There’s an interesting piece in the Times today about the resolution of the Olberman-O’Reily rap feud. Glenn Greenwald summarizes:
In essence, the chairman of General Electric (which owns MSNBC), Jeffrey Immelt, and the chairman of News Corporation (which owns Fox News), Rupert Murdoch, were brought into a room at a “summit meeting” for CEOs in May, where Charlie Rose tried to engineer an end to the “feud” between MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann and Fox’s Bill O’Reilly. According to the NYT, both CEOs agreed that the dispute was bad for the interests of the corporate parents, and thus agreed to order their news employees to cease attacking each other’s news organizations and employees.
There’s a lot of troubling issues here, but let me focus on this one: Charlie Fucking Rose?
I’m no fan of Bill O’Reilly, but I doubt he’s ever said anything more offensive than Suck. On This. Iraqi. People. I will never cease to be amazed that the same people who cheered on the Iraq war, the same people who book Michelle Malkin on their shows, can even pretend to be so concerned about the bad manners of a couple of cable chatterers.
Andre
I knoestly read this as “the Olberman-O’Reily rape feud” the first time around. I was seriously creeped out and quite glad I didn’t understand what was going on.
Now, it doesn’t seem so bad. But still, I have a hard time understanding why people who, y’know, disagree on stuff should have to pretend like they don’t.
GregB
Interesting historical note.
The truce was mediated at the Palace of Versailles.
Chuck Farly Rose.
-G
Chris Johnson
Oh now COME ON. You’ve got to be kidding me. Versailles??
JK
Many, many thanks for posting on this topic. I was hoping one of the BJ folks would pick up on this story.
More Stupidity from Charlie Rose – excerpt from Rose’s interview with Amy Goodman
ROSE: I don’t know what “independent” means — “independent” in contrast to what?
AMY GOODMAN: It means not being sponsored by the corporations, the networks — like NBC, CBS, ABC: NBC owned by General Electric, CBS owned by Viacom, or ABC owned by Disney —
ROSE: My point in response to that would be that we do need you . . . . Having said that, I promise you, CBS News and ABC News and NBC News are not influenced by the corporations that may own those companies. Since I know one of them very well and worked for one of them.
At the end of the interview, Rose says he’d like to have Goodman back on the show. I’m fairly confident that hasn’t happened.
I can’t think of a bigger boot licking and ass kissing defender of the MSM than Charlie Rose.
h/t Glenn Greenwald http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/08/01/ge/ http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/2104
eric
This is such a non-story. To get breathless about instructions to two NON reporters and two NON editors about what to cover. These guys are spokesmen, editorialists. The real shame is the quiet over the respective corporate interests in the run up to the various wars with Iraq. GE is a major weapons designer and manufacturer. I mean, sure, no one expected GE to point that out, but maybe one of its competitors might have noted the obvious problem. See the firing of Donahue for the most obvious example and the dead silence from the other networks.
As a more radical lefty, I am often amazed at the awakenings of most left of center people when they realize that the rantings of the “loony left” (see, e.g., Chomsky) are not rantings and the people are not looney. Sure there is a fringe of leftwing activism that is indeed a bit loony, but the real Left has highlighted these very issues for years, and done so at a high intellectual level with a commitment to verifiable reporting and commentary.
The thing that has changed is not the degree of corporate control, but the quality of the product, which has gotten so abysmally bad, that I often wonder if national reporters are proud of what they or simply proud of what they get paid.
eric
MikeJ
Amy Goodman in the same room with Charlie Rose? Why doesn’t the earth swallow buildings whole when it really needs to?
ericvsthem
So let’s see if I have this straight: Olbermann criticized O’Reilly for being a dangerous, hateful, hypocritical, lying, talking-point spewing, perverted, sexist, right-wing hack, and O’Reilly retaliated by making shit up about General Electric (unnecessary when there are plenty of legitimate things for which GE should be criticized) and encouraging his minions to boycott NBC.
