Vanity Fair’s piece on the fall of NBC News over the last 4 years is a pretty good read, and at least finds some people willing to put the blame squarely on the shoulders of The Worst Company In America, which bought NBC/Universal despite serious concerns raised by, I dunno, everyone?
Since Comcast took control of NBC, the network’s news division—famously termed Comcast’s “crown jewel” by C.E.O. Brian Roberts—has endured one debacle after another. “When Comcast took over, they had the No. 1 morning show, the No. 1 Sunday show, and the No. 1 evening broadcast,” says a former top NBC executive. “That’s all completely fallen apart. I don’t know how you blame anyone but Comcast and the people it brought in. It’s been a nightmare.”
Behind the scenes much of the blame has been laid at the feet of three executives: [NBC News chief Deborah] Turness, a British-trained newcomer to U.S. television; [former network head Patricia] Fili, who had virtually no experience in journalism; and Fili’s boss, the steely, driven C.E.O. Comcast installed to run NBCUniversal, Steve Burke. Under Burke the network has done well overall—its ratings have rebounded from last to first in the coveted 18–49 demographic, and NBCUniversal’s profits were up 18 percent last year—but he and his deputies, their critics charge, time and again proved unable to rein in the news division’s high-priced talent. “News is a very particular thing, NBC is a very particular beast, and Deborah, well, she really doesn’t have a fucking clue,” says a senior NBC executive involved in recent events. “She’s letting the inmates run the asylum. You have kids? Well, if you let them, they’ll have ice cream every night. Same thing in TV. If you let the people on air do what they want, whenever they want, this is what happens.”
“Look. Deborah Turness: I have seen no evidence she knows what she’s doing, but in fairness, she walked into a complete shitstorm there,” says a former top NBC executive. “Today is a horror show. Brian Williams? He didn’t give a rat’s ass what Deborah Turness says. But this is fundamentally not a Deborah Turness problem. She’s just a symptom of the problem…. This is a Comcast problem.”
Even some of Burke’s defenders admit he has only himself to blame for the decline of NBC News. “Steve has a great track record, and phenomenal DNA, but nobody bats a thousand,” insists one Burke fan. “He’s done a phenomenal job in so many areas. What he did easing out Leno? Unbelievable. But what you’re looking at here is his mistake. Just a huge mistake. I mean, bringing in Pat? Then Deborah? That’s like bad food and small portions.”
Officially, in a damage-control mode where almost no one will be interviewed freely and on the record, NBC News declined comment for this article. Unofficially, its loyalists cooperated extensively. While admitting the occasional misstep, they reject the harsh critiques that have trailed in the wake of the Williams scandal, blaming them on a coterie of departed executives, including former NBCUniversal C.E.O. Jeff Zucker and former NBC News chief Steve Capus, who resigned under pressure in 2013. “We know the people saying these things about us, and we know why,” one NBC partisan told me. “Because five years later we are still cleaning up the mess they left behind.”
I’m sure a similar piece will be written about MSNBC head Phil Griffin about that network’s rapid disintegration in the coming months, but I’m fairly sure the cause of both of these issues remains “having the largest cable company in the country buying a major broadcast network”.
kindness
I don’t care what they do so long as they don’t touch a hair on Rachael Maddow’s head.
bemused
@kindness:
I don’t want to see Chris Hayes go either.
Mustang Bobby
Comcast can’t even get cable installation service done right, and their customer service department is one step below a help desk manned by Klingons (and their sales staff is handled by the Ferengi), so it’s no wonder they managed to crater NBC News.
srv
The demographic for the Today Show is probably the same as those having AOL dialup accounts.
Mustang Bobby
@srv: Is the Today Show still on the air? [/snark]
Bobby B.
I refuse to consider a fix that doesn’t include David Gregory’s public tar-and-feathering. He was only a cog, etc, but I have a lot of unused fury for him. Plus those yammering idiots on the Today Show on both sides of the window.
Iowa Old Lady
I’ve read that Hayes’s show has historic low ratings. Is that true? I like the show, though not as much as I liked his weekend show.
NotMax
For a network that survived (though just barely) Supertrain, this is a mere hiccup.
mtiffany
MSNBC — 20 hours of hatewatchability, everyday.
MattF
I’m all for blaming Comcast– they bought it, and it’s their shitpile. And yeah, it’s fair to assume that the knives are out for the new executives– but how is that different from SOP in the broadcast news biz?
