Sunday, October 02, 2016

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.”...

5 comments:

Robt said...

Be careful. Do not let the media bite or scratch you..

The infection will turn you to something dead but undead.

I saw this Beck and Todd date.
Why does it matter to Chuck what Glen says ? Why the hell does he even have people on to talk with. It is not his job to tell viewers any sort of facts or truth.

I mean he said so right?

maybe Alex Jones can comeon his show and tell Chucky about the false flag operation at SandyHok.

Ok said...

Truly distributing. To my dismay, NPR now has Fox ghoul Tucker Carlson on as a regular guest. Running out of options for real journalism. 😔

RUKidding said...

Vis Schmuck Toad interviewing the Beckstir: It's of some minimal interest to me that Beck is not a Trumper, only bc I have unhinged rightwing evangelical family members who also love Beck. They've even bought some of Beck's skeevy gold dubloons. Ugh.

At any rate, now that the evangelicals have sold out to Trump, as I predicted ages ago, I'm wondering if Schmuck has Beck on to counter-balance that surging Christiany tide going for Big Daddy? Who knows.

Just seems to me that recently there's - finally! - been a concerted push to knock Trump down. I really think that there's powerful forces who do NOT want Trump anywhere near the White House. I could be reading too much into the use of Beck - Chuck Todd isn't the only one who's been interviewing this fool and giving him "serious" air time - but that's one way to look at it.

I gave up on anything in the M$M ages and ages ago. The only reason to stay up to date with what any of the outlets are spewing out is to attempt to read the tea leaves and see what propaganda they're brainwashing the hapless US proles with at any given time. I call NPR the National Propaganda Network; their talking heads are more and more rightwing with each passing year. It's another one of those bait & switches, where hapless "liberals" think they're getting "unbiased" nooz. Yeah, No.

Neo Tuxedo said...

Professional armchair psychiatrist Charles Kraphammer (whom you might switch to if you ever reach the point where you can take no more DFB) had a column in yesterday's Herald-Mail and today's Public Opinion bemoaning how the Trump campaign exists in a world where "facts, truth and logic no longer matter." Given that Kraphammer is regularly wheeled out* on Fox News to be treated as if his opinion were worth a wet slap, this is an irony so crushing that it could be used to implode God Herself.

The time to complain that "facts, truth and logic no longer matter" was when Distort D'Newsa wrote a book on The Roots of Obama's Rage, which is kind of like writing a book called The Roots of Bill Clinton's Crippling Shyness.

The time to complain that "facts, truth and logic no longer matter" was 2002, when David Horowitz's How to Beat the Democrats took as its thesis that the reason Republicans lose elections is that they're just too darn nice, too willing to go along to get along, and that they need to be more like the Democrats, who ruthlessly enforce ideological unity and ruthlessly steamroll all opposition.

The time to complain that "facts, truth and logic no longer matter" was when Paula Jones came charging into the spotlight to tell us that she was the "Paula" mentioned in an American Spectator article, a fact which would not have become known if she hadn't said anything, and that she wanted her "good name back" so much that she was willing to let the magazine that had helped her take her own good name away bankroll her lawsuit against the subject of the magazine article.

"Facts, truth and logic no longer matter"? Chuckles, that ship has long since sailed, sunk, and inspired a heartwarming global blockbuster with Winslet and DiCaprio.

* Literally. He's been paralyzed from the waist down since his college days when he did a Steve Brodie into a somewhat empty swimming pool. I have often suspected that the closest he's been able to come to an orgasm since then is drinking his morning Arab-blood smoothie.

Robt said...

If Countdown was on the air,

Would folks like Chucky win the onerous and coveted , Worst Person in the World"?

I do not invest any time watching someone as Cuchy. He told me flat out, looking soberly into the camera on the TV. That it is not his job to get truth and fact or even correct the record.
So I asked myself, what is the value of giving him and his show my time?

What could I possibly get out of watching him after that? I can turn on FOX at any given time of day and get the same (if not more) from the FOX or AM radio for that matter.
As it is, I can get opinions that are more factual and smothered with more truthiness from this blog and it's owner operater. (Not intended to inflate any heads).

The cries of horror bellowing from the Tea potted Dittoheads over Lester Holt's insertion toward facts and his selfish liberal mentality to direct the self ego stroking Trump elaborated into quite often. Is now the evil liberal media control of America;s newsrooms.
IF there is any doubt how this got here, Rush Limp-paw has been telling his listeners for at least 20 years of, "Filling minds full of mush". I think he, like Beck like the Wisconsin right wing radio pied pipers are now having a mea culpa dessert after their sour grapes salad as the main course is still being cooked.