Sunday Morning Comin' Down: Will Saletan Edition

 

How useless is Will Saletan?

So useless that he has been installed as the "You're so right, Charlie!" housebroken Liberal at The Bulwark, where he regularly plumbs the depths of finding new ways to excuse the inexcusable like so --

-- but not before putting on his hair shirt and lecturing us naughty Liberals about our bad behavior.  

This time, he that lecture came from Saletan peering deeply into the cesspit that is the Texas Republican party and noticing that some of the regular MAGA turds float a little higher in the muck, while the superMAGA turds sink deeper in the muck.  From this he invented a cautionary fable about what we naughty Liberal must not do.  You see, they call all of us Democrats dirty commie, terrorist-loving scum.  However we must be better than that.  We must recognize the subtle gradations in turd buoyancy between regular MAGA turds and superMAGA turds and take pains not to paint the entire GOP with such a broad brush.

Liberal Tone Police at the MAGA turd pool is a helluva way to make a living, Mr. Saletan.

While Saletan was oozing with praise for Welker's Meet the Press clusterfuck, the rest of the sentient saw something very different happening on NBC on Sunday Morning.

Take it away Jay Rosen:

NBC chose a "zero innovations" model for how to conduct and present a Trump interview at this stage in his degradation. Everything was predictable, nothing was surprising, and new host Kristen Welker did nothing to justify going to the well again with another Trump Q & A. 2/

— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) September 17, 2023

Baker said this was a "hard problem" for people in his profession, but what can we do?

Which is what I mean by a "zero innovations" model, in which you simply ignore the fact that interviewing Trump does not work. No accountability moment ever comes. 4/ https://t.co/OvR5bkHbjN

— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) September 17, 2023

I doubt we will ever know (same company) but I would love to hear what @Maddow thought about NBC's interview with Trump.

She is the one who said on air: “There’s a cost to us as a news organization of knowingly broadcasting untrue things.”

NBC willingly paid that cost today. 8/

— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) September 17, 2023

Admittedly a little lazy of me to copy/paste the opinions of the estimable Mr. Rosen, but honestly I have little to add.  

I wrote my own breakdown of the Sunday Gasbag Cavalcade for [takes off shoes and socks to count that high] 16 years, and began tapering off a few years ago because by that time it was long past abundantly clear that the political reportage of the networks was completely fucked in the head and that it would never change but only get worse because the networks believed they were doing a terrific job.

I wrote dozens of posts specifically pointing out that when NBC had finally used up and tossed out the odious David Gregory, they took pains to hire someone exactly as terrible in exactly the same ways in the person of Chuck Todd.  Todd came right out of the gate awful and only got worse, which should have told anyone paying the slightest attention that the executives at NBC actually, explicitly want someone just like that in that chair every Sunday morning.  That the gender, skin color or hair style of that person is secondary to their willingness to carry on Meet the Press' rich tradition of being a steaming pile of craven Beltway bad habits and cliches.

That once they had finally used up Chuck Todd and were getting ready to tossed him out, the thinking of NBC executives went no deeper than, "Can we get a Chuck Todd-type...but in a dress!"

And the halls of 30 Rock rang with the slowly-rising, awed cheers for this stroke of wild, out-of-the-box genius.  

Burn The Lifeboats