Thirty-two years ago, when the GOP was re-nominating mainstream conservative President George H. W. Bush, NBC’s Katie Couric suggested Republicans had become “too exclusionary, too intolerant.” Four years later, MSNBC host Bill Moyers fretted about the “theological imperatives being imposed” on the Republican platform.
In 2000, CBS’s Bryant Gumbel suggested “blacks have a right to be suspicious” of many Republican leaders, while ABC’s Charles Gibson doubted whether the pro-life GOP was “really an open, compassionate, tolerant party.”
Viewers heard the same thing in 2012, when CBS’s Scott Pelley claimed that because of its stance against abortion, women might “question whether Republicans have women’s best interests at heart.”
In 2016, MSNBC’s Joy Reid decried the “really angry rhetoric” she heard directed against illegal immigrants,” while her…
