The Revelation According to Chuck

[Note:  This post more or less the content of our early edition the Pro Left Podcast which dropped yesterday.  I was half way through putting this together when Blue Gal and I decided we really should podcast about this very fertile subject ASAP.  So if you've already listened to our podcast, please feel free to skip this...and/or just scroll straight to the bottom and drop much coin in the tip jar :-)  As always, thank you for your support.]

As most of you know, for the better part of two decades I ran a feature on this blog called "Sunday Morning Comin' Down" which was a weekly rundown of how America's Most Prestigious Political Talk Shows were failing us.  

And over time I gradually tapered off because, let's face it, after a while it was just poking a dead possum with a stick.  It's not playing.  It's really dead.  And it's starting to smell so...

But every now and then something weird happens.  Something which, to the uninitiated, can appear as though the Beltway media has Learned a Lesson.  That the now-long-dead possum is somehow staggering back to its feet.  

I can assure you this is never the case.  

Instead, what you are seeing when this happens is a kind of media post-mortem flatulence: the decomposing husk of the media twitching and farting as if there were something "journalistic-y" still going on in there.  And that's what happened this week, on Meet the Press, that's got everyone's panties in a bunch.

But first, let's take a step back so that we all understand what we're talking about.

Meet the Press is a weekly network broadcast teevee show that is aired by NBC.

NBC is a subsidiary of NBCUniversal News Group.

NBCUniversal News Group. is a subsidiary of NBCUniversal Media Group.

NBCUniversal Media Group is the television and stream division of NBCUniversal Media, LLC. 

NBCUniversal Media, LLC. is a subsidiary of Comcast.

Which, as every 30 Rock fan knows, is owned by Sheinhardt Wigs.

Jack Donaghy breaks it all down here:

All of which is to say that NBC/Comcast/Whatever is a Very Large corporation, and all those people you see in front of NBC cameras -- every one of them -- are merely employees of that Very Large Corporation.  

That Very Large Corporation sells a lot of different products and services.  Cloud computing.  Cybersecurity.  In-home fiber optics.  And way, way down that list are teevee shows.  And way, way down the list of teevee shows is Meet the Press, which many people mistake for a news show that does journalism, but it isn't.  It is a news simulacra.  As Velveeta is technically not real cheese, but rather, a "processed cheese product", Meet the Press is not "news" but rather a "synthetic news-like product".  

Every week, on Meet the Press, various well-paid performers put on costumes and stage a news-like performance.  What historian Thomas Zimmer refers to as "neutrality theater".

Like a stage play or puppet show: everyone knows their role and plays their part.  And in between segments, various advertisers pay NBC/Comcast/Whatever a Very Large sum of money to run ads for Skyrizi and reverse mortgages.  That's how everyone involved in the project gets paid.  

So, in this marketplace, what exactly is being sold and to whom?  Is news the product?  Nope.  Are  Skyrizi and reverse mortgages the product?  Nope?

You are the product.  Your attention.  Your eyeballs.  You the audience are being sold to the advertisers. Ergo, the bigger the audience, the bigger the payday.  

Conversely, the smaller the audience, the smaller the payday.  This is why a 30-second Super Bowl ad costs seven million dollars, and an ad for a local body shop on local teevee costs nine dollars and a Whitman's Sampler box of chocolate.

From The Washington Post, September 18, 2022:

Can the Sunday morning talk show be saved?
After declining ratings and an exodus of VIP guests, these Washington institutions are looking for ways to tweak an old format

...

“Trump established the reality that he could address a very large audience very quickly just by using his thumbs alone” on Twitter, says Mark Lukasiewicz, a former ABC and NBC News executive who is now dean of Hofstra University’s communication school. “The Sunday shows are no longer the gatekeepers for political conversations on TV. They were born at a time when politicians needed TV to reach their audience. That’s far less true today.”

...

The number of younger viewers — the 25-54 age group valued highly by advertisers — has dropped by one-third, weakening the shows’ financial viability.

...

