This is the creepy followup to the Romney/Melissa Harris-Perry, Faux Nooz/Rightiesphere versus MSNBC.
Rachel’s Show
Eliana Johnson / National ReviewMSNBC, the left-leaning cable-news network, has settled on one solution to its recent problems. It now has an executive reviewing scripts before they go on the air. The role, which has fallen to Rich Stockwell, a former executive producer of The Ed Show and Countdown …
The faux “behind the enemy lines” fairly drips of condescension and spiking the football:
MSNBC’s wonks, nonetheless, are seeing weak ratings because the cable-television audience does not mirror the American, or Democratic, electorate. It’s older: A 2012 Pew Research Center study found that 57 percent of Maddow’s audience is past 50, compared with 43 percent of all Americans. It’s also slightly less educated: According to the same study, 26 percent of MSNBC viewers have a college degree, compared with 29 percent of all Americans. Of course, the numbers can be parsed in many ways, but it’s difficult to imagine there’s a large appetite among MSNBC’s core audience for the graduate-level punditry served up by Maddow’s protégés. Nielsen data — which showed the network last year posting its lowest prime-time ratings since 2007 both in the coveted 25–54 demographic and in total viewers — reflect that mismatch.
“They’re just not going to get those people watching cable news,” says a longtime cable-news insider. “That’s why their numbers suck. If they were going to go populist, I think they could challenge Fox. What if you took that brand of ‘Hey, middle-class America, you’re getting screwed by the banks and by the educated class, by the environmental movement’? Wow, I think you could beat Fox on that.”
Gosh. That’s mean. Why am I not surprised?
his vorpal sword …
The perspicacious reader will remember this blog’s leitmotif of the past few years (OK: This is our TENTH year of publication), namely that the Right Wing Flying Monkey Corps. is disciplined and works together like a well-oiled team when it comes to defending the illegitimacy of any solution that is about the team of society to the potential detriment of the Howard Roark/John Galt Über-individual that they perceive themselves to be.*
[* And the corollary: they are mean. Actually mean. I mean, vicious: destroy your life, destroy your career, point psychopathic nutballs at you, mean.]
GOP: Goya’s Own Party
Mean time (and I DO mean “mean”), the defenders of society, of this “we’re all in this together,” pooled risk and reward “Leviathan” of our political/social nation state? What to they do? Ah, cussedly independent, they refuse to cooperate or give ONE IOTA in their defense of the notion that “There’s no “I” in team.” (Ah, but there is one in “Idiot”)
And, Team Asmodeus has successfully taken out “left” wing media figure after media figure. While Team Michael has not managed to take out ONE. But they have also successfully defended precisely ZERO.
Bring out the long knives:
Behind her back, colleagues call her “the queen,” a not so subtle suggestion that Maddow gets what Maddow wants. And what she wants is a network filled with young wonks such as Chris Hayes, Ezra Klein, Alex Wagner, and Harris-Perry, whose highbrow intellectualism can, she hopes, push the Democratic party, and the country, to the left. On Twitter, Harris-Perry’s show proudly uses the hashtag #nerdland. Alex Wagner’s move to the 4 p.m. hour, where Bashir’s show once aired, has Maddow’s fingerprints on it.
Do we really believe that a PROFESSIONAL rightie hater at the National Review Online has the “inside” scoop on what’s going on inside MSNBC?
Right. The Richmond Daily Dispatch was more credible in 1863.
This is clearly a Beelzebubbian attempt to sow dissent and discord, to feed jealousy as a media Iago, and, hopefully harm EACH AND EVERY person in the story she’s writing about! (Brava! Not a lot of “new” journalism out there is THAT thorough.)
Beelzebub, Lord of the Flies
And, just as clearly, Rachel is seen as the linchpin that can make the whole house of cards come a’tumbling down. It is just BUSINESS, the Comcast Monsters Masters are Reminded:
“I liked Rachel because she is totally sincere, she is what she seems to be, she’s smart, she loves to debate for its own sake,” says Tucker Carlson, a former MSNBC host. After watching a tape her agent sent along, Carlson (who is also co-founder of the Daily Caller) championed Maddow in the face of Griffin’s initial objections. She was, at the time, a radio host at the now-defunct Air America network*. “I always got along with Rachel. She’s a hard worker, she’s not a bulls****er,” he says*. Maddow appeared regularly on Carlson’s show and began substituting for former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann. Then she got her own show in the summer of 2008, when Griffin decided to make the network, which had once employed conservatives such as Carlson, Pat Buchanan, and Michael Savage, a refuge for liberals and an answer to Fox News. It was a business calculation, not an ideological move.
