Sunday Morning Comin' Down In Four Movements

You may have noticed that, over the years, my regular Sunday Shows feature, Sunday Morning Comin' Down, has tapered off.  Where these missives were once thunderous, lengthy and weekly, they have, over time, become more occasional and less verbose.  The simple reason is that there is almost nothing left to say about them that I haven't already said literally 1000 times before.  Yes, they are an obscenity.  An ongoing perversion of the craft of journalism and a criminal waste of a potentially priceless venue for critical national conversations.  

But mostly they are just fucking boring.  

Week after month after year, they remain a dreary zombie parade of interchangeable waxworks D.C. pundits mouthing the same Both Siderist treacle, presided over by dullards whose main qualification for the job seems to be their willingness to remain seated next to someone like Hugh Hewitt without giving in to the perfectly natural urge to come across the table, yank out his motherboard and laugh manically as Hewitt slowing sings "Daisy" into oblivion.

So this week, my thanks go out to Jay Rosen and the Twitterverse for serendipitously providing us with a brief, immaculate precis of the stagnant tenacity of the Sunday Shows:

First, Jay Rosen accurately summarizes this week's Meet the Press:

Just watched @chucktodd debase the once-proud franchise called @MeetThePress with his "interview" of Ron Johnson. All sadly predictable. Johnson squealed bias and fraud. Todd put up his show of resisting. Meet the Press became air the crazy. He both-sided it with Stacey Abrams.

— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) January 3, 2021

Then comes what should be the reactions of any normal, sane human being:

I have essentially stopped watching the show. They constantly book Trump sycophants like Ron Johnson and Hugh Hewitt that go on and spin their lies. There’s rarely any pushback and I’m so done with the “both sidesisms”.

— Amy Yang (@amysyang1) January 3, 2021

Chuck Todd is lying. He has not "had enough of hearing this." Immediately after this, he asked Johnson more questions and allowed him to lie about the election, again

Not sharing the video because it's pure misinformation. This is performative bullshit from both of them https://t.co/EE2ihKPypI

— Matt Negrin, HOST OF HARDBALL AT 7PM ON MSNBC (@MattNegrin) January 3, 2021

Then comes the treacly false nostalgia for a glorious past that never was:

Somewhere the spirit of tim Russert is shaking his head

— Appa’s Grandma (@whatdotthinks) January 3, 2021

Then, at last, comes the real reason this debased claptrap is kept on the air and in its privileged time slot.  Because long ago somewhere high up in NBC/Comcast executive county, men in suits who you will never see on-camera decided that the purpose of programs like Meet the Press was not to inform the citizens of a great nation in order to serve democracy, but instead was just another infotainment product -- a puppet show designed to serve the interests of their advertisers and shareholders by attracting the attention of the maximum number of consumers . And because those are the priorities of NBC/Comcast executives, from their perspective...

Ron Johnson eviscerated the 🤡Chuck Todd this morning and exposed the double standards and hypocrisy of NBC and the rest of their MSM ilk

— Kevin Mac (@kpmac) January 3, 2021

... this meathead's eyeballs are just as valuable, just as monetizable, as yours or mine.

And because the health of our democracy is irrelevant to their corporate decision-making -- and because nothing they actually do care about is ever jeopardized by their corrupt behavior -- there is no reason in the world for them to stop.  

No Half Measures