“Fox News Sunday” and “Meet the Press,” which each lost about a quarter of their audience over the past four years, have both been doing some tinkering, too.

So media corporations like NBC/Comcast/Whatever try out all kinds of bad ideas, because they're not in the journalism business or the democracy business.  They're in maximizing advertising profits in a shrinking market business.

Swap out the words "client" and "creative" and swap in "democracy" and "journalism" and Mad Men's Duck Phillips has it just about right.  

And if you're in the business of maximizing profits in a shrinking market for synthetic news-like products, and the market for right wing garbage is already saturated, and your network executives just plain hate the Left with the heat of 1000 suns, what is there left to exploit but a non-existence Center, where Conservatives are scattered around here and there like throw pillows to let wingnuts know they're being heard...and there are enough pureblood Both Siderists around wringing their hands about The Extremes on Both Sides to make the cowards in the middle feel safe.

And what about the Left?  Fuck the Left!  Have I mentioned that network executives hate Liberals with the heat of 1000 suns?  So instead of putting on Liberals to talk about the long, ugly trajectory of the GOP that led them from Nixon to Trump, they repurpose a tiny handful of Republicans who have been run out of the party over the last few years.  Instead of Digby, Sam Seder, David Pakman, Hal Sparks and Blue Gal, you get Charlie Sykes, Tom Nichols, Bill Kristol, Amanda Carpenter and Matthew Dowd...all with their incredibly inconvenient pasts washed simon-pure by the narcotic magic of teevee and the amnesia of the general public.

And it's working.

This is from me, 1000 internet years ago:

Donald Trump exists to normalize Bill Kristol. After Trump, cable news "debates" will be between Charlie Sykes/Rick Wilson/National Review on one side, Eric Bolling/Hugh Hewitt/Breitbart on the other, "moderated" by Joe Scarborough. Liberals will vanish altogether.

— Driftglass, Guardian of Inconvenient History (@Mr_Electrico) November 15, 2018

So who's to blame?  

Frankly, the audience is to blame.  Because NBC/Comcast/Whatever does this shit all the time, and there are never really any consequences.    However fondly the masses may recall Tim Russert, he was bad enough that Meet the Press was Dick Cheney's prefered network for spreading lies and propaganda.  When Russert died, NBC put David Gregory in the big chair, and he was fucking awful.  

At the end of his run they replaced him with Chuck Todd, who was worse in exactly the same way.  

After eight years of Todd, they replaced him with Kristen Welker, who was worse still, also in exactly the same way.   They threw a huge bag of money at Megyn Kelly, who bombed, but got to keep the money.

I'm now going to repeat the phrase "they learned nothing" several times as a head-fake because it isn't strictly true, but bear with me.

Over at little brother network MSNBC, am I the only one who remembers the failed "Too Far Right" campaign, from which MSNBC learned nothing.

Brian William came and went, and they learned nothing.

Mark Halperin came and went, and they learned nothing.

Chris Matthews came and went, and they learned nothing.

Steve Schmidt came and went...and came and went..and came and went, and they learned nothing.

They gave Hugh Hewitt his own show, and it bombed. Hewitt came and went, and they learned nothing.

They gave Greta Van Susteren her own show, and even had network superstar Rachel Maddow push the hell out of it.  It bombed.  Van Susteren came and went, and they learned nothing.

Except, they did learn something.  They learned how passive and docile their core audience is over the long haul.  You can make a huge mistake -- piss on their leg and call it a warm spring rain -- and they'll beef loudly for a little while, but in the end they'll come back, and their Big Mad will fade away.

After all...where else are they gonna go?  To the blogs?  To the radio?   To Democracy Now!  Blog are dead.  Liberal radio is dead.  And DemocracyNow is somewhere north of station 978 if your cable company carries it at all.

Face it...