I can see the downside for GE, but what’s in this deal for Murdoch?
General Winfield Stuck
I very much doubt there is any such truce. Though Olby might make someone else Worst Person ITW occasionally. Don’t believe everything in the newspaper. Olby gets viewers with his Fox skewering and good ratings. And now prolly more viewers and ratings to see if he let’s up any. And Fox, without mean spirited attacks, lies, and distortions aimed at the left, would be a bad remake of Captain Kangaroo.
And here is a funny from Bill Maher on the recent spate of RW books chronicling Obama’s failed presidency. 6 months in.
eric
OT: from a breathless AP piece running on the front page of YAHOO!:
*****
WASHINGTON – Sen. John McCain says he is still on the fence when it comes to voting for Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor.
McCain says he is examining Sotomayor’s record as an appeals court judge to decide whether she understands the limits to judicial power. He voted against her when she was nominated to the appeals court.
*****
Help me out here: how is this effing news even on a slow day? Let me help the AP out: his vote does. not. matter. he is a dick. also.
eric
Waingro
If the meeting was anything like his show, Rose probably asked interminable questions and constantly interrupted them.
General Winfield Stuck
Linky no work on Maher video. Try again.
JK
@eric:
Last night BookTV aired a speech by Noam Chomsky marking the 40th anniversary of the publication of his book American Power and the New Mandarins.
@MikeJ:
Amy Goodman is a godsend. Charlie Rose is pathetic with a capital P.
eric
@Waingro: He has this habit of leaning forward when asking a “thoughtful” question as if he is physically pushing the conversation forward. He has the most diverse guests of the talies, but that makes the vapid outcomes more incriminating.
eric
eric
@JK: thanks.
The thing i have “enjoyed” over the last 15 to 20 years of media navel gazing and blogging is the near univeral acknowledgement of the thesis of Manufacturing Consent and yet not a word ever about the prescience of Chomsky and Herman, or a reference to the book itself.
eric
Comrade Jake
You’ll see a lot of GE/corporate overlords/conspiracy theory type stuff on liberal blogs. I don’t know, I have a really hard time believing half this shit. Maybe it’s just me.
Chris Johnson
Geez. Especially if that ‘Versailles’ bit isn’t just made up- talk about a sound bite!- this is like a moment of clarity, as much as radical lefties want to say ‘you bastards, we’ve been saying this for decades, and NOW you’re surprised?’
So let me get this straight. Maybe I can put things simpler than Chomsky.
City-states are replaced by corporations which wield power in excess of the world’s governments, wage war, and control the world’s access to information in order to sate their appetites.
Which appetites are summed up by ‘make more money according to fiduciary duty, there is no Rule 2’.
Which fiduciary duty is spelled out in corporate law enforced by the same city-states that are now becoming irrelevant to the power of the corporate entities.
So the corps used to trash the place because the law said if they didn’t the shareholders could sue, but now they’re above the law and sometimes the governments, so they can do whatever they want, but as created entities what they want is defined by the law that says ‘make more money provided you don’t break the law’.
Will there be cake?
geg6
Our MSM suck donkey dick. That is all.
Comrade Jake
@eric:
You kind of get the sense with McCain that he just wakes up every day thinking about what mavericky thing he can do that will put his name in the press.
eric
@Chris Johnson: America is just one giant mining town owned by a congomleration of mills with its own bought and paid for “police force”. rather than an overpriced general store selling “essentials”, we have overpriced malls and overpriced sporting events designed to take our minds off of our endless toil.
workers unite. :)
eric
eric
@Comrade Jake: yes, but the funny thing is the guy is, and has been, conventional wisdom personified, or perhaps i should say fossilized.
eric
Jen R
I am so goddamn tired of these sanctimonious lackwits treating a grown woman — a Federal judge — like a naughty and somewhat slow child. John McCain is going to decide whether Sonia Sotomayor understands the limits to judicial power? Fuck you, Walnuts.
