Reader Jerry sends a couple of links (Democracy Now and the Huffington Post) where Phil Donahue discusses his firing from MSNBC for, among other things, opposing the Iraq War. Part of the story involves Chris Matthews, peripherally:
I think he saw me as a threat to his supremacy,” Donahue told HuffPost Live’s Marc Lamont Hill. “He wanted to be the face of MSNBC and here comes this talk show host. I had the benefit of recognition … I think I was a threat to his goal of being the man at MSNBC. He was quite emotional. He was emotionally upset.”
He said that he had not been prepared for “the fear of the suits at MSNBC” about his show, adding that he was forced to put two conservative guests on for every liberal.
Donahue said he thought corporate pressure had played a key role in his show’s demise.
It’s worth remembering the rest of Tweety’s little war dance. While he did write a Chronicle column opposing the war, the history of his behavior on MSNBC is that he was a cheerleader when everyone else was cheering, and he stacked his show with pro-war voices. After the conventional wisdom flipped to the view that the war was a mistake, he tried to sell the notion that he was against the war from the beginning. And, like the rest of them, he’s still gainfully employed, because, unlike Donohue, he never “opposed” the war in any way that risked his career.
the lost puppy
My mom and I used to watch Donahue and were big fans.
I forget how Donahue, surely the most popular talk show host at the time and the father of the modern talk show, just dropped off the face of the earth.
Villago Delenda Est
I can never forgive Tweety for his tongue bathing of the deserting coward, a man who should have been imprisoned decades ago, before he ever had a chance to fuck up the Texas Rangers, the state of Texas, the United States, or Iraq.
the lost puppy
My mom and I used to watch Donahue and were big fans.
I forget how Donahue, surely the most popular talk show host at the time and the father of the modern talk show, just dropped off the face of the earth.
Then the brainwashing of a nation began. I look back on that time as being surrounded by a bunch of war zombies.
Yes, careers & lives were destroyed. And no fucking apologies to those who were right and unjustly punished, just a bunch of dick-stroking by the architects.
This is one fucked-up country.
the Conster
Donahue had a great show – the only and last talk show I remember that really delved into political controversy with more light than heat. I heard about issues and differing perspectives on that show that weren’t covered in the news, and lively intelligent audience input that Donahue was great at soliciting and mediating, so obviously he had to go.
Todd
Meh. Lots of sturm and drang from pundits, little fact, all as Donahue runs his trademark speculation without basis.
I hate paid pundits.
the lost puppy
Shall we start a punishment list? Beginning with Valerie Plame?
the lost puppy
@Todd: Was that some kind of obtuse snark, or do you have some evidence to share that Donahue was no less informed than those of us, most of whom were not rocket scientists, had the whole thing down from the very beginning?
WereBear
As a teen babysitter one summer, I became very fond of Donahue’s daytime show. I particularly remember how he handled an episode about a blind physician who had to switch to therapy because of his sight issue, and what he specialized in was people with transgender issues, who told their moving stories.
It sounds like an alternate universe SNL skit, but it was enlightening and sincere. The man has a rare talent; it’s ridiculous that he cannot still ply his trade.
the lost puppy
@the Conster: Plus, I think he had a bit more class than to get a woodie over a stuffed codpiece and then tell the whole world about it.
bemused
Tweety’s egotism is buffoonish.
mai naem
Watching Twetty yesterday, he pretty much said he didn’t support the war but that the admin said what they said and, well, that was it!!! Hell, at least be honest that you were a cheerleader for the war. Now, I know, there’s a lot of Tweety hate around here but I don’t think he’s all that bad and I think he’s gotten braver as there have been more strident successful liberals around him. He’s matured a lot too. There used to be a real personal hateful edge to his comments about the Clintons and that’s gone. Donahue, if I remember right, was the most popular show on MSNBC at that time. FWIW, I remember another liberal(Olbermann? Al Franken?) saying that the real reason Donahue got cancelled was Donahue’s insistence on stuff(production value stuff) that made the show expensive to produce. As much as people diss Olbermann, I miss Olbermann at MSNBC. I know he’s a bit of a blowhard and a bit of a peacock but he’s smart and funny and knows the medium that is teevee.
