MS NOW’s Peter Alexander defended his former colleague Kristen Welker after President Donald Trump said the NBC News anchor should face “rebuke or punishment” from the Federal Communications Commission for her comments about his primary endorsement record. “The truth is still the truth, and you deserve to know it, whether a president likes it or not,” Alexander said Monday, hosting “State of Play.”
Welker made her comments during an appearance on NBC4 Washington on Sunday, when the “Meet the Press” moderator predicted that Trump was going to “loom large” over the midterms, while noting that he had seen some “mixed results” on the success of his endorsed candidates thus far.
In a social media post after the segment, Trump attacked Welker, calling her the “Unpopular ‘Hostess’ of the once great Meet the Press.” He went on, “Because of this purposeful inaccuracy, she will be reported to the FCC for rebuke or punishment.”
Alexander described Trump’s response as “rage posting” and said the president was “furious over the facts.”
“Setting aside the fact that the FCC does not ‘rebuke’ or ‘punish’ individual journalists, Kristen’s statement that candidates Trump has endorsed in the primaries have had some mixed results is true,” Alexander said.
The MS NOW host noted that Welker wasn’t the only journalist who has reported on the president’s endorsement record, and he shared an article from Fox News on Trump-backed candidates who had failed to secure their party’s nomination this primary season. “Trump didn’t threaten Fox News for reporting on his ‘high-profile defeats’ — their words, not mine — because it’s true,” he said.
While he conceded that Trump “remains the biggest kingmaker in politics,” Alexander said that the president “has not been perfect, and those defeats are worth exploring.”
What Alexander said should be “more concerning” about Trump’s comments, however, was that the president was “again threatening to use the levers of government to crack down on reporting that he does not like.”
“The goal, it appears, is to have a chilling effect, to intimidate, to threaten, to bully journalists and to undermine the truth,” he said.
Alexander, who worked alongside Welker at NBC News for more than a decade, said that kind of intimidation would not work on his former colleague, whom he described as “one of the hardest-working and best-sourced reporters around.”
“The point is this: The work still matters. The truth is still the truth, and you deserve to know it, whether a president likes it or not,” Alexander added.
You can watch Alexander’s full comments in the clip at the top of the page.
The post ‘Furious over the facts’: Peter Alexander slams Trump’s ‘rage posting’ against Kristen Welker appeared first on MS NOW.