PeakVT
I can honestly say I’ve never watched Rose.
And I am completely baffled why he would care one whit about two cable news talkers. Has he appointed himself Ms. Manners for the teevee journalists club?
El Cid
@eric: I think you may be looking at this in a perspective which is unnecessary.
One of the obvious truths which therefore must be fervently denied by the media establishmentarians — including Charlie Rose himself — is the elementary point that the ownership of the particular news producing organizations affects what is said.
Without the continual insistence that the news organizations and commentators are free to voice the news unblemished or their commentary uncontrolled, the propaganda is less effective.
And yet here is a crystal clear moment in which we actually have the behind the scenes particular mechanism by which ownership asserts itself over content.
There’s nothing about this story which need trouble anyone more seriously interested in, say, a materialist analysis of the news, or a Chomsky reader, or whatever. In fact it’s every bit as helpful to the case as is demonstrations of news media coverage of pro-coup perspectives with relation to Honduras, or the typical high level content analysis.
JK
Prior to the Charlie Rose show, WNET Channel 13 in NYC used to air a program called The Eleventh Hour hosted by NY Times journalist Robert Lipsyte. On one broadcast, Lipsyte had Jeff Cohen a co-founder of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting http://www.fair.org on to discuss a report FAIR had done on the guests who appeared on the MacNeil Lehrer Report. The report criticized MacNeil Lehrer for having too few women and minorities as guests and for having too narrow a range of opinion expressed by their guests
Robert MacNeil also appeared on this broadcast and was pretty pissed off at Jeff Cohen. Soon after this broadcast, The Eleventh Hour was taken off of the air and replaced by the Charlie Rose show.
Over the years, I’ve read articles speculating that The Eleventh Hour was taken off the air because WNET was embarrased that they aired a program that strongly criticized the MacNeil Lehrer Report which is regarded by many as the jewel in the crown of PBS.
It would be incredibly ironic if Charlie Rose got his show on PBS in the first place as a result of the kind of muzzling and strong arm tactics against news and public affairs programming that he claims are non existent.
Napoleon
@PeakVT:
Me either, and after everything I have read about him on this blog I will avoid ever changing that.
eric
@El Cid: I don’t disagree with your assessment, and I would add that I think the most prototypical example of corporate control over news stories is the way the Chavez is vilified and delegitimized in the American press. Putting aside his vanities and eccentricities, he was no more a buffoon (less so) and no more power hungry (far less so) that our own Bush 43. But, Venezuala will not play ball with this hemisphere’s dominating corporate interests.
eric
kommrade reproductive vigor
Dear Lord, the weight of the pathetic is creating a black hole.
MikeJ
The last time I listened to her was back in the Clinton days, when she was saying that the very idea of trying to contain Iraq was doomed to failure and therefore we shouldn’t even try. The alternative to containment turned out to be invasion and the death of hundreds of thousands. She can go fuck herself.
HRA
PeakVT and Napoleon – Me either, too and will not try to find him as well.
Mavericky needs to have the spotlight shine on him. I doubt he will even grasp what he reads of Judge Sotomayor’s rulings. He has no credentials for it.
The other thought is this is coming from someone who picked you know who as a running mate?
JK
OT
Health care talk sinks Obama press conference ratings
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0709/25385.html
Standout passage in Politico story
“The problem with health care is that it’s so big and so complicated that the public is never really going to understand all the moving parts of this,” NPR health policy correspondent Julie Rovner said on air Wednesday. “So the public is really always going to be sort of amenable, if you will, to demagoguery and arguments one way or the other that don’t necessarily link to what the substance is,” Rovner continued.
Here you have an NPR correspondent complaining that health care is too difficult a story to cover. NPR is supposed to be the adult in the room among the different MSM organizations. During pledge drives, NPR brags ad nausea about their unique status within the MSM universe. They do all of the heavy lifting and analysis that the commercial news outlets ignore. It’s Julie Rovner’s fucking job to make health care understandable to her audience. If she can’t handle that task, what the fuck is she doing working as a journalist?
