Sunday, June 08, 2014

Sunday Morning Comin' Down -- UPDATE


"Conspicuous By Your Absence" Edition.

UPDATE:  Welcome Esquire Readers!

From AP News:
Guest lineups for the Sunday TV news shows:

ABC's "This Week" - Reps. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., and Tom Cole, R-Okla.; Seattle Mayor Ed Murray
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NBC's "Meet the Press" - Pre-empted by coverage of the French Open.
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CBS' "Face the Nation" - Sens. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga.

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CNN's "State of the Union" - Secretary of State John Kerry; Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.

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"Fox News Sunday" - Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey.
The alert reading will note that NBC has once again opted to spare "Meet the Press" from a DNR order by pre-empting it with whatever ESPN7 feature they have in the pipeline.
(Next week, highlights of exciting jai alai action. Patxi Lives! 
)
Several weeks ago when this started, I riffed mockingly that this was NBC test-driving a burn-the-village-to-save-the-village strategy to relieve David Gregory of the responsibility of pretending to be a journalist long enough to let the searing actuality of Greggers' week-in-week-out banal, Beltway incompetence fade and be replaced by the same kind of nostalgia for a fake past that drives people to pine for the Good Old Days of St. Ronny Reagan.
The Meet the Press ratings death-spiral was briefly arrested due to preemption by a soccer game, which meant that the John McCain/Lindsay Graham Human Neocon Centipede was able to sleep in today, and Chuck Todd had to read his 2016 goat entrails alone in his kitchenette with no one listening.  I think this bold "Saving Meet the Press by not actually airing Meet the Press" idea has a lot of promise.
But now that they have done it yet again, I cannot help but wonder what special senior executive money-lined face-saving coffin they have prepared for Mr. Gregory and what fresh hell the geniuses at NB-See/NB-Do have waiting in the wings to drive down my estimation of American journalism even further.

As to the rest of the Mouse Circus, I'm sure I'll get around to watching a chunk of it once the fire-and-boat drill of this first weekend of summer vacation dies down sometime in August.

4 comments:

Horace Boothroyd III said...

I came across this gem today:

http://andrewgelman.com/2014/01/03/booze-done/

[*blockquote*]
Our research assistants have unearthed the following guest column by H. L. Mencken which appeared in the New York Times of 5 Nov 1933, the date at which Prohibition ended in the United States. As a public service we are reprinting it here.
[*blockquote*]

and immediately thought of friend Driftglass. Enjoy!

Anonymous said...

So, is there a reason the clip shows the guy smirking and squirming at the mention of "catching balls to the face"? Is he the "This weekend, God willing..." guy?

Mike.K.

Redhand said...

I was going to write, "What, no John McCain?!" until I saw him listed on the CNN show.

dinthebeast said...

Not having ever owned a TV, I don't watch MTP, but when they don't run it, there's no Bobblespeak Translation of it. That doesn't always bother me, as sometimes even the BST of it pisses me off. But this week there was no BST at all. How dare they not air anything for me to read satire about!

-Doug in Oakland