Wow, the world got stupider this week.
MSNBC tried a bold experiment this year by putting two politically incendiary hosts, Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews, in the anchor chair to lead the cable news channel’s coverage of the election.
That experiment appears to be over.
After months of accusations of political bias and simmering animosity between MSNBC and its parent network NBC, the channel decided over the weekend that the NBC News correspondent and MSNBC host David Gregory would anchor news coverage of the coming debates and election night. Mr. Olbermann and Mr. Matthews will remain as analysts during the coverage.
The change — which comes in the home stretch of the long election cycle — is a direct result of tensions associated with the channel’s perceived shift to the political left.
Or it could have been a direct result of tensions due to the fact that Tweety’s a moron and KO’s a hothead and occasionally the vigorous and joyful ignorance of the one overcomes the patience of the other; I’m not saying Keith’s blameless here, but I can’t be the only one who watched all through the primaries just hoping that at some point KO would snap and eat Tweety’s head.
“In a rapidly changing media environment, this is the great philosophical debate,” Phil Griffin, the president of MSNBC, said in a telephone interview Saturday. Fighting the ratings game, he added, “the bottom line is that we’re experiencing incredible success.”
To my mind, the “great philosopical debate” is not whether in a “changing media environment” (twitspeak for “we have no clue whatsoever so here, have some words”) you should be openly partisan, it’s whether you can continue to treat politics like a) football or b) a big ironic joke. Coverage should be impartial; that doesn’t mean it should be dispassionate.
If there was an attraction to me in watching Keith, it was that he seemed to get that this shit mattered to people, and mattered enough for him to actually get upset about it. It’s the same attraction I have to a lot of writing on the Internets: People give a damn and get righteous about it. This is a bloody fucking world; the coverage of it can’t be bloodless.
But as the past two weeks have shown, that success has a downside. When the vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin lamented media bias during her speech, attendees of the Republican convention loudly chanted “NBC.”
Yes. A terrible downside. Some chewy fucking people in stupid hats yelled your name at the modern political equivalent of the rally the villagers have in the town before they go storm Dracula’s castle. They yelled out NBC! Oh, my God, let us cower in fear! What a terrible price we have paid with our … eardrums … er … Hey, at least they know your name, right? Do you know who I’d kill and eat to have that Army of Doofus shouting MY name? You can’t buy that kind of love.
This is all leaving aside the whole bullying argument, of course. Does no one who works for any major network have a third grader who could school them in how a bully doesn’t bully you to change your behavior, how it’s not an altruistic act? Watching the newsies scramble around this week has just been pathetic. Go on, try to please hardcore Republicans. It won’t work. THEY HATE YOU no matter what you do. THEY HATE YOU no matter what you say.
THEY HATE YOU because it is convenient, because it helps them maintain a worldview at odds with reality, because it sounds good to scream at top volume during a video of the Twin Towers crashing down, because that’s who they are. You’re incidental, you’re somewhere on the list with the black commies who do community organizing, the Clenis, and Jeremiah Wright. You’re barely there, to the bully, except as a target. Sooner you all get that through your heads, easier it becomes to do your jobs.
Which is really what this is all about. While I’m pleased to see some news bosses developing some backbone, it should be noted that Republicans have waged open war on the press since Watergate, most vociferously since Reagan, and in all that time, while limp-dicked wannabes on talk radio called for New York Times editors to hang and syndicated columnists made cracks about ropes and trees and reporters, and bestselling authors fantasized about blowing you up, you all were giving them magazine covers and puff pieces and calling them “provocative” and “controversial” instead of “epically disgusting” and “morally stunted” and “insane.” You were laughing them off and pretending to be above it all, so while I’m happy to see some swinging back, it might have been avoided had you just noticed that for the past 30 years you gave them everything they said they wanted, and they put it on a stick and they shoved it up your ass.
And you’re still doing it:
Tom Brokaw and Brian Williams, the past and present anchors of “NBC Nightly News,” have told friends and colleagues that they are finding it tougher and tougher to defend the cable arm of the news division, even while they anchored daytime hours of convention coverage on MSNBC and contributed commentary each evening.
Mr. Williams did not respond to a request for comment and Mr. Brokaw declined to comment.
Schmucks.
Tough to defend? You’re kidding me, right? It might be tough to defend the stupidity. It might be tough to defend the sexism. It might be tough to defend the screaming, or whatever Tweety’s hair was doing, or that Norah O’Donnell was like 99 months pregnant during the primaries and they made her stand the whole night in heels. It might be tough to defend the lazy, shallow, senseless yammer that goes on every night but tough to defend the stunning leftward shift that included having one and a half talk shows be somewhat progressive? That’s tough to defend? I know Brian Wiliams is like an epic pussy and that Brokaw’s mostly checked out, but come on, you can’t tell me you can’t come up with a statement that reads something like this:
To Whom It May Concern:
It has come to our attention that certain inbred mouthbreathing cretins at present walking around with scarlet Rs on their chests are upset with us airing views that conflict with what they want to think. While we understand and appreciate feedback from all our viewers, even Bill the furry dude who comes around each week to confess to the Kennedy assasination, we would also politely remind those sensitive little conservative snowflakes that the sky is blue even if Rachel Maddow says it is, and by the way, enjoy the view of our lightly freckled asses as we moon you out the windows of our limousine. Jesus God. We have a world that isactively blowing up, we do not have time for your nonsense. If we give you a quarter will you all just go play in traffic?
Thanks for watching!
Course, to stick up for one’s professional colleagues requires the kind of pride that, had anyone in a position as high as a nightly news anchor displayed it at any time in the past eight years, might have prevented the necessity of it being issued today.
A.