This stood out to me, among the usual nonsense (I can’t say any e-mails I sent to people in my years as a reporter would be any less embarrassing, really, albeit aimed at school board presidents and the like rather than governors; you say what you have to say to get somebody to answer the question you want him to answer):
you start to understand why most major network interviews with
politicians tend to be a lot less hard hitting than they need to be to
really hold their subjects accountable.The politicians themselves have
the power to make or break the networks, by granting or withholding
access. That ends up meaning that, consciously or not, the networks
soften their approaches — both in their pitches, and in their actual
interviews — in exchange for that access.
Emphasis mine.
1. REALLY? The fate of NBC depends on which asshole gets to spend time with David Gregory? It’s all that much life and death shit, that their excuse for acting like desperate prom dates is that OMG IF WE DON’T GET SANFORD WE’LL DIEEEEEE. Nobody who didn’t get Sanford ceased to exist as of the next day, at least not that I heard, and I think I’d have noticed if an entire network went away, buried as I have been.
2. Assuming this idiocy is true, who grants them that power? The networks themselves, by promoting “gets” and celebrity/event coverage rather than the day-to-day reporting on which a reputation once was built. They created this monster and now they want to blame their bullshit behavior on it. Ooooh, we’re all just slaves to the world of cheap grabass crap, woe is us, if only someone could free us from this tainted and trivial world in which we live. YOU CREATED IT, assholes. You cooked it up in your kitchens and now you have to eat it and choke. Go cry, bitches, you’ll get no sympathy from me.
3. This is why accusations of political bias from one side or another get greeted by me and mine with a huge giant yawn. Laziness and stupidity, bitches, laziness and stupidity. You have those two things, you barely need politics to enter into it in order to create disaster.
A.
No one, not one single person, goes on any TV talk show, whether it is to chat with David Gregory, or with Oprah Winfrey, or the old-timer on CNN, unless they see some $$$ to be made by doing so. Authors go on to try to gin up some book sales, actors go on to try to boost the ticket sales, politicians go on to help get more political donations, and members of any administration go on to spin whatever is going on that needs a big dose of spin to keep the tar and feathers stored away. So, it shouldn’t take any bribery, flattery, cajoling, or anything else beyond a crooked finger to get any of those folks on any TV show. Most of them have agents out trolling for that type of gig anyway.
Jon Stewart’s comment about American “news” media being like watching five year olds play soccer gets proved time and time again: everyone just chases the ball.
There’s other ways to tell the story without getting the lead actor.