BUCK: I promised you detailed coverage. Clay took you sweep into a story I did not even remember, but producer Ali said once you told it, then it jogged a memory a little bit; she did remember hearing it. I don’t remember anything about that story of LeBron James with the very racist graffiti that they didn’t even wait to show. The cops didn’t get to see it. They had to get rid of it right away.

That seems like a strange thing to do. But we wanted everybody to know about as well the excellent coverage of the Jussie… Look, MSNBC. Say what you will about them — and they’re delusional commies who are trying to destroy the country. But when they know they’re wrong, they know they’re wrong, and they were gonna make amends last night on the Jussie Smollett thing after hyping it up as a huge story in the early days and still backing him up now. Here is the opening on Joy Reid. Remember, verdict came down maybe, what, I mean, 5 or 6 Eastern last night, around then.

CLAY: That’s about right.

BUCK: So, this was the biggest breaking news story in the country by far. Here’s the opening of Joy Reid’s show.

REID: Good evening, everybody. We have a lot to get to in the next hour including two legal setbacks for Donald Trump. Late today, a federal appellate court ruled against his effort to withhold documents from the January 6 committee. And the New York attorney general is seeking a deposition from Trump early next month as part of her investigation…

BUCK: All right, enough.

CLAY: Who is actually interested in either of those stories?

BUCK: Can I just say one thing just about this, Clay, which is so amazing? Fox did a story on this up on Fox’s website. Not a single primetime host last night on MSNBC made mention of Jussie Smollett’s name.

CLAY: It is unbelievable that that could happen, yet simultaneously I’m not shocked. Does that make sense? Let me explain, ’cause I think this is significant. One of the ways that the media lies to you is by their selection of stories. There are — every single day, truth be told, and Buck and I know this ’cause we have three hours to talk to you every single day.

We try and talk about the biggest stories in America every single day, and the selection of topics for media is massive. That had been, Buck… Do you know who runs MSNBC? Who is the lead programmer or CEO or whatever the title is? I don’t think that happened by accident that every single show didn’t cover it. I think that had to be a directive almost from on high that, “Hey, the Jussie Smollett story’s really not that big of news. We’re just not gonna cover it.”

That’s fine. But they covered the allegation monumentally, and this is what I… Some people are getting used to the phrase, but I think it’s worthy of continuing use: Stories get memoryholed when they defeat the narrative. The narrative that Jussie Smollett was trying to sell that America’s “a fundamentally awful, racist country, and it’s so outright racist that two Donald Trump supporters would confront me with the news, pour bleach on me, insult me based on my sexuality and my race.

“This is the America that we live in right now.” That’s the story that MSNBC wants to tell because they want their viewers to believe that they are the good people and that the rest of the country, the Trump supporting red states, are filled with bad people. That’s the number-one narrative that MSNBC sells to its viewers every single day. Do you agree with that, the number-one —

BUCK: Of course.

CLAY: — narrative is, “We’re good; they’re bad”?

BUCK: It’s so much virtue signaling that goes on among the leftists, among the Democrats all the time. They’ve created this storyline where they’re always the good people — the Democrats, the leftists, the Marxists —

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: — because they’re fighting against this constant force of racism in society, which is really just another version of fighting against the horrific inequality that they’re talking about in society, which is why really what you have is — as we’ve discussed before — a racial Marxism that has become completely mainstream in the Democrat Party. Looking at the race relations as a form of primary agitation to sprite us, to divide us, to turn us against each other.

Instead of sitting around saying — in a normal context of somebody who understands the world and our history and what we are — America is a country where people actually get along really well. We like each other. We’re not racist. We love each other. We’re Americans. We want this country to do great. We want all people of different colors and ethnicities and religions and everything to be great and happy and safe and secure.

We want the best for all of our fellow Americans, right? And instead of sitting around saying, “You know what? It’s a pretty darn good country even with all the problems that exist that are always going to exist,” they just exacerbate. They dive deeper, because it feels good and it costs them nothing. Clay, they did a story on some Trump legal thing.

CLAY: As an opener.

BUCK: As the opening segment! This thing has happened yesterday, and you and I are like characters in the news matrix. We live in a New York Times alternate world of all of this. Clay is dropping tweet bombs at 11 o’clock at night. I’m like, “Doesn’t Mrs. Travis take his phone away?”