Peale
I do like how it is somehow the new executivess fault that the “talent” hired by the previous news department is childish. Management isn’t necessarily the art of telling children they can’t have ice cream. I hope Ms. Thomas gets to fire a few of these children. They aren’t really “talent” anyway. Just “personalities” and since everyone has a personality, finding new ones that the audience likes shouldn’t be an insurmountable problem.
Tommy
@Mustang Bobby: I say this rarely here. My MA is in Journalism (goal was to research the FCC). In grad school, my Graduate Assistantship was with a man named Sig Mickelson. He has two claims to fame if you Google him, he fired Edward R. Murrow and hired Walter Cronkite as the head of CBS News.
I wish I had some amazing stories to tell, I sat with him for many hours, but I got nothing. I mean nothing. When in a class you are reading about the man, and then you have to walk up the stairs and take your research he asked to him, I often almost pissed my pants.
I guess maybe a different time but pretty sure if GE or COMCAST told him to do this or that, he would have told them to go pound dirt.
Betty Cracker
We rightly slam the corporate media coverage of national politics here a lot, and I’m not sure what could change it aside from burning it down and starting over. But at the local level, there are many excellent reporters doing real work in uncovering corruption and pinning politicians down on issues and influence. And the scary thing is that the same shit is happening in those newsrooms and has been for years — marketing execs are running the show, more so than ever since print media funding sources have been drying up for a couple of decades.
Outfits like ProPublica do a great job of delving into complex issues and providing thorough coverage on non-trivial topics. But do we want to rely on the largess of rich people to fund investigative journalism? The potential problems with that are pretty obvious — the corporate media demonstrate it daily.
I don’t know what the answer is, but it’s a serious problem.
MazeDancer
There is, IMHO, no mystery about MSNBC ratings decline.
1) All TV news viewership is down. Too many devices, too little time.
2) Unless there is some news event/crisis, MSNBC primetime shows all report the same thing. Who wants to watch the same stuff over and over in the flavor of another talking head?
3) That same stuff is usually Republican talking points and lies. The MSNBC show may be trying to refute it, but still, one has to be subjected to GOP malarky. Which is painful. People don’t like pain.
4) MSNBC repeating the GOP lies just gives lies equal standing to the truth. And “both sides do it” continues to erase facts.
5) Life is calmer and better without TV news viewing. Everyone who gets fed up with all the lies and stops watching discovers that. Reasons to tune back in are really only some kind of emergency/news event.
6) And watching Joe beat up wimpering Mika, and then give air time and credence to Mark Halperin, is not the way any one, especially progressives, wants to start their morning.
7) There actually is a market for a decent Sunday Morning show that wasn’t GOP-TV. If Meet the Press was actually a show trying to promote truth, it would find an audience.
8) Chris Hayes was on his way to developing an interesting long-form show that would also play well live-streamed in the background while people did their weekend chores, as well as archived in podcasts. But when they yanked him for a less interesting show in primetime, that was lost.
Keith G
One of the things that most in corporate America can’t/won’t understand is that government regulation is very useful at saving them from their own flawed impulses. Network news is a very tough, product-oriented competition of a type Comcast suits aren’t practiced in. What Comcast is good at is buying out the competition and caring very little about consumer products.
Edit
In line with that last sentence, I wonder if Netflix will start news programing.
Mustang Bobby
@MazeDancer:
FWIW, “Up with Steve Kornacki” on MSNBC on Saturday and Sunday from 8 to 10 ET is certainly more tolerable than MTP and that clown show on ABC.
NotMax
@Mustang Bobby
Or was, until they included that insipid game show. Unwatchable dreck now.
the Conster
It doesn’t matter what Comcast has or hasn’t done – there is no news on the “news” on any network, and there won’t be because facts have a liberal bias, and apparently any liberal bias means an automatic death sentence. That’s why Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert were so valuable, because they could use humor to report news stories but they had to be on Comedy Central where they could be dismissed as comedians by the VSPs on the networks. The talking hairdos are unable to ask probing questions or offer informed critiques, because they’re paid to be agreeably vapid. Broadcast media serves one purpose and one purpose only – to create consumers and not citizens, and they’ve succeeded. America, fuck yeah/
Jim, Foolish Literalist
The suits like the low-rated show for the same reason they like the Sunday shows. The right sort of people watch it. Whether that matters in revenue, I don’t know.