Todd
@the lost puppy:
I’m saying that there’s a lot of bitchy speculation about the role of Matthews and not a lot of fact.
More typical punditry on parade.
c u n d gulag
I got home from work, and was watching Chris’s show when he showed footage of W when he was on that aircraft carrier wearing his codpiece, and I swear, if my TV could have ejaculated, I’d have been drenched in jism.
Thank goodness I didn’t have HDTV, or I might have been.
the Conster
@the lost puppy:
Jack Welch likes all of his Irish Catholic male employees to be ball washing sycophants.
sharl
@mai naem:
That sounds like the opposite of bravery to me.
Do you know if he/they were told that by Donohue himself? Or could the prospective talent in question have been told that by network management and/or already employed on-air talent? If the latter, might there have been less-than-noble reasons for them to tell Franken/Olbermann/??? that sort of thing?
Culture of Truth
I always liked Phil. Smart guy with a good heart.
sharl
Here’s Amy Goodman in 2006 (Youtube, 35sec), publicly asking Chris Matthews about the Phil Donohue thing. Who knows what the truth is, but the new accounts are entirely consistent with other accounts of Tweety’s opportunistic and self-serving nature.
The reports on Tweety in his early network years by Lunatic Savant* Bob Howler – and his imaginary team of mordantly chuckling analysts, natch – tend to provide at least circumstantial evidence for this sort of thing, i.e., this is totally in keeping with how Tweety rolls.
Whatev. Once I realized how much standard corporate media was covering up and basically lying about the situation up until and during the Iraq invasion, I stopped watching, and sought out more trustworthy sources of information.
*h/t eemom
Maude
Donahue also had problems with Bill Clinton. Donahue spoke about it after that.
Anya
Tweety is a buffoon with the emotional maturity of a 14-year old boy. The most ridiculous things come of out his mouth. Someone mentioned the other day a segment on his show where he talked about the jailed traitor Jonathan Pollard so I went online to see the discussion. Tweety argued that the sentence was too long, then he made the most ridiculous comparison with Nelson Mandela. He basically said: at this point it’s longer than Nelson Mandela’s sentence. Why did he think it was appropriate to compare the two is beyond me.
kay
@sharl:
I don’t think “lying” gets it though, because these are deliberate ommissions rather than “lies”.
Lies are straightforward. Ommissions are tougher for people because they don’t know what they’re not hearing. No regular person counts guests L and R and says “you know, something is …missing here”
indycat32
Didn’t Tweety give the swift boaters a lot of air time or am I mis-remembering?
sharl
@kay:
I’ll agree with you there. The behavior needs its own descriptive term (assuming it doesn’t already exist):
SinsLies of OmissionNews reporting – especially broadcast news, where time is extremely limited – is inherently subject to the biases of the media organization/personnel behind the production, and IMO (with the exception of Fox) mostly manifests itself in the selection of stories to be presented, far more so (IMO) than the manner of presentation of what actually gets on the air.
The media’s behavior during the run-up to Iraq prepared me to be totally unsurprised when they studiously tried to avoid covering Occupation Wall Street, as well as the labor protests in Madison WI, while devoting copious time to covering the much smaller, bussed-in Tea Party “protestors” as part of that big-money-backed astroturfed initiative.
These days, I find it more interesting to figure out what is driving the activities of these media fronts, rather than the specific content of their vocal and visual emissions.
Gian
So, we are to believe that “the suits” at MSNBC had control over Donahue’s guests, but Tweety had total control?
