"Gorgeous George Stephanopoulos" again.
ABC re-paints it's Sunday morning privy one more time (via Reality Chex):
"This Week with Whoever" Is on again at ABC News.
Keach Hagey of Politico: "Christiane Amanpour is leaving 'This Week' and returning to her roots at CNN and in foreign reporting in a new arrangement that allows her to appear on both ABC News and CNN International.... George Stephanopoulos will replace her on 'This Week,' while continuing his duties on 'Good Morning America.' Jake Tapper will also have a 'large role' in the Sunday show, as will other correspondents...."However often ABC -- or any network -- rebrands its Mouse Circus dog food and reshuffles its usual suspects, until someone on commercial teevee has the balls to assemble something as unabashedly smart and raucous as "Up with Chris Hayes" (and arrange to air it later in the day than the farm reports) nothing about our national political dialogue will change very much.
Maybe a little new embroidery around the edges -- an occasional thrill as some housebroken Liberal is allowed to tread the boards for a minute or two -- but nothing of existential importance will be allowed to break the media mesmerism. Nothing as far as the eye can see but the kind of lazy, narcissistic and aggressively stupid Brooks/Halperin/Gregory/Friedman drool that Hunter at dKos expertly exfoliates here (h/t Invisible Backhand):
...And speaking of "Up with Chris Hayes"... just how much better is it than everything else?
It strikes me that the fault for all our current problems in Washington lies equally with both parties. That probably is not technically true, but examining it at any deeper level would require actual work, on my part, and if I chose to single out one party or the other as being more to blame then people from that party would probably get very angry with me, the next time I saw them at a holiday party, and that would darken the whole mood considerably. So both parties are to blame.
...
If one party wants to chop up kittens to feed them to the elderly, and the other wants seniors to get gift certificates to Applebee's, then the obvious answer is to give them gift certificates for purchasing dead kittens. If one party wants to nuke the entire planet just for sport, and the other party, say, wants to nuke nothing, then only a snob or a flaming liberal would object to nuking half the planet as reasonable compromise.
This, then, is the fundamental truth of phoning something in: When in doubt, presume both sides are wrong and that the answer is, regardless of actual facts, statistics, logic, morality, history, or ideology, smack dab in the middle of what all the other people are saying. The magic of this stance is that it literally requires absolutely no research whatsoever: It also shields the writer from being seen as taking sides, or even of having an actual opinion.
I can be confident of my lazy-assed pronouncement that both sides of any discussion are equally wrong, or muleheaded, or corrupt for one simple reason: by phoning that in, too.
...
So much better that I'm little worried MSNBC may hire Mark Green to come in and "improve" it into extinction.
And speaking of the Mouse Circus ... more on today's burnt Republican offerings later.
3 comments:
It may seem like lazy centrism is the default mainstream media position, but it's not. The default mainstream media position is to explicitly advocate conservatism and work extremely hard (see whitewater) to attack liberals.
Lazy centrism is actually a fallback position that is only taken when conservatism is entirely indefensible and is contributing nothing of value.
Centralism. I don't know about that for it seems that what is commonly called "centralism" today is often, in practice, to the right of Richard Nixon.
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