One thing that cracks me up is the promo they’re running where the g-libertarian queen of the nineties Oprah! tells them they’ve “got this morning thing DOWN!”, cause the patron saint of Drs Phil and Oz is who’s gonna guide me to a political shout show. Less funny is the images they offer as proof of their ability to get important people: Condi Rice and Tony Blair. At least they don’t use Mika’s pal and neighbor Liz Cheney.
CONGRATULATIONS!
It all went to shit when they fired Phil Donahue back in 2003 for being virtually the ONLY media figure to oppose the Iraq war.
It is informative to meditate on the fact that he’s never worked on TV again.
NotMax
@CONGRATULATIONS!
“You’re television incarnate, Diana: Indifferent to suffering; insensitive to joy. All of life is reduced to the common rubble of banality. War, murder, death are all the same to you as bottles of beer. And the daily business of life is a corrupt comedy. You even shatter the sensations of time and space into split seconds and instant replays. You’re madness, Diana. Virulent madness. And everything you touch dies with you.”
– Network
askew
MSNBC’s problem is Griffith doesn’t want a liberal network. He keeps Morning Joe around when their ratings are in the toilet and wants to have a “neutral” station which just means chasing Fox News and their right-wing audience.
MSNBC does best with African-Americans and Hispanics for English news networks and Griffith wants to ditch Sharpton from primetime and bring in another white anchor.
Biggest mistake Griffith made was moving Hayes to primetime. He is too similar to Maddow. Second biggest mistake is having the same limited number of pundits appear on multiple shows every day. I don’t need to hear Krystal Ball’s opinion on 5 different shows every day.
They should be doing more interviews with Dem politicians and less pundit bullshit.
Plus, they need to reign in Maddow and her 25 minute monologues where she explains stuff to viewers like we are total morons.
Pogonip
@Mustang Bobby: The Klingons demand an apology for being compared to Comcast.
askew
As for NBC News, biggest mistakes are with the Today re-haul and Meet the Press. They allowed Lauer to become the centerpiece of the show even has he has become more unpopular. And they have 5 or more people crowded around a desk talking over each other. That plus the increased focus on celebrity news and not on actual news is what hurts the Today Show.
With Meet the Press, they’ve gone with two unpopular and uncharismatic hosts, Gregory and Todd, instead of going outside the box. Once Todd gets fired, I expect them to give it another boring white guy.
In the end, I expect NBC to decide the problems with both networks is due to them being “too liberal” and for them to chase after the same demographic that is watching Fox News. It won’t work, but that will be their excuse to go all rightwing all the time.
Kolohe
Biggest surprise? People inside the machine liked Russert a lot more than I thought they did.
MomSense
@Mustang Bobby:
During the whole health care reform debate when right wingers were saying the government can’t do anything right I kept thinking that these people must have never dealt with Comcast of Bank of America. Unless right wingers enjoy endless menu prompts and being transferred to multiple departments and repeating all the account numbers and information to people who can’t help you until you want to throw your phone out the window.
Cervantes
@the Conster:
Bryant Gumbel, long-time co-host of NBC’s Today show, once said the following in an interview:
Of course, he was no longer at NBC News when he said it.
Bobby B.
@askew: The punchlines to Maddow’s monologues are the brokerage firm commercials, followed by a ten second teaser, followed by an Exxon commercial. We all know who the comedian is here.
gene108
Do you read what you post?
The news division turned into a mess, but the network overall is doing well.
Cable companies are just another retail outlet. Buy content at wholesale prices and sell it at retail prices to consumers. It is a dying market.
Having control of content is one direction to go to help in the transition to whatever wireless streaming wonderland we will be at in the next 15-20 years.
Pretty much anybody in this space – HBO, Starz, Showtime, Netflix, etc. – is pushing to get their own content, so there’s more to their brand that is not easily replaceable by another outlet.
jl
There is no profit in news, there is no news in profit.
The Venn diagram of this is surprisingly simple.
CBS is getting as bad. Back in the day when I walked barefoot in the snow uphill to school and back, I remember 60 minutes being a tolerable show. This Sunday, the first two segments stunk, IMHO.
Leslie Stahl plays her astonished and panicked Valley Girl act again: ‘Investigations in 40 states! 40 states!! I mean… but.. 40 states! OMG!!?? Followed by incoherent observations designed to maximize some generalized outrage and panic.