Frankensteinbeck
@sharl:
‘Lies of Omission’ is, indeed, the term for it. ‘Deceptive half-truths’ is another. They’re the favorite lies of lawyers, and the subject of the ‘dihydrogen oxide’ joke. You can make a lie sound like a convincing, obvious truth backed up by verifiable facts just by leaving out a few details. It meshes closely with ‘selective perception’, a process of our animal brain where we pay attention to information that suits us and ignore counterarguments. This stuff is everywhere.
Todd
@Gian:
Hush. Didn’t you know that Donahue is the bestest pundit on Earth.
mai naem
@sharl: Look, I think a lot of people would not be brave if it comes to giving up their livelihood. Prime example are the pols who take unpopular stands after they don’t have to stand for election. I also give Tweety some slack because he served in the Carter admin. and had to deal with the Reagan lovers/Limbaugh/FOX etc. destroying Carter’s image as president and that’s where he was coming from. I don’t love Tweety but I do think he’s gotten better since he’s surrounded by Maddow/Bashir/Sharpton/ODonnell etc.
Mutt50
@Frankensteinbeck:
BS is the word. Not consciously lying, just no concern for the truth or falsity of something.
Donut
@Gian:
Are you saying this is not possible? Do you understand how media companies operate? Not all producers have equal clout or equal amounts of latitude with their booking options. It’s entirely consistent to think that Matthews’ producers have been given more free rein than other shows’ producers.
These are big corporations, and like with any big company there are constant turf wars and people protect their fiefdoms with vicious ferocity.
I don’t really give a shit about Phil Donahue or Chris Matthews,, personally, but to pretend like Donahue’s account could never be accurate is bullshit of the highest degree.
Emma
@Gian: He had total control because never once, EVER EVER EVER did he fight the corporate line. He never tried to buck the system unless he knew that the conventional wisdom was behind him.
It’s very easy to have “total control” and peer support when you agree with your supervisors. Not so when you disagree. This is really a basic lesson you learn when you enter the work world.
kindness
Tweety and Russel weren’t far apart really. I mean, just because Mathews once worked for Tip O’Neil doesn’t make him a liberal. He isn’t. He never pushed his views against the war and bowed to the bush43 capos, every show. Let us all hope Tweety doesn’t have a son who will soon be sparring with lil Luke Russel.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Tweety’s opposition to the war was a lot more than just one column, but everything was still colored by his obsession with the Clenis, which lasted at least through the ’08 primaries, and he’s still weirdly sympathetic to the Codpiece of Sunny Nobility. That twin obsession/delusion I’m sure did make him a more sympathetic host to war pushers, though in his guest pool there weren’t a lot of opponents.
I didn’t catch that discussion last night after the re-airing that documentary they’re kind of oddly proud of– a worthy and unfortunately necessary effort, but Moyers already did it and a lot better– I was wondering if he encountered any push back when/if he aired his theory of Dubya as a well-intentioned naif caught up in the wicked influence of Das Cheney.
And Tweety gets props from me for calling out the race-baiting of the Romney campaign, for which I suspect he got some heat from the suits, especially the suit containing Tom Brokaw, but that’s just a hunch on my part.
Bitter and Deluded Lurker
@Frankensteinbeck: Pedantry break: the joke is about dihydrogen *monoxide* since that’s, well, water. The other well-known oxide of hydrogen, hydrogen peroxide, is actually dangerous at high concentrations.
Gex
@sharl: Likewise, do you think MSNBC told everyone they were firing Donahue for political reasons? Or did they drum up a cover story about production costs because that plays better than overt corporate censorship?
mai naem
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I always thought the Clintons turned Tweety down for some position he wanted in the admin(press sec? speechwriter?),not so much the Clenis. There was something absolutely personal in the way he talked about the Clintons.
Gex
@Frankensteinbeck: Now look up what the Catholic Church is doing with regards to “mental reservation.”
