Maddow: Real Benghazi scandal is how media got played by GOP 'sources'

On Friday night's edition of "The Rachel Maddow Show," host Rachel Maddow discussed how DC has worked itself into "scandal mode," but over the wrong scandals. In the show's opening segment, she questioned why no one who printed and quoted a doctored set of White House emails regarding the Benghazi attack has revealed the source of the misinformation.

"In Washington today," she said, "It's still 'Scandal o'Clock,' all day."

With regards to the IRS investigation of Tea Party groups, Maddow said that hearings reveal that a top official in the U.S. Treasury knew in June about the investigation of the conservative anti-tax groups. Republican officias want to know, now, what role a revelation of the scandal would have played in the 2012 election.

She then turned to the bogus email quotes that ABC ran as its big Benghazi story.

"That scandal that White House weighed in, in the talking points, to make the State Department look good?" she said. "That did not happen. That only happened in the cooked-up dossier that Republicans in Congress wrote themselves, that they said was the work of the White House, and then they shopped it to the press."

But even as individual scandals unravel, Maddow said, the Washington machine has trained the media how to go into "scandal mode" and only see what's fed to them by politicians.

"At times like this in our politics, sometimes it feels like the individual circumstances of each individual scandal unfolding through each individual hearing," she said, matters less that the "overall momentum."

ABC and other journalists who swallowed the supposed Benghazi scoop "hook, line and sinker," she said, need to own up to their mistake and out the "source" who re-wrote the emails and gave them to the press.

"If your source lied to you, they are not actually a source," she said. "They are a con artist and you are their victim. It means you don't have to protect them any more. They are not a source."

"When you are a tool of somebody else's deception, when you get lied to, the person lying to you is no longer a source," she concluded. "They are news. Their lie to you is itself news. And you can report that news."

Watch the clip, embedded below via MSNBC:

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