I don’t give a damn whether Gerry Adams is guilty or not. That is the Irelands’ problem, not mine. But little information and a lot of editorializing, some which seemed to me flat out contradicted by what was shown. Adams may or may not be lying, but saying he was equivocating and being maddeningly vague in his responses is flat out BS, unless you have the brain of a toddler. But the dolt Pelley was involved. Any way, hideous spot with obvious milking of emotion and sensationalism. I watched and thought “Wow, I didn’t really learn much of anything. I could have learned five times as much on the internet in that space of time” (Not that the internet is in general reliable, but you could check several reliable international news sites that are trustworthy and start looking up stuff and cross checking and filtering out BS).
Mandalay
@askew:
The problem for their evening news shows is the format: take an issue, invite on some colleague(s) who have the same views to agree with each other, and pile on against the Republicans. Be sure to throw in some laughing, sneering and smug condescension.
Even if you agree with the opinions being voiced, that format is dull as ditchwater.
Cervantes
@CONGRATULATIONS!:
Chris Matthews made that happen.
Unforgivable.
Zandar
@gene108: Hey Gene?
MSNBC, which is not NBC, is most certainly not doing well.
Bobby B.
@Cervantes: Yes, yes and yes. For real news I’ll take “Democracy Now!” on PBS (until The Corporation removes it).
Elizabelle
Haven’t read the VF article yet, and plan to, but I’ve got some sympathy for Brian Williams.
He wanted a chance to host the Tonight Show. I think he realized he’d become one of the smoothest figureheads on the News Ship Potemkin, and that comedy and satire took more courage and told the truth a lot more than the dreadful product he and other legacy broadcast corporations had been purveying for several years.
Colbert and Jon Stewart have more balls, and are more respected as news sources.
He was being paid a fortune to deliver a very compromised product. The “gravitas” cherry atop the infotainment newscast, and then only if a cruise ship was not in peril.
I think Brian Williams is partly being flung to the wolves for being honest about his aims, even while he embroidered his encounters with reporting. It’s those in the industry who are the cruelest. Most of them are as bad or worse than he is, and a lot less likeable.
Peale
Instead of the talking panel shouty fake discussion show, would there be a market for a primetime daily Osgood/Sunday Morning show? I’m just wondering.
Cervantes
@Bobby B.:
Yes, another vote here for Amy Goodman and company.
Elizabelle
If I was MSNBC, I would have a five-seven minute news recap at the top of the hour, and throw open a lot of the rest of the day to news broadcasts from the vaults. Perhaps edited for length, and with an update of how it played out in the end, but that would give one a sense of history as it was being made, what people were actually saying to MLK’s face (“are you a communist?”).
Viewers would see a prouder and more vibrant middle class. They’d see folks who respected war more, because it was them and their kids who would go. Viewers could see actual news broadcasts about famous people and events and movements, and not have to rely on the Oliver Stone sensationalized stuff and whoever remanufactures news to fit an agenda.
We used to punish people more seriously for financial transgressions. We used to have politicians that would work with each other more, and the public benefited. It wasn’t just outrage for the sake of raising money and attracting eyeballs.
NBC has some fabulous archives. Didn’t they used to run Bryant Gumbel-hosted programs of footage from the vaults, before they settled on the talking heads running their mouths all day format?
pacem appellant
@Keith G: I used to work for Netflix. As of a few months ago, the plan is to avoid short shelf-life programming. Their foray into an entertainment show is an experiment with medium shelf-life products. Many things would have to change first before they would want to delve into short shelf-life, non-entertainment formats.
Patrick
@MomSense:
That argument by the RWers is such a joke. How about BP and their oil spill a few years ago? I thought based on their dwarfed logic that corporations and the markets were perfect. By the way, since the government can’t do anything right (according to them), they must not think a hole lot of of our men and women in the military.
jl
@Peale: My experience listening to Osgood is that, at least until last few years, had wingnutty tendencies politically. If he is a political wingnut, at least he is not a closed minded one, since he lets the liberal David Ross take over his spot when he is away.
He is very good at science and technology, and human interest stories and doggerel.
Maybe he shook off the wingnut tendencies. Anyway, probably like good reporters who do their homework (Edit: and actually, willing to do work at all), he does not have time to cultivate, fluff and whore his on-air personality, as the likes of Williams, Pelley Stephawhateveropoloouss, and Toddler. Too much like a good reporter rather than a media news information product showperson.
askew
@Mandalay:
Especially since every show invites the same 3 pundits on every night to discuss the same issues with the same talking points.