Pretty much pre-approval for lies of omission.
kay
@sharl:
It gets more complex all the time, too. There are foundations and non profits and organizations who produce viewpoint. How many people know tgat Fix The Debt has a privatization agenda? That’s a direct conflict. Many of them stand to benefit if SS is discredited as a guarantee and then privatized.
Joey Maloney
I remember a daytime Donohue years and years ago with Chris Hitchens on the panel. The subject was something like “Iran: Threat or Menace”, this would’ve been early ’80s or thereabouts. Someone in the audience asked a question about how we could trust Iranian-Americans given whatever it was they were talking about, and Hitchens just ripped her a new one. I remember in particular the quote, “You should be ashamed of yourself. That’s a disgraceful thing for an American to say.”
The crowd applauded him.
Cermet
Always being right with the asswipes in power is far away what matters in our corporate media rather than being correct on an issue. Thugs are always like that; demorats, much less so.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I’m not so sure. They were certainly cut from the similar if not the same cloth, professional working-class micks (with neighboring summer places on the Vinyard, IIRC) with sentimental and self-serving deference to Authority, but Russert struck me as far more pompous and I think saw himself as having made it. Russert worked for Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Tweety for Tip O’Neill; Russert joined the country club, Tweety still goes down to the Sons of Hibernia hall though Tweety’s been sober for a long time, and reading between the lines after his death, Russert was a beef and booze guy right up to his early end. Also reading between those lines, I got the distinct impression that Russert was not all that fond of Tweety. But in still another stranger than fiction twist, it was Russert who protected Olbermann when he started with his rants and MSNBC was getting very nervous.
Remember from the Plame/Libby trial, it came out that the White House wanted to Cheney to go on the Tweety show to explain himself–which, yes, speaks volumes about Tweety and the Bush clan– but then Mary Matalin hissed from the dark shadows where she was feeding on the souls of dead kittens that the Veep “hates” Matthews, and would prefer Russert. I always thought that should have been hugely embarrassing to Russert, but it had no more effect on his Beltway reputation than did McCain’s pick of Palin.
the lost puppy
I’ll try to come up with “a few things Tweety did which I enjoyed”- His reaction to Bobby Jindal’s approach to the mike for the SOTU rebuttal.
A muted “oh my god” – to me, it’s still hilarious and quite prescient as to what followed.
Johnnybuck
All theories about Matthews’ dickishness aside, the suits made a business decision. The war had 70% approval rating among the American people, nobody wanted to watch a Cassandra spouting off about how wrong they were to support the war to restore national pride.
Donahue gets props for his opposition, but if he’s a Martyr, then he’s a martyr to ratings alone.
Matthews is not a news reporter, journalist, or even really an analyst, he’s a talk show host. His job is to get ratings, if the vast majority of the country supports the war (and the President) he’s gonna give them what they want. Just like he does now, with supporters of the President. The fascinating thing about Matthews is his intuitive sense of when the winds are changing direction, but other than that, he’s worthless, much like all cable news.
the lost puppy
@Todd: You’re being very silly. With the exception of this post, no one has thought or cared about Donahue for years. False comparison to a man who is on teevee for 1 hour, 5 nights a week,
kay
@sharl:
I think the thing that drives me crazy is that we never talk about the money.
The liberals who opposed the war had no financial interest in that outcome, other than their own careers, for the pros.
I would just like a straight recitation of the speaker’s financial stake in a given viewpoint. It isn’t accusatory or shrill. We’re not questioning “honor”
It should just be an ordinary inquiry. People can then make an informed call on how credible the speaker is.