And now, for a mere 300K, they've picked up Ronna McDaniel.  For NBC/Comcast/Whatever, that's fire sale pricing.  That's literally 1/100th of the price they paid for the Megyn Kelly fiasco.  Very low risk, with a a decent potential upside.  Just like that other former-RNC chair they picked up on the cheap, Michael Steele.  Now they'd have a matched set, and can't you just imagine the boozy corporate pitch meeting where everyone thought this was a genius idea!  

After all, outside of a few gripes from nobody Liberal bloggers and podcasters , MSNBC audiences have been nice and pliable when it comes to the colonizing of the network with former Republicans.  Michael Steele is still a completely amoral grifter and a Republican and remains a reliable Both Siderist, but where he was once "WTF is Michael Steele doing on my Liberal TV?" , now he's a Hero of the Resistance.  Not long ago, Bloody Bill Kristol was "the wrongest man in America" according to MSNBC superstar Rachel Maddow.  Now Maddow is semi-retired from MSNBC, and Kristol is the beloved, kooky uncle who drops by every now and then to trash Trump, yuck it up with rapper Fat Joe and talk about the good old days.

But this weekend, when NBC rolled out it's newest addition -- Ronna McDaniel -- things took a turn.  

Oh my yes they did.

First came the rollout with this note to network staff by NBC News senior vice president of politics Carrie Budoff-Brown on Friday:

“It couldn’t be a more important moment to have a voice like Ronna’s on the team.  She will contribute her expert insight and analysis on American politics and the 2024 election across all NBC News platforms.

“As we gear up for the longest general election season in recent memory, she will support our leading coverage by providing an insider’s perspective on national politics and on the future of the Republican Party — which she led through some of the most turbulent and challenging moments in political history.”

This meant that Welker's already ill-advised interview of McDaniel on Meet the Press was no longer an interview of the former RNC chair, but an interview with Welker's newest colleague!  And as we know, one of the Iron Rules of the Beltway media is thou shalt not talk shit about thy colleagues at the same company.  

Then came the blowback, which  blew in from every direction.

From Vanity Fair, two days after the announcement:

Ronna McDaniel Won’t Be Appearing on MSNBC: Report

Intense internal backlash has followed NBC News' hiring of the former RNC chair as political analyst.

Just days after NBC News announced it was hiring Ronna McDaniel as a political analyst, MSNBC’s President, Rashida Jones, told employees that the former Republican National Committee chairwoman won’t be contributing on air to the cable network, The Wall Street Journal reported Saturday.

The decision to hire McDaniel was met with intense public backlash, leading to her resignation in February as the head of the GOP. Critics pointed to her close ties to Trump and her behind-the-scenes role in his attempt to overturn the 2020 election.

...

The WSJ reported that “a number of MSNBC anchors and producers have voiced concern internally” about the hire. Some current and former contributors and employees have also gone public. On Friday, MSNBC columnist Marisa Kabas posted on social media a screenshot of an email she sent to Brown, in which she encouraged her to “reconsider” the hire. “As columnists, we are held to strict standards of factuality and truth, and are expected to have a fundamental understanding of our democracy,” she wrote. “McDaniel has proven time and again that she adheres to none of those values.”

And then perhaps someone high up the food chain -- presumably higher up than NBC News senior vice president of politics Carrie Budoff-Brown -- sent Chuck Todd in to do damage control, or maybe he took it upon himself.  (h/t Crooks & Liars): 

And while the uninitiated saw this as a moment of high drama -- Chuck Todd re-entering the arena to defend Truth, Journalism and the Meet the Press way -- to those of us in the business, this was a moment of high comedy.  

During his tenure at Meet the Press, Chuck Todd never had any qualms about platforming Republican liars and lunatics who Todd knew were liars and lunatics.   And this has always been the transparently pathetic thing about Todd.   He is forever oscillating between grand pronouncement about the High Principles of Journalism, and then, on a different day with a different audience, breaking down the ugly realities of keeping NBC's synthetic news product profitable.  

In a July 2021 interview in The Verge magazine,  Todd explains that he "[doesn't]ever want to be in the access game" while bemoaning the fact that "the access game is paying a lot of bills in the social media influencer and cable news space."