Paris
The real story is what a thug O’Reilly is. When he can’t win an argument he goes after people’s employers. He has harrassesd University administrators to deny tenure to professors he disagrees with. With Olberman, he went after GE. O’Reilly is a coward and should be treated as such.
steve s
Charlie Rose isn’t a great interviewer, he gets in the way too much. But the show’s still interesting and informative a couple of times a week. I’d rather watch Rose than either Olbermann or O’Reilly.
steve s
compare a week’s worth of Rose’s guests
http://www.charlierose.com/schedule/
to the Liz Chaneys and Michelle Malkins appearing on the Sunday shows, and Rose is ahead by a country mile.
JK
@MikeJ: The war was the fault of Bush and Cheney not Amy Goodman. I disagreed with her position on containment, but I wouldn’t dismiss her entire career on the basis of one issue. Democracy Now sheds light on a lot of stories that the MSM ignores.
@steve s:
Charlie Rose is watchable in spite of Rose. He’s a horrific interviewer. He sees every interview as an opportunity to convince viewers his subject expertise equals or surpasses that of his guests. When it comes to politics, his guest list is remarkably biased to the right.
General Winfield Stuck
One thing for sure. whenever the media meets with wingnuttia, it’s pure Poison.
NutellaonToast
“I doubt he’s ever said anything more offensive than Suck. On This. Iraqi. People.”
Someone needs to google iced-t and o’reilly, to alleviate those doubts.
trollhattan
Pretty much OT, but is BOB really a grrrrl? An armed grrrrl?
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/8/2/760870/-Glenn-Beck-Fan,-Highly-Armed,-Busted-For-Casing-National-Guard-Base,-Thinking-It-Was-A-FEMA-Camp-
The Grand Panjandrum
@steve s: Yep. I’m with you Charlie. Sometimes he’s good sometimes not so much. But yes he is much better than most.
If this report of the so-called rapproachment is true then O’Reilly is the winner. He gets Olbermann off his ass. I see no downside for BillO and KO is in a no win situation. MSNBC doesn’t have a full set of testicles in the entire executive suites of the corporate office and they will pull KO if he doesn’t comply. If KO does comply he’s a spineless eunuch who loses any cred he might have. KO has some credibility issues with his silence on the Morning Joke BS he won’t confront on his own network. But he got a big contract and it would be tough to walk away from that kind of jack by pissing off the people who sign those big checks.
El Cid
@MikeJ: You know who can go fuck themselves? People who suggest that those at fault for moving from containment to invasion and occupation of Iraq included Amy Goodman. It wasn’t Amy Goodman who made the U.S. invade & occupy Iraq, and it’s not like there were just some dudes sitting around a table and said, “Fuck, I mean, we can’t keep murderous sanctions on forever, though maybe no-fly zones, but that Amy Goodman and those evil fringe lefties happen to notice all the people dying and shit from the sanctions, so, hell, we best fucking roll in and blow the country up, at least, that is, if we get some cowboy in office and some massive act of terrorism makes it all easy to sell!”
The Grand Panjandrum
@General Winfield Stuck:
Just like every night has its dawn. Just like every cowboy sings his sad, sad song
b-psycho
@MikeJ: Um, no. The alternative to “containment” was leaving them alone. Neo-imperialists that had been frantically trying to carve a 3rd door just got lucky after 9/11.
Brachiator
Well, there it is. I wonder if there is any way to keep the feud going, since anything which is bad for the interests of these corporate parents has got to be good for America.
eric – As a more radical lefty, I am often amazed at the awakenings of most left of center people when they realize that the rantings of the “loony left” (see, e.g., Chomsky) are not rantings and the people are not looney.