When Joe Klein gets up and moans about public schools, people should know he works for Rupert Murdoch and sells canned charter school content. That’s his job.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@mai naem: Yeah, the rumor is he lobbied hard to be Clinton’s press secretary in the second term, and did not meet with a warm response, which no doubt colored his treatment of them. But if you were watching him back then, he was sincerely hysterical about the blowjobs in “THE PEOPLE’S HOUSE!” The man has issues about sex and gender that I’m betting would take a team of Freuds and Jungs a long time to even map out, much less treat, and which also played and play a big part in his professional persona. In fact, it was his reaction to the blowjobs, along with the ever-shifting shades of blond in his hair, that got him the name of Tweety. His staffers started calling him that after the cartoon where little yellow Tweety drinks a mad scientist’s potion that turns him into Frankentweety, a six-foot hulking, roaring orange beast who beats the hell out of Sylvester. One of them leaked it to the internets
Bitter and Deluded Lurker
@Johnnybuck: Donahue had the highest ratings of any show on MSNCBC at the time it was cancelled.
Frankensteinbeck
@Bitter and Deluded Lurker:
Reverse pedantry break. Isn’t ‘dihydrogen oxide’ correct? Mono-atomic anions generally do not get a prefix. Carbon monoxide is the only exception I can think of, and that’s to distinguish it from the VERY, VERY common carbon dioxide. Although let’s be honest – hydrogen hydroxide is actually correct.
Walker
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
There is someone who has totally destroyed his image in recent years. He should have just retired.
Johnnybuck
@Bitter and Deluded Lurker: Yeah? but for how long? And in the meantime, what kind of damage would having his show on do to the overall brand? I’m just going to assume that TV execs have a better understanding of how their bottom line is affected by it because clearly they believed they were better off without him.
kay
@sharl:
We could do this without drama and hurt feelings, too.
Did the guests who sold the war have a financial interest?
Could a guest with a financial interest ALSO think the war was good for this country? Sure. Those 2 things could be true. No reason to omit one.
I would actually say that’s a conservative approach. Market-obsessed conservatives see no conflict between making money on a viewpoint they’re promoting because they’d tell you they sell it because they believe it.
sharl
@Frankensteinbeck:
Dihydrogen monoxide (water) = H2O
Dihydrogen dioxide (hydrogen peroxide) = H2O2
{If I knew how to do it – and if FYWP allowed it – those 2s would be subscripted}
Although the “nominal formula” for hydrogen peroxide might be considered to be “HO” (because of the 1:1 atomic ratio of hydrogen:oxygen), peroxides are all characterized by the presence of the diatomic (di-oxygen) peroxide anion with a double-negative charge: “[O2](-2)”. {first 2 should be subscripted, the ‘-2’ should be superscripted, without the parentheses}
It’s been many years since I took grad-level chemical kinetics, but it’s possible the monatomic oxygen anion with single negative charge [i.e., O(-1)] exists as a transient species in carefully controlled laboratory conditions, or in outer space where “weird” chemical species can exist. But absent a very low pressure (=very high vacuum), charged species don’t survive by their lonesome for very long.
Far more than anyone wanted to read, I’m sure. [{whine} It’s just so rare that I get to talk chemistry though. {/whine}]
RaflW
The two conservatives for ever liberal bit, though not really surprising given the SUnday chatshow bullshit parade, but to see that it was an edict and not just the cozy Villager bias is kinda damning.
Frankensteinbeck
@sharl:
Except that you don’t put a ‘mono’ in front of the oxide for H2O because you only put ‘mono’ in front of specific exceptions. Sodium chloride is a perfect example of a normal monoatomic anion name. Are you stating water is one of those specific exceptions? That could be, except… water isn’t two H+s and an O2-, it’s an H+ and an OH-, hydrogen hydroxide, except… every chemistry class I’ve been in specifically insisted that it’s always referred to only as water and never by its chemical formula anyway.
Or did you just want to talk about hydrogen peroxide and its freaky little O2 2- anion? I mean, I can’t BLAME you for that…
EDIT – Reading over this, it sounds nastily sarcastic. It’s not meant to be. Sentence structure fail.
Mandalay
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
You believe that McCain’s pick of Palin had no effect on his Beltway reputation? Wow.