[* horrible pottymouth National Review prose cleaned up to reflect The Moderate Voice standards. ~HW]
Just business.
[* As Walter Brennan used to say in The Real McCoys: No Brag, just fact. Right.]
All this “insider” stuff sounds suspiciosly like the whispering campaign that followed the firing of Keith Olbermann at MSNBC for … (?) with all of the Manhattan Media Gossipsphere (possibly the most inbred AND retarded demographic in the nation, exceeding even Appalachia) talking in the same low terms about how “difficult” Keith was to work with, etc. etc. Coincidence? Of COURSE it is a coincidence. You can’t be THAT cynical can you? Jeepers!
And so, the perspicacious reader doesn’t bother reading carefully, since it is all a series of lies with an agenda. We ought to be very skilled at ferreting this out by now.
And, in that topsy-turvydom of GOPpanalia, we know that this is National Review’s role in this. The lapdogs all run in a tight pack over there in GOPpsylvania.
The NEXT question that the perspicacious reader asks is: WHAT is that agenda? WHOM does it serve?
The answer to the second question is “DUH!” and the answer to the first is clear, when added to Bashir, Baldwin, Harris-Perry, Olbermann (a sacrifice on the GE altar as a sign of Comcast’s new dominance as new feudal lord of the Universal-NBC media Leviathan) this is seen as the moment when MSNBC can be wiped from the political landscape.
Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post sent paparrazzi and
Page Six goons to harass and stalk Keith Olberman AFTER
he’d been kicked out at MSNBC. (Kind of like they did to
Alec Baldwin BEFORE he was kicked out at MSNBC. )
These folks is Junkyard Dog MEAN, kids!
The outlines and even many of the players are the same ones that followed and fueled the initiative to Destroy PBS a couple years ago, when the Tea Party Republicans retook the House of Representatives.
You see, if you are ANY queer-hatin’, N-word stereotypin’, duck murderin’, gun-lovin’ oppressed “Christian” then your freedom of speech rights/freedom of media rights are sacred. But if you are on MSNBC, we are actively looking to get you fired and your network destroyed. Yep. These folks is just plain MEAN. They don’t just want to beat you. They want to beat you to death. (Preferably with your own arm.)
Merry Christmas, America!
The perspicacious reader will recognize that there is nothing surprising about any of this.
Someone will invariably say “Well we can’t sink down to their level by doing anything THEY do, and thus, by implication, all Liberal/Progressive/Democrats find themselves in the default position of Angelic Perfection, and, thus, any sin, no matter how miniscule — consider the insane overreaction to a spot-on joke about Republican “diversity”* in terms of outrage versus “outrageous” — cannot be defended.
Else we “lower ourselves to their level.” Well meant, perhaps, but addle-pated in practice: They are impervious to criticism; we are fatally predisposed to it. Soon, all the Eloy will be eaten, and then what will the Morlocks have for supper?
(Well, hell: might as well. The way we been doin’ it hasn’t worked. Megan Kelly still has her job. Bill O’Reilly still has his job. As a matter of fact, every rightie video and radio hate jockey still have their jobs. Only “leftists” who misspeak ever lose their employment.)
[* Go back to Sarah Palin’s rallies in the Midwest and South in 2008 and not the discomfort of her BLACK Secret Service agents, who were almost invariably the ONLY BLACKS IN THE CROWD. ]
The perspicacious reader will also understand that no one will notice any of this, until someone at the Columbia Journalism Review writes an “après coup” piece and MSNBC is officially TV nostalgia.
I leave it to the perspicacious reader to tell me what the hell I can do?
You can’t play Paul Revere at night to a school for the deaf.
Courage.
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A writer, published author, novelist, literary critic and political observer for a quarter of a quarter-century more than a quarter-century, Hart Williams has lived in the American West for his entire life. Having grown up in Wyoming, Kansas and New Mexico, a survivor of Texas and a veteran of Hollywood, Mr. Williams currently lives in Oregon, along with an astonishing amount of pollen. He has a lively blog His Vorpal Sword. This is cross-posted from his blog.
A writer, published author, novelist, literary critic and political observer for a quarter of a quarter-century more than a quarter-century, Hart Williams has lived in the American West for his entire life. Having grown up in Wyoming, Kansas and New Mexico, a survivor of Texas and a veteran of Hollywood, Mr. Williams currently lives in Oregon, along with an astonishing amount of pollen. He has a lively blog, His Vorpal Sword (no spaces) dot com.