Sen. Cory Booker’s marathon 25-hour speech on the Senate floor got predictably bad reviews from the Media Research Center, which lashed out at anyone who praised it. Comedy cop Alex Christy griped in an April 2 post that the speech was merely “stunt work”:
Radio host Charlamagne Tha God joined Comedy Central’s The Daily Show on Tuesday for one of his irregular scheduled “In My Opinion” segments. Recently, Charlamagne’s opinions have focused on the woeful state of the Democratic Party, but Charlamagne found reason for optimism on Tuesday as he applauded the stunt work of Sen. Cory Booker, Rep. Jasmine Crockett, and his own uncensored N-words.
Reacting to Booker’s Tuesday talk-a-thon, that at the time of recording had reached 22 hours, Charlamagne gushed, “This is unbelievable. Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! A Democrat actually did something! Wow! Wow! That’s the longest someone’s held Congress captive since January 6th. I mean, yeah. I mean, so far, he’s only talking, but he’s talking a lot, so I’ll take it, okay. What Booker did today is like the political version of phone sex: It’s not as good as the real thing, but it’s a hell of a lot better than nothing. That’s right. And nothing is what it seems like the Democratic Party has been doing for the last three months. The Democrats are like Jason Momoa in-between Aquaman movies: Not in good shape.”
A couple hours later, Christy complained that another non-right-winger had on Booker to talk about it while insisting the speech was meaningless:
Democratic Sen. Cory Booker may have broken the record for the longest speech in Senate history on Tuesday, but it didn’t accomplish anything practical. Nevertheless, he joined The Rachel Maddow Show to take a victory lap while Maddow essentially worshipped the ground he walked on as she declared he “captured the moral imagination of this nation.”
Maddow gushed, “I don’t know if you are conscious of how much this caught the attention and caught the imagination of the American people. I know that you’re not using electronic devices on the Senate floor. You’re not watching your TikTok numbers and your YouTube numbers and the C-SPAN contemporaneous viewing numbers while you’re there, because you can’t be. But every time that I checked any form of media by which you could be live monitored, there were no less than tens of thousands of people watching in the same place that I was in that moment.”
She further oozed, “What you’ve done with all everything else that’s going on with this administration and the horrific cuts of, you know, 10,000 people fired today from the nation’s health agencies and all these other things. This is the biggest story in the country right now. You have captured people’s attention for 25 hours.”
The same day, Nicholas Fondacaro touched on the speech during his daily hate-watch of “The View”:
To complete the liberal media’s latest flip-flop on supporting the filibuster, the Cackling Coven of ABC’s The View spent part of Wednesday’s episode gushing about New Jersey Democratic Senator Cory Booker’s 24-hour, so-called “filibusters” (he wasn’t blocking legislation). Moderator Whoopi Goldberg went so far as to ridiculously and falsely assert that “no one” in the media covered Booker speaking until he was done.
“People have been fighting since the election,” Goldberg touted and pivoting to Booker. “And just because we’re not aware of it because media wasn’t covering – Nobody was covering it.”
“That’s true,” clueless Joy Behar agreed. Pretend independent Sara Haines also agreed, but added: “No one covered it till he broke the record.”
The first reference we found at the MRC to Booker’s speech was Christy’s “Daily Show” complaint above, so there is some truth to her claim.
Curtis Houck served up his own whine in yet another April 2 post, calling his speech a “charade”:
Between Tuesday and Wednesday mornings, the major broadcast networks of ABC, CBS, and NBC were head over heels for Senator Cory Booker’s (D-NJ) 25-hour-long, “marathon” act of chicanery “speaking in a protest” against Trump and “shin[ning] a spotlight on” his “rapid fire and controversial actions” through “the little bit of power and influence” they have in Washington.
At one point, one anchor even compared Booker to the movie Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.
Thus far, the networks have spent five minutes and 19 seconds on their flagship morning and evening news shows (excluding CBS Evening News Plus and CBS Mornings Plus, although we’ll include them for their bias below).
[…]Despite Booker having finally ended the charade later Tuesday night, the Wednesday morning news shows were ebullient over Booker’s showboating.
Christy returned for an April 3 post grousing that non-right-wing late-night shows love Booker’s speech:
Thus far, it has been a gloomy 2025 for the late night comedy shows as they have attacked Democrats from the left for not doing anything to stop Republicans, but on Wednesday, a trio of them claimed to have reason for optimism as they reacted to Sen. Cory Booker’s 25-hour talk. Some suggested he get an award, while others claimed he spoke for all of America, while others tried their hand at media criticism, arguing the media hasn’t praised Booker enough.
CBS’s Stephen Colbert teed up a clip on The Late Show of the final moments of Booker’s speech where he compared himself to the Civil Rights Movement, “There were many great moments, but Booker saved, I think, the best for last.”
[…]Over at NBC and Late Night, host Seth Meyers welcomed MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow and recalled, “Cory Booker, last night, did speak for 25 hours and then went straight on your show before declaring, “I did think, you know, as for what it accomplishes, I don’t know, but it did, at least, say, I think, to, you know, his voters ‘Look, I do still have some energy for this fight.’”
[…]Back on Comedy Central, The Daily Show’s host of the week, Michael Kosta, attacked the media for insufficiently gushing over Booker’s speech, “And the amazing thing is that Booker didn’t just get out there and read from Wikipedia, he stayed focused on condemning the Trump Administration’s assault on working people and the rule of law, so you can imagine the media had a lot of questions for him about these serious issues.”
Following a montage of reporters discussing how Booker was not allowed to take a bathroom break, Kosta returned, ‘“Senator, senator, senator, senator: pee-pee. Senator, a follow up: poo-poo.’ This is why our country is the shape that it’s in. The media won’t talk about the substance of this speech, they’d rather talk about how he held it in for so long. No one cares about that, but just out of curiosity, how did you do it?”
The truth is nobody cares about Booker’s speech either. To return to Maddow’s point, tens of thousands of video views is not exactly history-altering.
Christy seems to think that just because his right-wing echo chamber despised Booker’s speech, it means nobody did.
Tim Graham joined the whine-a-thon in his April 4 podcast:
Sometimes you can sense that Happy News for Democrats is the most important kind of news. Sen. Cory Booker speaking on the Senate floor for 25 hours, unloading wheelbarrows of Democrat talking points, isn’t exactly epic. But Democrats in the media will pretend it is.
“It was nothing less than the most dramatic and powerful Senate speech I have ever heard,” gushed MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell. He “took his place in history!”
Or maybe it will be forgotten by June.
Graham is certainly hoping that happens — that’s his job, after all.