Bitter and Deluded Lurker
@Frankensteinbeck: You have a good point, but the more specific monoxide is important to the joke. Look at iron (II) or iron (III) oxide for counterexamples.
@Johnnybuck: Yeah, presumably they thought they were saving the brand. However, didn’t MSNBC languish behind CNN and Fox in the ratings for years in the last decade? And haven’t their ratings improved only as they have allowed more liberal viewpoints like Maddow on the air?
sharl
@kay: I see age 60 on the horizon, so I’m of an age where I attained “political sentience” in the John Chancellor/late Cronkite era, when broadcast journalism was a lot more of a trustworthy venture. [It was never a totally trustworthy venture, as careful forensics can demonstrate, but in the afterglow of the post-WWII Golden Era of American journalism ruled by Edward R. Murrow, a lot of good still existed.]
My theory is that various non-media corporate entities learned something from convicted felon and cult leader Sun-Myung Moon’s purchase of the Washington Times, which was believed to be an enterprise which lost a ton of money for Moon, but gave him presence and power in Washington. So, my theory goes, G.E. bought NBC, Disney bought ABC, etc., and with those purchases came a high degree of credibility earned by their news departments in the 50s-70s/80s years. The new corporate owners cashed in on that credibility up through the aughts, converting those orgs into surrogate pseudo-propaganda outlets. I say ‘pseudo’ because they were allowed to present regular news, as long as it didn’t conflict with the interests of the corporate owners. Hence NBC beat the war drums leading up to Iraq, with very rare war criticism, certainly much to the liking of major military contractor GE. Likewise, you rarely heard ABC go after the awful stuff occurring in the area of patents, trademarks and copyrights; after all, Disney wants to own the Mickey Mouse franchise in perpetuity, and thus enabled to go after day care centers that dare to display their images on the building exterior.
All this wordiness is to say that, as long as corporate management perceives some residual “spendable” credibility in their news subsidiaries, I doubt they even want to bring up the topic of vested financial interests, since that would negate most of the corporate value of owning such news operations.
sharl
@Frankensteinbeck:
Good point on the ‘mono’ stuff – consistency fail on my part. But yeah, my main point was on the nature of peroxide – you can “formally’ talk about monatomic oxygen (mono)anions (and in certain mathematically oriented chemistry problems it actually works out to take that approach), but in the real world peroxide only exists as the diatomic doubly negative critter it is.
[And no offense was taken.]
minutemaid
That is why progressives are just as bad as Teabaggers. They will still support talking heads like tweety when he says stuff they like and ignore his history.
While we are on the subject…Hillary also supported the Iraq war. What say you Clintonistas!
kay
@sharl:
I have to tell you, I love the idea of living off earned credibility.
Spending it down and not replacing it. I think it’s accuratrd it before.
e, and I’ve never heard it phrased like that before.
During the financial crisis, I was really puzzled by how that industry seemed nit to care one whit about how they were perceived by the public. They handle money. Don’t they have to retain some shred if trustworthiness or prudence? Who wants a banker who’s blowing on the dice in Vegas? I want a boring banker, myself.
Maybe that’s it. They’re living off a prior repitation they haven’t earned.
patrick II
@minutemaid:
I’ll say it cost her the presidency. Though I am not a Clintonista.
Johnnybuck
@Bitter and Deluded Lurker: Yes, the war started going badly, and particularly after Katrina their slant amazingly began moving left. Oh, and Olbermann came back to “Countdown” in 2003, presumably they felt that from a demographics standpoint, the media savvy Olbermann was a much better bet than Donahue. Perhaps that was a mistake in the short term, but in the long term it paid off.
Presumably, even though Ed Schultz produces solid ratings, they felt the need to replace him with Chris Hayes because Chris Hayes improves the brand.
After all, they’re just selling soap.
JustRuss
@the lost puppy: Much as I loathe Tweety, his withering “Oh God” to Jindal’s appearance is indeed on ofmy favorite moments in punditry.