Oh, I don’t know. I don’t have much use for people who hold either Chomsky or Ayn Rand in high regard. But that’s just me.
Independence is a beginning, but it is not the whole enchilada. Lefty Americans in particular love to make a fetish of autonomy and independence, that they think is a guarantee of quality or truth. But progressives can do a solipsistic circle jerk just as intensely as can your average bunch of fundamentalists.
Still, any way you slice it, we are being royally screwed when the mainstream media so eagerly grovels before their corporate masters and the few remaining journalists with a brain in their heads cannot get a reliable forum from which to do their work.
Harcourt Fenton Mudd
Dougj-
If I were picking 10 people for the All-star team of major league assholes- Billo would probably make the team, Charlie Rose not so much. Do you really see things different from that?
steve s
I don’t have cable at the moment, but i’d def like to see Fareed Zakaria GPS. Only cable news show I’ve ever seen with consistently intelligent discussion.
JK
@Brachiator:
Brachiator – when the mainstream media so eagerly grovels before their corporate masters
I totally disagree with your assertion of some sort of equivalence between Chomsky and Rand, but I’m too tired to elaborate on that right now.
For the life of me I simply can’t understand the people who continue to heap praise on Charlie Rose. Look at his fucking guest list over the years. Count the number on the right vs those on the left. Where are people like Thomas Frank, Jeff Madrick, Michael Tomasky, Ezra Klein, Matt Taibbi, Dan Savage, Barbara Ehrenreich, Joan Walsh, Laura Flanders, Katrina Vanden Heuvel, Joe Conason, David Sirotta, Alexander Cockburn, Bob Herbert, John Ridley, and Glenn Greenwald? It’s bad enough that the Sunday talk shows are so biased to the right. Charlie Rose should be much more evenhanded when it comes to guest selection.
El Cid
@JK: I think a lot of it is simply behavioral. Like a lot of NPR. They talk about stuff much more calmly. With more pauses. As if they’re thinking about it more. There are reflective pauses between pieces. Artful music connecting the various stories. It all feels as though it ought to be much more solid, intellectually, than the sing-songy network goofballs.
Keith G
@steve s: Steve, you can download Fareed Zakaria GPS from iTunes.
inkadu
@Brachiator:
This lefty doesn’t.
Independence is the beginning AND the end of government involvement in media. This is a plural society, and I don’t want to control the content of what is said. What I do want is for control to be returned (at least partially) to smaller, more local-level companies without the ability to add to their profit margins by shutting down stories or spinning the news. But who watches the news anyway?
Long ago, someone — maybe Chomsky himself — summed up his argument this way to me long ago (paraphrasing):
I’m glad Noam stopped talking to monkeys long enough to figure that out.
Would that Marshall McLuhan had aged so well (the medium is the message).
This also explains why I didn’t get laid while I was in college: I was too busy reading the dusty paperbacks in the “Social Paranoia” section of the the library. If I was ever at a party and someone offered me a vodka and say, “Did you know Smirnoff subliminally draws knives pointing to vaginas in the ice cubes of their advertisements? You simply must read Wilson Bryan Keys.”
Brachiator
@JK:
Acolytes worship the two all out of proportion to their merits. But while Chomsky is often just wrong or superficial, Rand is a total crackpot.
Rose kisses up to the elites and the insiders, especially the Manhattan to Hamptons to Washington Beltway Axis (with a dash of London and Hollywood). And he will devote entire shows to guests and bring them back again and again. It is a hell of an ego stroke.
And he gives tons of times to artists, writers, filmmakers.
I’ve rarely seen Rose ask a perceptive or challenging question, but often an easy, leading or flattering one. Again, ego stroking.
But Rose is more center-left and not often the political go-to guy (that’s more Bill Moyers territory), so I don’t think there is much point in looking for some kind of right/left parity from Rose’s program. That’s not how he rolls.
