Sunday Morning Comin' Down: The Media Really Is Trying To Kill Us

There's big money in liquidating America.

And CNN president Jeff Zucker is all about the money.

So instead of talking about the parade of grifters, dementors, creepy doll-eyed "Trump surrogate" pod people and "journalists" who are awakening from a 20 year coma to discover that -- zOMG! -- the Party of Lincoln has been taken over by grifters, dementors and creepy doll-eyed pod people, let us rather thank Margaret Sullivan of the Washington Post for writing this story:

Jeff Zucker’s singular role in promoting Donald Trump’s rise

It is nothing which we dirty hippies have not known for a long, long time, but what a frosty glass of iced tea in Hell it is to have your deductions validated by an honest-to-Mike shoe-leather, newspaper reporting:

Looking for someone specific to hold responsible for the improbable rise of Donald Trump?

Although there are many options, you could do worse than to take a hard look at Jeff Zucker, president of CNN Worldwide.

It was Zucker, after all, who as the new head of NBC Entertainment gave Trump his start in reality TV with “The Apprentice” and then milked the real estate developer’s uncanny knack for success for all it was worth in ratings and profits.

...

Ten years later, it was Zucker, now the head of CNN, who gave Trump astonishing amounts of free exposure in the Republican presidential primary on the cable network, continually blasting out his speeches and rallies — often unfiltered and without critical fact-checking.

“It’s a not-unfair knock on CNN to say that they went all in on Trump and helped him enormously,” Ken Lerer, co-founder of the Huffington Post and BuzzFeed, said in a recent onstage interview at City University of New York’s journalism school. “I think it was a strategy, a programming strategy.”

Of course, CNN was hardly alone...

“It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS,” Leslie Moonves, chairman of CBS, said of the Trump phenomenon in March, according to the Hollywood Reporter.

“The money’s rolling in, and this is fun. It’s a terrible thing to say. But bring it on, Donald. Keep going.”

Moonves’s ebullience makes it clear that ratings madness infects all of commercial TV, although, of course, particularly the cable-news channels...

It is an old newspaper truism that sunlight is the best disinfectant, and an even older truism that they which doeth evil feareth the light, so it is especially galling when these doer of modern evil --

I asked Zucker, both directly and through his representative, to comment for this column but was told he wasn’t available to talk about it. In the past, he’s brushed off the idea that CNN has been anything but responsible in its coverage decisions.

-- own the fucking light factory.

OK, just one minute of the freak show.  Just one, and then i'ts off to bed with you scamps.

Here we find Mr. Chuck Todd -- inheritor of the Big Chair at the debased midden pile that used to be Meet the Press -- lending the last tatters of that once respectable venue to yet another made-by-teevee incubus so he can botch about how we here in Murrica are "losing our decency".

One more nail in the coffin of a profession that is composed mostly of coffin nails these days anyway.

But I bet it was great for the ratings. (h/t Heather at Crooks & Liars):

And in case you were curious about what kind of crop the rich soil of the Land of the Free yields when our nations professional political grifters, dementors, creepy doll-eyed, pod people and fake "journalists" are allowed to run wild, here is the scariest thing you will read this week.

‘Finally. Someone who thinks like me.’

In a living room in western Pennsylvania, the Republican National Convention was on TV, and Melanie Austin was getting impatient.

“Who’s that guy?” she said, watching some billionaire talk about prosperity and tolerance. “Prosperity and tolerance? Forget that sh--.”

She lit a cigarette. Her boyfriend, Kevin Lisovich, was next to her on the couch, drifting to sleep, a pillow over his head. On the ottoman was her cellphone, her notes on the speakers so far — “LOCK HER UP!!” she had written — and the anti-anxiety pills she kept in a silver vial on her keychain.

She was a 52-year-old woman who had worked 20 years for the railroad, had once been a Democrat and was now a Republican, and counted herself among the growing swath of people who occupied the fringes of American politics but were increasingly becoming part of the mainstream. Like millions of others, she believed that President Obama was a Muslim. And like so many she had gotten to know online through social media, she also believed that he was likely gay, that Michelle Obama could be a man, and that the Obama children were possibly kidnapped from a family now searching for them.

“So beautiful,” Melanie said as Ivanka Trump walked onto the convention stage to introduce her father, and soon the soaring score of the movie “Air Force One” was blasting through the TV. Melanie sat up straighter. This is what she had been waiting for.

“Here comes Big Daddy,” she said, clapping. “The Donald. Big Daddy.”...