M31
Old Chemistry joke:
Person 1 (to the waiter): I’ll have some H2O.
Person 2: I’ll have some H2O too.
Person 2 died.
Gian
@Emma:
so the functional difference between Tweety having control and not having control is he did what “the suits” asked?
maybe we have different definitions of control.
Maybe Chris kept his gig because he did as instructed, and Phil didn’t.
and you can shove the notion that thinking that means I’ve no idea how the freaking working world works.
sharl
@kay:
Yep, I too miss boring bankers who were, you know, safe with other people’s money. But then I also miss Presidential debates put on by the League of Women Voters, which on one level were also boring, but also actually put candidates on the spot to answer questions about important and tough issues. [No wonder both political parties were happy to ditch the LWV for the media spectacles that are modern political debates.]
Regarding my theory – or conjecture, or whatever it should be called – about how so many news organizations have been corrupted, there is at least circumstantial evidence. There’s the case of animator/comedian Robert Smigel, one of the few reliably funny people associated with Saturday Night Live in the past fifteen years or so. He once did an animated skit on corporate media consolidation for an SNL episode. But you won’t find it in any reruns of that episode, nor apparently on SNL DVDs. SNL producer Lorne Michaels claims it was yanked because it wasn’t funny. But if that were true, it doesn’t explain all the unfunny, lame crap he does green-light for distribution. So his explanation has a bit of a stench to it.
…I was surprised to actually find Conspiracy Theory Rock on Youtube (duration = 2m27s), because my recollection was that NBC was getting it yanked from the Internet right-and-left a few years back. My inherent suspicion of big media may be coloring my memory, however. [And while it ain’t knee-slapping, doubled-over-with-laughter funny, it certainly ain’t bad, and much funnier than a lot of SNL’s crap from the 90s and 00s.]
Long before I knew much about him, someone (Atrios, maybe?) linked to a post by the late Aaron Swartz, of a talk given at MIT in 2007 by former NBC reporter John Hockenberry. Hockenberry gave a real how-the-sausage-is-made account of an NBC news production meeting, specifically on a piece on the Iraq War they were deciding whether to run. Good journalism won out over corporate ass-covering in that case, but you have to wonder how many good stories got spiked in meetings like that.
By the way, if any interesting books come out of these big media organizations, I don’t expect them from the talking heads (e.g., that pablum put out by Tom Brokaw in The Greatest Generation), but rather from the producers and editors who worked behind the scenes, and were involved in and/or witnesses to that news broadcasting sausage-making process. Now, THAT would be grimly fascinating.
sharl
@kay:
Ooh, and before I get off this obsession, I’ll just mention the fate of former NBC reporter Ashleigh Banfield, who covered the Iraq War, then made the mistake of talking frankly about the experience in a university lecture, earning her a total shitstorm from the network suits once that became public. I guess acknowledging that ‘War is Hell’ – and including examples – is a problem if your corporate owners are dependent on that business.
Ms. Banfield is doing fine now. She’s part of the 1% (or maybe 3% – I haven’t tried gathering/crunching the numbers), and has landed back in media, possibly having learned her lesson. When she does misbehave – as Jon Stewart buster her for here (Daily Show video, 4m12s) – she presumably knows how to do so without incurring severe consequences for herself.
James E. Powell
A childish thing, I admit, but I think it’s very funny that Chris Matthews is referred to as Tweety all over the internet. He has to know this, right? I wonder how he feels about it.
lojasmo
i just sliced the webbing between two fingers. i would rather get the lemon juice out than watch tweety for a minute.
sharl
@M31:
Hah! (as Tweety might say), how have I missed this joke over all these years?
Only two of my colleagues will likely appreciate it.
grandpa john
@Johnnybuck:
The fascinating thing about Matthews is his intuitive sense of when the winds are changing direction, but other than that, he’s worthless, much like all cable news.