JOY REID (HOST): Eric, I want to start with you on this, because you heard Laura Ingraham there saying that they’re just mad because now we’re invading their sort of inner sanctums. And you did have a column on Fox News by a Fox News – a column by Fox News manager Bill Sammon, who essentially said this on the first news conference that was held by Barack Obama. “Longtime members of the White House press corps who are accustomed to sitting in the front row of presidential press conferences were surprised to find their prime real estate occupied by Ed Schultz, a strident liberal who hosts a nationally syndicated radio program.”
That was back in 2009 when the right was wondering how Obama could allow liberal talk show hosts, as well as the Huffington Post, to ever be a part of news conferences. Now they are sort of being snide about the fact that people may not want Breitbart to be in the front row. What do you think, Eric?
ERIC BOEHLERT: Obviously, there's no comparison to something like the Huffington Post and Ed Schultz to Breitbart. Look, what Breitbart has done -- even a couple years ago, Breitbart was kind of like a running joke within the conservative media. It was kind of a punchline. The reporting was not serious. If not punchline, a sort of place of concern, right? Wildly Islamophobic, thinly veiled racism, occasionally anti-Semitic, kind of the sewer really of the conservative media, far, far right. And now we've got the sewer running straight into the Trump White House. This is incredibly troubling. And again, Laura Ingraham says, “Well, alt-right just means that you're conservative.” No, this is not The Weekly Standard. This is not even Fox News. During the campaign, I was saying that Donald Trump is the Fox News id. Turns out he's the Alex Jones id. We are sort of careening beyond conservative media into something far darker and far more radical, and it is the face of the Trump White House right now.