And yet here he is in 2014 as the newly-minted host of Meet the Press explaining that he knows full well that without playing the access game, he'd be out of a job.

And here is a link to Chuck Todd's almost-lost-to-history appearance on The Moment with Brian Koppelman making it perfectly clear he knows what business he's in.  Going into even greater detail about how it is definitely not his job to irritate his guests by letting his audience know when they're flatly lying or insane even when he knows for a fact that they are.  As I said back in 2015 when I was the only person writing about this interview (and h/t again to Alert Reader Walt for pointing me to it):..

[Todd] does go so far as to say (starting at around the 11:00 minute mark) that he understands that every week elected asshats come on his show and lie to his face.

And that our politics has become a game of pandering to the "idiots" and that that is why the public is cynical.

And that all core truths about the catastrophe our politics has become are perfectly well known to everyone in The Club, but are only ever whispered about off the record. Because, as Mr. Todd confesses (at around the 18:15 mark), he is a creature of The Business of Show. A clown, in the employ of corporate executives whose faces we will never see and whose names will never be mentioned, but who make it clear to Mr. Todd that his show is all about gettin' them ratings, and fuck the substance. 

It is also kinda hilarious to hear the host of the most influential political show on teevee hoping (starting at around the 25:00 mark) that somehow, someday, maybe the Millennials with their Twitters and their Instagrams and suchlike will start demanding that politicians be on the record all the time, and then something something a big change might happen.

So what was Todd doing back on Meet the Press on Sunday?   He was there to do brand damage control.  Dispatched, presumably, from someone higher up the food chain than NBC News senior vice president of politics Carrie Budoff-Brown.

Because someone, somewhere fucked up badly, and that fuck up threatened to at least temporarily snap the audience out of its media somnambulism.  A minute ago they had seen caping for Donald Trump, groveling for his approval, and now here she was, a member of the NBC family?  Cloaked in the tattered remnants of Meet the Press' credibility?   

What the Hell, man!?

Of course, other people -- terrible people -- have different and terrible opinions:

The professional Republican mercenary, Frank Luntz thinks

 "Ronna McDaniel has an insider’s perspective we all would benefit from.  Instead of trying to silence her, we should be listening intently for all we can learn.  I listen to people I disagree with all the time.  It’s not an endorsement, it’s an opportunity to learn."

And  Greta Van Susteren, formerly of Fox, formerly of the failed MSNBC "Greta is Great" ad campaign", and who is now one of the walking media dead on NewsMax believes:

Chuck Todd does not have to agree with Ronna…but he should not disrespect that audience and only allow them to hear what HE wants them to hear; that is not journalism (that is Russia TV);the viewers are smart, they don’t need to have Chuck Todd screen what they hear.

So was hiring a Very Big Liar like Ronna McDaniel NBC's very big mistake?

Oh my goodness no.  Haven't you been paying attention?

NBC's very big mistake was simply bringing her to market too soon.   She was seriously underripe and needed to age in the oak barrel of occasional, brief, softball appearances before she was moved up to the bigs.

After all, former-RNC chair Michael Steele groveled just as hard for Rush Limbaugh's approval as McDaniel groveled for Trump's.  While he was running the Republican party, Steele told outrageous lies about the Democratic Party and the sitting Democratic president, including blaming the launching of the Afghanistan war on Barack Obama.  And Steele had no problem being hired to front for the racist Republican party.  By the end, he had humiliated himself so thoroughly that he stopped showing up to do his act on The Daily Show, thus launching the career of Puppet Michael Steele. 

But network executives used to understand that, if you want to get an audience to swallow something tainted and corrupt, you have to start by feeding it to them in small, sugar-coated bites.  First, they appear a few times as the sadder-but-wiser man or woman who, despite having spent their entire adult lives building the Republican monster machine, somehow never noticed and never really knew what was going on.  Who was shocked!shocked! when they only recently discovered what those Republicans were really up to!  

