Way to go Todd …
I will hold my tongue about your yesterdays … today —
but continuing to do so will depend on your … tomorrows —
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He seems overprepared to make this observation…
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see, now,that didn’t hurt.
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I don’t remember Russert admitting that MSM are corporate shills that will do anything to keep what is going on behind the Green Curtain secret.
It’s not just about the press. It’s about delegitimizing facts and objective truth.
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This, 1,000 times.
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Thank you. It continuously disappoints me how many supposedly fellow progressives are indistinguishable from Trumpistas when it comes to unifying the country.
I have, and recommend it. A few quibbles aside, it’s spot-on, and it’s especially important that it have come from a prominent member of the “mainstream media.” But I can’t help but share the sentiments of many here: not only is Todd’s revelation, as @ncsteve notes, a few decades late, but it’s hard not to remember that he was the guy who just a few years ago literally said it wasn’t the media’s job to call out GOP lies:
Now, the Trump era has clearly shaken him, and his colleagues, into the realization that false equivalence between facts and lies is a pernicious practice, and to his credit he cops to his own culpability on that score. And his explication of Ailes’ development of what eventually became Fox – highlighting Ailes’ purposeful perversion of the definition of “balance” – is genuinely terrific, and well worth reading especially for those unfamiliar with the history. And it’s perhaps invaluable to share with friends and relatives who haven’t been lost to Foxworld but don’t realize just how different in kind it is from NBC or CNN.
But that makes the piece all the more frustrating, coming from someone who should have realized this eons ago. And given the continued tendency to see Trump as an outlier and treat other Republicans’ dishonesty and poison as still roughly equivalent to Democrats’ views, forgive my trepidation regarding the prospects for this insight’s lasting beyond the Trump era.
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Seconded. I read his writing and agree with the content. (And it’s well written.) And I agree with your post 100%.
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Now that I’ve gotten to your longer comment above, I can say the same.
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This. Exactly this.
ETA: covering the Leopards Eating Faces Party was all good fun, like a football game, who’s up, who’s down, who’s ahead, what to the Gang of 500 think today, when they didn’t think the leopards would eat their faces.
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I’m mostly with you on that. I’m not his sponsor agent, best pal, whatever. I was struck by how clearly he laid everything out precisely because he’s been a big offender with the MSM not getting what’s changed. His day-to-day practice, what little I see of it, doesn’t reflect this broader understanding. It bears out what I’ve been trying to tell people—the halfway smart MSM people so many rail at here get it, they see the problem, Jesus, they’re not stupid. They just can’t conceive of a way to deal with it that fits well with what they’ve always done. Some of them have begun “pushing back” hard on assertions that just aren’t true, but everything GOP people say is built on a huge stack of false premises. You’d have to push back in every direction at once. Like for instance, we say don’t have Kellyanne on, don’t have Jeffrey Lord, don’t have this one or that one. So who do they have? There’s nobody on the GOP side who isn’t an incredible liar. But there’s no way the broadcast people can have a Democrat in one chair and nobody in the other. They don’t know how not to have two supposedly opposing views, and now they’re in a post-truth situation with one side. It’s not a lack of understanding. It’s a lack, for many of them, of a viable adaptation to the new non-reality.
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That’s definitely part of it. But I think it’s worse than that, because this era, and hence their current awareness of their dilemma, is built on a foundation of years in which the political mass media became – in a very real way, though not necessarily consciously on the part of the journalists – manifestly center-right-leaning.
If the problem now is how a show can honestly fill a “right” seat to accompany a “left” one, for years the problem, often noted here, was how to get remotely enough Democrats on, say, the Sunday shows to approach the numbers Republicans routinely chalked up. As I know you know, folks like us would regularly call out Chuck Todd et al. on that; in the Bush years, the justification was, “Well, the Republicans are in charge,” and in the Obama years, it was, “Well, the opposition should be heard.” Again, I truly don’t think it was conscious bias; but decades of the right’s browbeating of the “liberal media” combined, over time, with the increasing corporatization of newsrooms, whereby broadcast news was no longer considered a public-service “loss leader” but folded into entertainment divisions and thus forced to become profit centers, inevitably had an impact. And careerism no doubt played a part with some. But whatever the cause, that’s been the reality.
So now, as Todd acknowledges at least a bit of that history and calls on his brethren to operate accordingly, I’m heartened that this fight is joined where it counts. But I’d feel more hopeful if coverage of, say, Paul Ryan as noble, humble, principled policy wonk weren’t still the norm. But I hold my breath and wait. And hope.
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[Damn, given all the tsuris this device caused me as I was trying to write that reply, I’m stunned that it’s not even more rambling and error-ridden…]
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More effectively manipulated by the right, I don’t think you’d get much argument on that. From Atwater to Ailes.
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I’ve figured the explanation is rather simple. As you say, the MSM has been highly corporatized. Who owns these mega corporations? Republicans (billionaires). Who therefore gets to set the agenda of what is aired and how it is spun, whether explicitly or implicitly? Republicans (billionaires). Whatever isn’t explained by that can be explained by the ill effects of corpocracy — namely the race to the bottom effect to attract eyes and clicks for ad revenue.
Check this out. I found this a compelling read.
Corporations have always been “creatures of the State,” as Teddy Roosevelt once called them. But they have become a kind of Frankenstein’s monster, unmoored from their creators to wreak havoc on the countryside. Corporations no longer consider the broad public interest in making decisions, nor do they worry that the state will ever revoke their license to operate. They only consider the desires of their shareholders, which has led to record corporate profits, stagnant wages, soaring inequality, and a shrinking middle class.
On Wednesday, Senator Elizabeth Warren proposed a counterweight to this relatively recent phenomenon in American business. Her bill, the Accountable Capitalism Act, revolves around a simple idea: The government would grant corporations the right to exist through a public charter, and could use that power to put obligations on corporations to benefit the broader public rather than a small handful of shareholders.
A federal corporate charter, required for all companies with over $1 billion in annual revenue, would be granted through a new Office of United States Corporations in the Commerce Department. The charter could be revoked if corporations didn’t follow its rules, including engaging in “repeated and egregious illegal conduct.” Shareholders could also sue companies for charter violations. “For the past 30 years we have put the American stamp of approval on giant corporations, even as they have ignored the interests of all but a tiny slice of Americans,” Warren wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed announcing the bill. “We should insist on a new deal.”
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