Everything You Feared About Cable News Is True

Jeff Zucker explaining the rules of the cable news game.

This is Drew Magary's summary in GQ of this article in The New York Times:

To alchemically convert politics into sports, you have to dumb them down to a point where all nuance and meaning is lost—which is exactly what Jeff Zucker has done. Zucker has built CNN on the premise that the news can be First Take, but instead of arguing about whether or not Tony Romo was elite, the talking heads argue about whether women have a right to birth control.

Van Jones told me that he thinks (Jeffrey) Lord has played a valuable role at CNN, helping its viewers understand the Trump phenomenon. “He’s a Trump translator, really, for the whole country,” Jones said.

If that's the truth, then maybe Van Jones is no better than Lord, or any other opportunist whose worldview has been thoroughly distorted by a paycheck from CNN. Jeffrey Lord is a liar and a racist, and is only on television because people like Jeff Zucker want you to believe that lying and racism are crucial vantage points in exploring any particular issue...

But of course if you visit the back alleys and underpasses of the media -- if you are a connoisseur of the nearly-dead Liberal blogosphere -- none of this will come as a surprise to you.  Just as the rise of the Fascist Imbecile Bigot Right has not been a surprise to you.

We saw this coming long, long ago and have been raising the alarm on our wee blogs and tiny podcasts as loudly and with as much skill and passion as we could muster.  But no one wanted to cover those stories because they did not fit the Accepted Beltway Both Siderist Narrative and were not framed as "characters in a drama" with zoomy graphics and talking heads screaming at each other, which is the default fault format dictated by the jolly little monsters who run America's cable news networks.

That Van Jones, purveyor of the Love Army rhetoric, would buy in to any of that, at least publicly, is both confusing (for us) and embarrassing. It plays into the long-futile need for Democrats to cater to their enemies more than they cater to their own constituents.

As Zucker sees it, his pro-Trump panelists are not just spokespeople for a worldview; they are “characters in a drama,” members of CNN’s extended ensemble cast. “Everybody says, ‘Oh, I can’t believe you have Jeffrey Lord or Kayleigh McEnany,’ but you know what?” Zucker told me with some satisfaction. “They know who Jeffrey Lord and Kayleigh McEnany are.”

OF COURSE I know who they are, because YOU WON’T STOP PUTTING THEM ON TELEVISION...

We've been sold out, cats and kittens.  The watchers on democracy's wall deserted us and guard towers of the fourth estate were abandoned years ago.

And all to make parasites like Jeff Zucker rich beyond your wildest dreams.