There is plenty of news to cover and no need to for each of the primetime shows to cover the same stories with the same people.
And why is it so rare to get an interview with a Dem politician on MSNBC primetime?
MomSense
@Patrick:
Most of the right wing arguments are a total joke but they get repeated so often that they have become accepted as true.
They talk a good game about our women and men in the military but they don’t actually want to pay for their healthcare or much else.
Bobby B.
@Elizabelle: What? And deprive us of our weekend “Lockup: Extended Stay” marathons??
Judge Crater
CNBC, the financial news channel, has been going off the rails for years now. Ratings have collapsed. They politicize everything. In prime time they’ve gone to crappy reality TV – plutocrats like Mark Cuban putting fledgling “entrepreneurs” through the mill.
Comcast has no vision beyond sticking it to the consumer. Now they want to merge with Time Warner cable and bring their cutting edge incompetence to millions of more Americans.
Patrick
@Mandalay:
Perhaps. But it works for FoxNews.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Doesn’t surprise me. Russert was from everything I’ve heard personally beloved. One story I remember was he semi-publicly tore David Gregory a new one for being rude to a waitress, which makes me like him a bit as a person, but as a journalist he was a joke. And the things that made us crazy about him, his authoritarian establishment worshipping, is as normal and natural as breathing to his professional tribe Also, there was a story that he was Keith Olbermann’s in-house protector when KO was the only person on TeeVee criticizing President Sunny Nobiltiy.
BobS
@askew: Maddow is fucking insufferable when she launches those monologues — it’s probably the single biggest reason I stopped watching her a couple years ago — that plus I realized the internet is a much more efficient use of my time as well as being a lot more nutritious — DemocracyNow!, The Real News Network, Richard Wolff’s Economic Update, Fair’s Counterspin, Doug Henwood’s Behind the News, Project Censored, etc.
Mandalay
@Zandar:
Unbelievably, MSNBC makes money. Why? Because it is usually bundled in a basic cable package, so subscribers are throwing money at MSNBC even if they never watch it.
Patrick
@Judge Crater:
CNBC lost its credibility a long time ago. They acted like the teabaggers own news channel during the health care debate. And none of the concerns that CNBC voiced has come to fruition.
And then they give a megaphone to Jack Welch, the guy who openly accused President Obama of cooking the jobs numbers without an ounce of evidence.
jl
@askew:
” every show invites the same 3 pundits on every night to discuss the same issues with the same talking points. ”
But, hell, the production costs of doing that are so damn cheap. Hard for bottom line short run ROI corporate suits to resist that.
My guess is that, given that the audience for news is not going to be that large, better to get a high return on some cheap ass BS, than invest in gathering, reporting and actual real analysis.
Of course, you could get real experts on remotely. Could have someone like Juan Cole phone in on Middle East issues. But the producers want drama and conflict in real time. They see it as a reality show thing. Sure you could make some money dong real news, but you’ll never get near acceptable big crony corporate capitalist short run ROI.
I remember some subject matter expert saying that doing these shows are dreadful because producers hovering around demanding that guests deliver drama and conflict during the segments. If, because facts too obvious people start agreeing, or guests decide to honestly hash out their points of agreement and disagreement in good faith, that is not riveting TV that will hold the viewer. I will try to remember who it was who wrote about his problems and repeated arguments with news show producers.
The whole US corporate news racket is close to fraud.
Not sure US media reforms are totally to blame. Krugman has been talking about corruption of economic reporting in UK, but I don’t know how far they have gone down the US corporatization model. Not sure ow much BBC has gone PBS/NPR for example.
Betty Cracker
@Mandalay:
That business model is going bye-bye soon thanks to streaming options. It’ll be interesting to see how it all shakes out.
WereBear
I now get absolutely apoplectic with people who whine that at me. “You want Time Warner to run our driver’s licenses?” I ask. And they go quiet.
WereBear
And by the way, NBC screwed up getting Leno in the first place, totally losing Letterman in a famous debacle. So I don’t know how good they were back in the Good Old Days.
But both screwups have common roots: being dismissive of talent. Thinking it’s the same thing as adding a new color to a dish detergent, or getting new ties for a host. Corporate sees everything as interchangeable.
And that’s just not good show biz.
Mandalay
@Patrick:
The audience for FoxNews is old, white and conservative. They want to be reassured that their views about the world are correct. I’d like to think that people with political views similar to Rachel Maddow, Chris Hayes, and Lawrence O’Donnell aren’t so insecure, but I could be wrong.