CLAY: The reality here is if Jussie Smollett had been on trial with his accusers there — in other words, if it had been a hate crime and there had been two guys who were Donald Trump supporters, two white guys that were accused of a hate crime, they would have been covering it every single day in minute detail. And so as soon as the story turns out, “Oh, Jussie Smollett’s a liar; the hate crime is totally made up,” they pretend the story didn’t exist.

Again, if you’re going to cover the allegation because it fulfills your worldview, when the allegation explodes and is no longer true, to me you have an obligation to cover it as well. And this is the same thing I was saying in the second hour, Buck, about the LeBron James case. If you are going to cover the allegation of racism when the LAPD does an investigation and you determine that that story isn’t true, you should have to follow up and cover up the entirety of the story.

Because your initial coverage presumes that it is important for your audience to know it. So, you need to fulfill that and complete the story arc, so they understand. There’s a ton of people out there… Buck, you saw the numbers from The Hill: 26% of people still believe Jussie Smollett according to the poll that they did — 74% believe it’s a fake hate crime, 26% still believe it’s real. I guarantee you, Buck, that 26% is overwhelmingly made up of left wingers who saw the initial story and then were not shared the remaining details, and so they didn’t ever know what the full resolution of that full story was.

BUCK: There’s a part of this also with the Jussie Smollett thing. There’s the funny thing that this is so obviously false, and this is so stupid and how could anybody have believed this? There’s the positive aspect of it, the good story, which is — and we said not even just in this case, which is obviously a much lesser severity of case than some of the others, but juries have been getting it right in highly politicized cases recently.

You and I both agree on that. But on the downside of this or on the part of this that’s still upsetting, galling, you have Jussie Smollett was willing to come forward, have his defense team still dig in on this. And I think what they were hoping for was someone on that jury… No one was going to believe, on a fact basis, that Jussie didn’t do this.

It’s not possible to find a sentient adult human being that would have been presented with all the evidence that they had and think, “Yeah, maybe this actually happened to Jussie Smollett.” What they were hoping for was something similar to the mentality around…

Again, a very different kind of case and different severity, but the mentality around the OJ case, which was, “Well, even if we know he’s guilty, doesn’t matter; the facts don’t matter; the truth doesn’t matter; this is actually about narrative. This is about my team! This is about making sure that people know that we’re balancing things.” You know what I’m saying?

CLAY: Oh, yeah.

BUCK: Jussie Smollett not only lectured us the first time around when Kim Foxx, let’s not forget, pulled all charges and tried to seal it, Clay —

CLAY: Yes. Oh, I know.

BUCK: — so no one could bring it back, talk about it, look at it again. Another DA couldn’t look at it. So, they tried everything to cover this up. He lectured us. And now effectively Jussie’s pitch — ’cause no one believed the facts — was, “Please nullify the facts here because I am a gay black man in America today, and I hate Republicans. So, it doesn’t matter what I actually did! You should just stand with me against this,” and that’s really undermining. That’s going right at the heart of “equality for all” in the U.S. justice system. So that still bothers me.

CLAY: The jury got it right. But what goes on, I think, on a daily basis is when it comes to race in this country, when there is a victim ideology that can be advanced, that is, black people predominantly, right? You mentioned earlier that the Asian hate crime story basically vanished when it came out that most Asian hate crimes were being committed by black people.

So, it wasn’t a convenient narrative because there wasn’t a white person to blame. When it is the case that a black person appears to be a victim of a white person, the media covers that story with a fine-tooth comb. As soon as that story starts to blow up or begins to have any inaccuracies, then many in the media pretend that the story never existed in the first place — and that’s exactly what has happened with Jussie, and it’s an embarrassment.

But, Buck, the challenge is, those MSNBC viewers don’t even realize that they’re being manipulated and lied to. We talked about the other day, and I think it’s significant: The number of people who still believe that if you get covid you’re gonna have to go to the hospital. A monster percentage of those people are MSNBC viewers, CNN viewers — left wingers who have no ability to rationally analyze fear. Because CNN and MSNBC and the New York Times and the Washington Post, if they read those — although most people get their news from television or the people, I imagine, who believe this — they have no ability to engage in rational thought, and it’s tough.