MSNBC actually does have a 'standards and practices staff': report

The Daily Beast's Lloyd Grove has a look at how MSNBC's Steve Kornacki landed the consequential interview with Dawn Zimmer, Democratic mayor of Hoboken, N.J.

Most interesting, perhaps, is that an actual process went into the decision to air the interview in the first place:

There followed two meetings, totaling three hours, with MSNBC in-house lawyers and standards and practices staff. “I guess it was the longest meeting with lawyers I ever had in my life,” Kornacki said. “We wanted to make sure we were confident in the documents we had. We wanted to subject them to a lot of scrutiny on our end before it was something we aired. We wanted to be able to show the documents and we went through every assertion in her story.” Zimmer’s account, he added, “passes the plausibility test.”

Until now, MSNBC viewers could be forgiven for thinking producers at the left-leaning network simply hatch an idea and see if it works. They now know that's not the case.

Zimmer claimed in the interview Saturday that Gov. Chris Christie's administration threatened to withhold hurricane relief funds from Hoboken if Zimmer didn't grant a favor to a real estate developer.