I’d love to see progressive Democrats come on their shows and get grilled by the hosts rather than being patted on the back – Rachel Maddow trying to pick holes in Elizabeth Warren’s arguments would make for great TV. The problem is that most people won’t appear on TV if they know they are in for a rough ride.
askew
@Mandalay:
Actually MSNBC isn’t bundled in basic plans unlike CNN and Fox so that is one of the reasons they struggle in ratings. They are usually in the next step up from basic plans.
askew
@Mandalay:
Here’s the thing that is not useful. We already have all the other news outlets grilling Dem politicians. MSNBC shouldn’t follow their game plan. Yes, question them, but we don’t need another network attacking Dems instead of letting Dems explain their positions, etc.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@WereBear: I’m a Letterman fanboy, but IIANM, Leno after the bad publicity at the start and until the bad publicity of his end was a money machine for NBC, kicked Letterman’s ass in the ratings.
If you hate Leno, and haven’t seen it, look for Jimmy Kimmel’s taunting interview with him during the height of the Leno/Conan thing.
Patrick
@Mandalay:
If you want to see Dems grilled by the host, then I’m sure you can see that at FoxNews.
I know what the politicians, Dem or Republican, will say, So I have no use for an interview with them. I prefer a good analyst who can talk about what is likely to happen. Good analysts used to exist. They are becoming more and more rare.
Bokonon
@Patrick:
Don’t forget the pains that the GOP and their right-wing helpers took to shift blame for the BP oil spill to Obama and the federal government. It was fairly effective, and hurt Obama’s ratings.
srv
Those cheeky Greeks
askew
@BobS:
Yeah, I can’t deal with Maddow and her overlong explanations. I gave up Maddow when she spent months on some conspiracy theory that Obama secretly wanted to keep DADT in place and then when it was repealed proceeded to not apologize for her CT and heap all credit on to Dan Choi and other activists and ignore Obama’s work on it.
Mandalay
@jl: Utter contempt for politicians by their interviewers is alive and well in Britain. Here is Prime Minister Cameron having the shit kicked out of him by the icy Jeremy Paxman in a general election interview from a couple of weeks ago.
Would any interviewer here dare ask a president “What do you think has been your biggest foreign policy disaster?”.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Patrick: Yeah, I find elected pols rarely make for good TV. The exceptions I would say are Chris Murphy on foreign policy, Sheldon Whitehouse, Warren and Sherrod Brown
I think two of the worst TV Dems are Harry Reid and even worse, Nancy Pelosi, which just makes it that much more interesting that they’re so effective in their actual jobs
MomSense
@srv:
I’m actually cheering this on.
askew
@Patrick:
The interviews with Dem politicians has other uses. It helps build our national bench. GOP politicians get unlimited TV time on Fox, CNN and other outlets. If Dems don’t appear on any national news shows, we can’t build our brand and that matters.
Mandalay
@srv:
Good for them, but I suspect their corporate overlords, German bankers, view them as uppity Greeks.
Mustang Bobby
@askew: This is true, and if you go to certain parts of the country, MSNBC isn’t on the cable in hotels. But boy howdy Fox sure is.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@askew:
Yep. If I want to see Democratic politicians torn to shreds, I can watch every other news channel. What added value does having MSNBC add to the pile-on bring to our understanding of how government works?
Epicurus
I first saw the movie Network when it was released. I did not realize it was actually a documentary. Corporate America has taken over all three of the original networks, Fox is not even worth discussing. I can’t tell you the last time I willingly watched a network news program, not to mention the Today Show. I get my news like everybody else, on the Web. Until they bring back “Must See TV,” NBC ain’t high on my list of destinations.
boatboy_srq
@Pogonip: And the Ferengi demand that their names and likenesses be appropriately compensated for the mention.
Cckids
@Mandalay:
I’m pretty sure O’Reilly or Hannity would go there with Obama (or any Dem president).
EconWatcher
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
I swear that every time I turned on Leno (which was only a few times, for a few minutes) he was telling a prison rape joke, with this impish little grin, as if he was being naughty and transgressive. If I ever run into the the guy on the street, I’d like to ask him if he feels good about laughing at teenage boys being ripped apart by gang rapists, and helping make this acceptable and amusing in our culture.
jl
@Mandalay: I watched a minute or so.
