Stuck In The Middle With Chris

The reason I don't watch Sunday shows is that they are basically 2 hours of silly, mendacious false equivalences used to bash President Obama.  Up With Chris Hayes is a nice change of pace most of the time, but there are still segments where Chris tries to impress his right-leaning panelists by feeding them red meat.  Sunday's final half-hour was a prime cut of this, as Deaniac83 notes over at The People's View:

At a time when the entire GOP is busy constructing a fictional Barack Obama that doesn't actually exist, some on the "Left" have their own construction of yet another fictional Barack Obama. As opposed to the peacenik terrorist-loving Barack Obama constructed by the Right, the Left's fictional version of the president presides over a police state America. On his MSNBC show "Up with Chris Hayes," Chris Hayes launches a fresh attack on President Obama's "national security state." In this version, President Obama commits Syrian-style journalist-killing atrocities by... drum rolls please... prosecuting irresponsible leaks under specific, legally defined - with fully protected defendants' rights - circumstances. 

Yeah, Chris Hayes went there, equating the prosecution of leakers like Bradley Manning with the brutal and bloody deaths of journalists covering Syria's deadly al-Assad regime crackdown. Look Chris, I like your show. It's still head and shoulders above the pablum served up by your sister network, NBC.  But as much as you pride yourself on journalistic accuracy and deep drilling on subjects that cable news doesn't otherwise touch, you blew this one.

It is one thing to rigorously pursue disclosure in government business, and work within a framework of law and democracy to expand that framework in the public interest. It's quite another - and more than irresponsible - to equate the leak-prosecutions of individuals with their right to defend themselves in a court of law secured with open war on citizens and journalists in the cross-hairs of totalitarian regimes. It dishonors the memory and the sacrifice of the brave journalists who risk and give their lives in those regions by comparing their difficulties with a reporter sitting in a fancy press briefing room throwing out questions at the president's press secretary. It makes a mockery of the injustice facing those journalists on the frontlines there to equate it with legal prosecutions of leakers here. Perhaps more sadly, it harms the very effort to make our government more open when comparisons are taken to the level of the absurd.

And if there's anyone in the cable news business who should know better, it's Hayes. Sadly, this isn't his first slip, especially when it comes to guests like Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald.  There's a reason I've been glued to 4 hours of Melissa Harris-Perry, and ambivalent at best about Up With Chris Hayes.  There's no contesting that the former is worth your time, as the professor does an admirable job of flagging down such notions.   The latter, however, could stand to take a few notes on the subject.