Have 'em talk about the Party of Lincoln.  Have 'em pine for Reagan.  Have 'em quote William Buckley.   Then, after the primer has been applied, move them onto the paint shop for full rebranding.  Have 'em shake their fist and stomp their foot and be indignant.  Maybe have them write a breathless book about all the terrible things they only recently learned -- things Liberals have been writing about for decades -- then promote the hell out of that book until it hits the Time's best seller list.  Then bring them back on for longer segments as a "New York Times Best Selling Author". 

Get 'em on Morning Joe and Nicole Wallace and the Today Show.  When they launch their own media company, adopt it as a virtual NBC subsidiary.  Pour tens of millions on free advertising in their enterprises...and then bring them back on for even longer segments as the founders or editors or publishers of these new things you helped them create.

And make sure, at every step along the way, they all remember to reinforce their overall Beltway media credibility by taking regular shots are The Extremes on Both Sides.  Sure, Trump is a monster, but what about campus speech codes?  Sure the Republican party is now a fascist shithole, but what about Liberals being so dismissive of their totally legitimate fears of some trans high school kid making the swim team?  

The Alert Viewer could not have failed to notice that, seated across from Todd on panel on Sunday was unreconstructed Iraq War huckster, Stephen Hayes, who has written a long and thoroughly perverse attempt to perform CPR on the rotting corpse of the Both Sides Do It lie.  

You see, both Biden and Trump are equally terrible choices.

We covered this a week ago on The Professional Left podcast, but in case you are unfamiliar, Hayes is one of the many Bush regime stooges in the media whose careers should have died once the debacle in Iraq could no longer be covered up and the Bush administration effectively collapsed.  

In 2004, Gideon Rose, editor of Foreign Affairs, described Hayes as "most indefatigable proponent of the Iraq-Al Qaeda link outside the [George W. Bush] administration."   In 2008, Spencer Ackerman characterized Hayes as one of the most effective amplifiers of the Bush administration's Iraq War claims about an Iraq-Al Qaeda link.

He wrote an entire book on the subject.

But, as with all the other Conservative propagandists who suddenly found themselves very much on the wrong side of history…nothing happened.   All the Bush administration's most ardent flaks, and all of their mainstream media collaborators. just shrugged it off and moved on to the next thing.    

And for Mr. Hayes, the next thing was the New York Post, Washington Times, Salon.com, National Review, and Reason. He has been a commentator on CNN, The McLaughlin Group, Fox News Channel, MSNBC, CNBC, and C-SPAN.

Hayes took over The Weekly Standard for a while, until the Trump team killed it.  Then he lingered far too long at Fox News for anyone with any sense of decency.  Then, since the wingnut welfare trough never goes dry and there is always funding available for these goofs to start their   next thing, he "along with Jonah Goldberg and Toby Stock, formed the conservative media company, The Dispatch."

And, just like Ronna McDaniel, Hayes was also hired by NBC as a "contributor across all our platforms".

So of course, now that he has been rehabilitated into a respectable Beltway stalwart, he’s has written  long, whining essay on Our Terrible Choices!!!

In Steele's case, the rebranding began in 2015.  From The Week, January 8, 2015

Michael Steele joins MSNBC: A 'sign of the apocalypse'?

The former chair of the Republican National Committee delights fans of his "sassy" style by signing on as an analyst at the left-leaning news network

He did the contributor thing for a few years, then began substitute hosting, and then, almost exactly nine years later:

From The Hollywood Reporter,  January 9, 2024

Behind MSNBC’s New Weekend Morning Show Revamp

Alicia Menendez, Symone Sanders-Townsend and Michael Steele talk to THR about their new morning program.

Small, sugar-coated bites of poison and the slow, steady erasure of the past is what got Steele from being a has-been punchline on The Daily Show to a full-time MSNBC employee and weekend co-host of his own show.  

And that was NBC's mistake with McDaniel: rushing to get the audience to swallow a whole bottle of cyanide all at once.

I Am The Liberal Media