To be specific, Krugman, and from his links,a number if UK Keynesian economists, have been complaining about macroeconomic austerians, and general budget stinginess Bowles-Simpsonism, NPR debt concern trolling talking over the UK news and current affairs analysis programming.
Mandalay
@askew:
It’s not a matter of “attacking”; it’s making sure that Democrats can justify the arguments they are making when they explain their positions. If they are spewing shit let’s call them on it rather than giving them a free pass. Many here acknowledge that it would be helpful to Hillary Clinton to have some competition, so why isn’t it also helpful to challenge (say) Chuck Schumer on his love for Wall Street and Israel?
The only place where this happens is FoxNews, but all you see there is a spineless DINO taking dirty money to be patsy.
beth
@Mustang Bobby:
And on the tvs in the fitness rooms and bars too. At my garage I watch for a few minutes, shake my head, sigh loudly, and say “nothing but bad news all the time. Anyone object if I change to HGTV or Food Network?”. No one’s ever said no.
rikyrah
@Iowa Old Lady:
Yes, dragging down the entire night…yet, he still kept his job.
Patrick
@Bokonon:
I will never ever forget when Republican Joe Barton apologized to BP. His apology ranks up there with the 47 Republicans who sent the infamous letter to Teheran.
Mandalay
@Cckids:
Not so. O’Reilly has interviewed Obama and didn’t treat him with contempt. Interviewers here generally accord the president with respect more akin to a monarch than a grubby politician.
jl
@Mandalay: problem is political hacks like to argue and fight, and do it ugly. Subject matter experts not so much. Which makes the corporate suits get dollar signs in their eyes? The former.
I think that is the problem. Too many BS artists are perceived by the corporate hacks who run the joints as only ones who can do good TV.
beth
@Patrick: That was when I lost all faith in the news organizations. It seemed like their whole focus was on why Obama couldn’t stop this flood of oil into the gulf, never mind that the engineers from the oil company didn’t have a clue either. I can remember miserable James Carville looking into the tv and whining that the government needed to do something because “people are dying down here!” and Anderson Cooper solemnly nodding agreement with Jindal as Bobby whined how Obama wouldn’t let him build berms (that every engineer said would be useless). It’s when I realized what the Obama administration would be up against for the rest of his term.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Mandalay:
We must have watched different interviews. Of course, you also seem to think that it’s impossible to ask tough questions while being respectful, so you’re already infected with the Fox News infotainment bug that thinks only a screaming argument can be informative.
ms_canadada
@Bobby B.: It’s on Free Speech TV along with Thom Hartmann, etc.
jl
@Mandalay: But there is a difference in US TV. In Mandaly’s link about, in the couple of minutes I watched, Jeremy Paxman asked straightforward questions, and knew enough to challenge Cameron on some of the BS he spewed with facts and reasons, and had enough good faith to agree with Cameron when Cameron (IMHO rarely) made a good point.
O’Reilly’s interviews with Obama are full of gotcha questions, and BS. And how could O’Reilly do any different, since he is ignorant as he is arrogant and delusional?
jl
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): Yea, that is a difference. You can ask very tough questions with respect and good faith. Or, like Fox News,pester repeatedly with gotcha questions, spend most of the interview editorializing and spouting canned BS talking points disguised as questions and responses. And complain that your BS editorializing and absurd premises are not being respected by yelling at the interviewee that he or shie is not answering your questions.
askew
@Mandalay:
That isn’t going to be what a corporate owned network goes after a Dem for. It will be for BS rightwing talking points which Dems get on all other networks. Why do we need MSNBC to do the same thing?
askew
@beth:
Maddow was awful during the Gulf spill. She had Chu on for a feel-good segment and proceeded to spend the entire interview railing at him because a whole different dept of the administration had not fixed the BP spill. She didn’t even let Chu talk.
She never talks to any GOP guest or any non-Obama admin guest with the disdain she talks to guests from Obama admin. It’s like she thinks they and the president are all beneath her.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@jl:
The difference between BBC journalists and American cable TV journalists is NOT that the BBC treats those grubby politicians with the proper contempt. It’s that BBC journalists ask actual questions that are relevant to what’s in legislation rather than reporting on the election horserace while preening in front of the camera. Most US journalists seem to think that Tom Grunick (William Hurt) was the hero of “Broadcast News.”
We don’t need tougher questions or more contemptuous reporters. We need reporters who will ask questions about (for example) how the ACA actually works, not about imaginary death panels.