Also, the secret of TV is being facile in front of the camera. Talk shows have a rolodex of guests who can easily gab on camera, whether or not they have anything to say. And the right has mastered this better than has the left.
This kind of thing is the PBS/Sunday talk show equivalent of Regis Philbin or the late Tony Randall, who popped up on Letterman when a scheduled guest backed out (or got drunk or cold feet).
Availability trumps ideology.
inkadu
@Brachiator: Maybe I haven’t paid enough attention to Noam Chomski, but is one of his core messages wrong or superficial? He may OFTEN be wrong and superficial, so can anyone, but from my, admittedly superficial (and by now ancient) reading of him, he seems to be right on the money.
JK
@Brachiator: I’ll give Rose credit for bringing attention to some indie films and some art exhibitions. As for his discussion of politics, it’s as shallow and empty as the Sunday chat shows.
2th&nayle
@inkadu: Thought I was the only one that read any of that WBY malarkey. I think I damaged my eye sight peering into glasses of vodka on the rocks, hoping to see a ….oh, wait a minute! Ah, dammit!
inkadu
@2th&nayle: I don’t know if it’s all malarkey. I always look at ads to see if there’s anything there. It’s gotten harder to do over time. So either I’m slowly being driven SANE or they are getting better at hiding them.
Still, there’s a story to a lot of the pictures in ads… I notice, for instance, how often travel commercials show a man with a wedding ring enjoying the beach with a woman without a ring.
Brachiator
@inkadu:
If Chomsky is often as wrong as anyone, then there is no particular reason for paying him any attention. But my larger issue, which I probably did not make clear, is that too often lefties stop at Chomsky (or Izzy Stone), as though their minds are too small to hold more than one thinker or idea in their heads. This leads to a lot of blind spots.
For example, people make such a fetish about conspiracies designed to keep corporations in control that they lose sight of human motivation. And human stupidity.
A NY Times mea culpa on the ridiculous number of errors in the Alessandra Stanley appreciation of Walter Cronkite reveals an astounding bit of babysitting over someone who is supposed to be their top TV writer.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/02/opinion/02pubed.html?_r=2
Apparently as a result of the Cronkite debacle, Stanley has been put on a short leash again. Why she even still has a job is beyond me. But the Times didn’t make such prodigiously bonehead errors in the past, even though they were no less part of the establishment than they are now.
I’m not sure why intellectual cowardice is so much a part of the media, along with ideological cheerleading. But I have not seen anything in Chomsky (or the musings of another lefty darling, Gore Vidal) that offers a comprehensive or satisfactory analysis.
JK – As for his discussion of politics, it’s as shallow and empty as the Sunday chat shows.
I absolutely agree with you on this.
inkadu
@Brachiator: Alas, I don’t think this conversation can go any farther without examples. But what you’re talking about reminds me of trying talk sense to Naderites.
El Cid
@Brachiator: Funny — I had never seen it as a particular weakness by Chomsky that he had failed to explain all things in one coherent theory, mainly because I was grown up enough to know that that would be quite a silly thing to expect.
2th&nayle
@inkadu: Oh I didn’t think it was all malarkey either. That was just the setup of my otherwise feeble attempt at humour. I think the reason you don’t see so much of that type of advertising today is the sexual aspect doesn’t have to be subliminal now. Hell, for the the most part it’s down right blantant! Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
2th&nayle
@2th&nayle: that’s “blatant” not blantant.
Brachiator
@inkadu:
You’re probably right, and there is no reason to try to turn this into a pro- or anti-Chomsky thread (and it would be rude).
And I don’t think we are that far apart on the main points laid out in this thread.
Some people want more lefties interviewed on the air just because they want more lefty stuff represented, whether or not the particular leftist has anything meaningful to add about contemporary issues.
But this in itself is not a solution.
And the larger problem, when corporate owners openly suggest that free speech needs to be tempered so that corporate interests are not threatened, suggests sadly that people may simply have to stop looking to the mainstream media for anything meaningful and move on to something else, keeping in mind that small and/or non-corporate does not guarantee integrity.
