtime at all – and then not adequately fact-checked along the way.
“I don’t understand what she did wrong,” Brzezinski said of Stahl’s performance. “She did an interview with Marjorie Taylor Greene.”
The most viral moment from the interview Monday was Stahl’s reaction to Greene’s claim that the Democratic Party is full of pedophiles, which left the interviewer visibly taken aback – but, some have argued, not adequately factchecking the claim.
“Democrats support — even Joe Biden, the president himself — supports children being sexualized and having transgender surgeries. Sexualizing children is what pedophiles do to children,” Greene said, to which Stahl responded, “Wow. OK.”
Citing tweets that were called up earlier in the segment – one from Norm Ornstein that called Stahl’s a “disgraceful, cringeworthy performance” and one from John Harwood that called the interview “garbage” – Brzezinski questioned who could realistically do a better job than Stahl?
“I think she did an exceptional job, as usual,” Brzezinski said. “I take issue with those tweets and with both those people. If they sat down with Marjorie Taylor Greene, could they do it as well? Because it should be done. We do need to cover these people.”
The “Morning Joe” segment began with co-host Joe Scarborough posing the question of whether or not Greene should have been given the opportunity to interview on a platform like “60 Minutes” in the first place, while also adding that Stahl is “an extraordinary journalist and she has been for a long time.”
“We never even mentioned Marjorie Taylor Green’s name on this show when she was a back-bencher,” Scarborough said. “I wasn’t gonna give anybody oxygen for saying crazy things if they weren’t relevant. She’s now relevant, just like Donald Trump is relevant … If she is there, and she’s the second most powerful Republican in the House, do we not need to hear from her?”
“It is worth hearing from her, we just have to do it in a smart, contextual way,” panelist Jonathan Lemire responded.
“I think it’s important,” Brzezinski added later on. “This is what they do in ’60 Minutes.’ They bring a person like this or a foreign leader, they go into situations where they ask the questions and show their viewers what they’re dealing with.”
Watch the full “Morning Joe” segment in the video above.