(Edited because I left out a very important negative above.)
Tree With Water
It’s not as though NBC wasn’t a steaming pile of propaganda before the Comcast takeover. To hear some tell it, a person might think something near and dear our democracy had been despoiled.
Elizabelle
@MazeDancer: Yes to all of your points.
I never watch MSNBC anymore. Will turn them on if Obama’s giving a speech and I’m curious if they carry it live.
MSNBC — and too many blogs — rechannel the rightwing puke funnel, this time so people can point and laugh. But you are still swimming in sewage and ugliness.
Easier to turn off the TV and get your news from many good quality sources on the internet. Outlets outside the US, too. And reading is faster than listening, and you can google for factchecking/learning more in real time. It’s efficient.
J R in WV
Reporters, even very god ones, are not perfect. This is why we used to have good editors following up on reportage. Used to be, every long form story was reported, fact checked, and then edited into a package that matched the style book of the medium in question.
This is all gone now, as even proofreaders are extinct. The average B-J commentary is better spelled and more grammatical than many news reports published today.
And fact-checking is only useful if your news group intends to report the truth, which many of them have little or no interest in. Quite the contrary for some of them. Look at Rush, or Morning Joe, or – well there is a long list available, and it is too depressing for me to go on.
I grew up in a newsroom of a local daily, and there were proofreaders AND editors. I was a proofreader from time to time, and it was a hard job. Some things one proofreader would read out loud to another proofreader who had their own copy of the piece, with out-loud spelling of complicated words. This is all gone now, faultily replaced by spel-check. [sic!]
Some magazines still have all that infrastructure, like Harper’s and Vanity Faire, but many of them have let all that expensive manpower go away.
But the most important problem is the re-emergence of news sources who are not at all interested in promulgating truth, but are dedicated to creating a fairy-tale world that supports the crazed political instincts of their owners.
pseudonymous in nc
What we’re seeing, broadly, is the end of network broadcasting. It’ll be a long transition, but it’s now at the “end of the beginning” stage for news.
You get to see snippets of it in how HBO puts John Oliver online and manages to take over a chunk of the Monday news cycle, perhaps more successfully than the Sunday gasbag shows. That’s remarkable, given how one of the big questions before Oliver started at HBO was how the Sunday night schedule would play out. The answer was simple: step back and don’t be driven by Stuff Of The Day.
MSNBC would work as, I dunno, three hours morning and night. Daytime programming doesn’t really need to exist. Chris Hayes could do a weekend show.
One of the telling snippets in that VF piece is that Turness had only managed one journalist on over $1m a year, and had never interacted with agents. That should have been a tell that she wasn’t working in a news org, but in a corporate entertainment division.
gene108
@Zandar:
When has MSNBC done well?
Maybe for a brief time 10 years ago, when liberals could not get enough of Olberman saying what people were thinking, but otherwise the network has been a mess for most of its existence.
Part of what drove MSNBC, and Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, to have success is the fact there’s a large contingent of liberals, who knew Bush & Co. were full of shit and the only people calling them out on it were Olbermann and Stewart and later Colbert; there was an audience waiting to be met.
I think a lot of the liberal anger over getting dumped on during the Bush & Co. years has abated a bit, with Obama in charge.
So MSNBC is back to where it was, having neither the captive audience Fox has nor the “I’ll keep it on as background noise” that CNN enjoys, as CNN was background noise for years before MSNBC ever came into being.
Mandalay
@askew: FFS, I am NOT arguing that MSNBC attacks Democrats. I am arguing that Democrats should be prepared to explain their politicial positions: what do they believe, and why? If they can’t take the heat of doing that then they are not up to the job, and if explaining their positions is a vote loser then they may want to rethink their positions.
If you want MSNBC to be nothing more than a forum for Democrats to freely spew their talking points have at it. Just don’t complain when President Schumer starts bombing the Gaza Strip.
Elizabelle
@J R in WV: Rolling Stone has given us all a lesson in the importance of editors.
And the WaPost does not have enough in its online operation.
Mandalay
@J R in WV:
The godly Moustache of Understanding begs to differ.
Cervantes
@EconWatcher:
Isn’t that what Twitter is for?
J R in WV
@Mandalay:
O dam, I left that first [sic] out!!!
That’ll teach me to pontifikate, huh?!! [ sic ;-) ]
ouch, he murmured…