2th&nayle
@Brachiator: “And the larger problem, when corporate owners openly suggest that free speech needs to be tempered so that corporate interests are not threatened, suggests sadly that people may simply have to stop looking to the mainstream media for anything meaningful and move on to something else, keeping in mind that small and/or non-corporate does not guarantee integrity.”
Quite right! Seems the corporate entities took the lesson’s of “The Godfather” quite literally. No infighting among the families. It’s just bad for business.
2th&nayle
@2th&nayle: I know there’s not apostrophe in lessons> Never knew how much I would miss that 5min edit.
inkadu
@Brachiator: I
I have no doubt in an environment where left voices are allowed, I will be rolling my eyes a lot of the time and wishing they would just shut up. That’s going to happen within any movement of any size, even intellectual movements have their fair share of morons.
Neither you nor anyone is going to be the gatekeeper for lefty voices. Right now, being on the left AUTOMATICALLY makes you a radical extremist unfit for mainstream consumption. That’s the only thing that’s going to change. Micromanaging a message is just not possible in what should ideally be an open media environment.
I’m already ignoring the mainstream news. Except for the griping and guffaws I hear on the blogs, I wouldn’t even know who Chris Matthews or Brian Williams were. Cable news for me is a wasteland, and I can’t figure out why people watch it. But then I realize that people are stupid, and the Big Shows will always be appealing, as vapid as they are.
See morning radio. Also.
JK
@inkadu:
“Cable news is a wasteland” – That’s why God created C-SPAN. I’m not suggesting that C-SPAN is a bastion of liberal or progressive thought, but I think they do a reasonably good job of representing viewpoints on the left that don’t get on CNN, MSNBC, or FNC. I’ve seen speeches/interviews with Noam Chomsky, Ralph Nader, Gore Vidal, Alexander Cockburn, Katrina Vanden Heuvel, Seymour Hersh, and Amy Goodman on C-SPAN.
bago
See, tbis is why I don’t get the hate for Ana Marie Cox. No corporation outside of playboy would touch her for her proclivity for ass fucking.
Chris
Charlie Rose once told someone field producing for him that he was “the muhammad ali of broadcasting” as they prepared to interview a boxer.
There’s a reason Wes Anderson sent him up in the Royal Tennenbaums. He’s a star fucker, a narcissist, a rambler, steps all over guest answers, wants to hear himself sound smart over everything else, is a horndog with a comically gargantuan sense of self.
That said, where else do you get the great guest bookings, in the ideal format – sitting around a table with a black background for an extended period? Thus the whole thing is frustrating, a great concept ruined by a twat.
Charlie Rose got to where he is by having a very close, asskissing friendship with a billionaire underwriter called Michael Bloomberg. That’s his power base, he funds the show, that’s his corporate underwriting which he brings to the pbs affiliate, who take it gleefully. Explains a lot.
inkadu
@JK: What you describe isn’t really news.
I like me some C-SPAN book tv; but only after I’ve read the main entries, and all the links on the Washington Monthly, Pharyngula, Balloon Juice, Eschaton, Sadly, No!, DailyKos (ok, just the main entries, and I skip most of the comments), Talking Points Memo, and I Can Haz Cheezburger. Doesn’t leave much time for teevee.
itsbenj
Um, it wasn’t Charlie Rose who said “suck. on. this.” it was Thomas Friedman being interviewed by Rose.
malta
I’m getting wordpress database error 28 and site is all broken up (prob everybody knows this)
Allan
Does anyone care that KO says he spoke twice to the author, denied that anyone had attempted to muzzle him, and proceeded tonight to make the NYT author, Billo and Murdoch his third, second and worst persons in the world respectively?
Cause that would be, you know, relevant to whether the NYT was spreading lies again and Greenwald was feasting on shit and thinking it was foie gras again.