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Personal news: why I’m now leaving MSNBC

bubbabgone

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It's possible that I'm more sensitive to the editorial process due to my background in public radio, where no decision I ever witnessed was predicated on how a topic or guest would "rate." The longer I was at MSNBC, the more I saw such choices - it's practically baked in to the editorial process - and those decisions affect news content every day. Likewise, it's taboo to discuss how the ratings scheme distorts content, or it's simply taken for granted, because everyone in the commercial broadcast news industry is doing the exact same thing.
...
As it is, this cancer stokes national division, even in the middle of a civil rights crisis. The model blocks diversity of thought and content because the networks have incentive to amplify fringe voices and events, at the expense of others ... all because it pumps up the ratings.

Personal news: why I’m now leaving MSNBC


"I understand that the journalistic process is largely subjective and any group of individuals may justify a different set of priorities on any given day. Therefore, it's particularly notable to me, for one, that nearly every rundown at the network basically is the same, hour after hour. And two, they use this subjective nature of the news to justify economically beneficial decisions. I've even heard producers deny their role as journalists. A very capable senior producer once said: "Our viewers don't really consider us the news. They come to us for comfort." "

First Bari Weiss at the NYT and now Ariana Pekary (a Producer, Lawrence O'Donnell) at MSNBC.

Well, yeah. No kidding journalism is dead.
 
"I understand that the journalistic process is largely subjective and any group of individuals may justify a different set of priorities on any given day. Therefore, it's particularly notable to me, for one, that nearly every rundown at the network basically is the same, hour after hour. And two, they use this subjective nature of the news to justify economically beneficial decisions. I've even heard producers deny their role as journalists. A very capable senior producer once said: "Our viewers don't really consider us the news. They come to us for comfort." "

First Bari Weiss at the NYT and now Ariana Pekary (a Producer, Lawrence O'Donnell) at MSNBC.

Well, yeah. No kidding journalism is dead.

Theres an ever increasing number of people who are coming forward and exposing our "news" media for the bitter partisans they truly are! The NYT, Wash Post, and many others have officially gone full-in with the left's modern ethno-tribalistic intersectional extremism AND cancel-culture, to where even the biased traditional liberals are being "canceled" because of something they said 20 years ago thats just now become "taboo" with the far-leftist SJW staffers there!

The left is now devolving into a purity spiral, where they are eating their own, because the most radical have the car keys, and they DEMAND that everyone else must conform to their level of radicalism, OR ELSE!! It seems that its difficult to be "extreme enough" to meet the mob's demands.
 
Bitter partisans or simply profitable business?
If you want journalism that looks and sounds more objective like public radio and TV, then watch and listen to public radio and TV.
Know why more people don't do that?
Because for the last forty years they have been conditioned to think that publicly funded media is evil because it's SOCIALISM.

A very capable senior producer once said: "Our viewers don't really consider us the news. They come to us for comfort." "

A very capable senior producer once said this:

“Today television news is watched more often than people read newspapers, than people listen to the radio, than people read or gather any other form of communication. The reason: People are lazy. With television you just sit—watch—listen. The thinking is done for you.”

Know who said it?
ROGER AILES, in a 1970 memo titled "A Plan For Putting the GOP on TV News"
 
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Bitter partisans or simply profitable business?
If you want journalism that looks and sounds more objective like public radio and TV, then watch and listen to public radio and TV.
Know why more people don't do that?
Because for the last forty years they have been conditioned to think that publicly funded media is evil because it's SOCIALISM.



A very capable senior producer once said this:



Know who said it?
ROGER AILES, in a 1970 memo titled "A Plan For Putting the GOP on TV News"

FUX news is the worst msm for real news reporting, they spread conspiracies and falsehoods worse than the Liar In Chief himself. Their main goal is to cover up his corruption, lies and constant gaffes. I do tune in daily to watch what they are up to, and it's always the same, dancing around the facts to serve their purpose. I watch MSNBC, but also tune into NPR and PBS for a more rounded understanding of the daily happenings in the US and the world.
 
You should never be able to determine the political lean of the person speaking if they are journalists.
A person's political lean doesn't have to creep into their reporting.
The 2 people mentioned in this thread are examples. They are of the Left but they can recognize their craft has been corrupted.
Another example is Matt Taibbi.
 
News today thrives on one thing: being able to sell advertising. It is their main form of income, and the only way they can pay the staff. That means they will focus on the stories that get the views and clicks.

Sad, but obviously true.
 
Theyre just giving the people what they want. Look at all the low iq reality shows that have great ratings. Celebrities singing or playing games, or being interviews. Ow, My Balls is the #1 show and thats just people being kicked in the balls.
 
Bitter partisans or simply profitable business?
If you want journalism that looks and sounds more objective like public radio and TV, then watch and listen to public radio and TV.
Know why more people don't do that?
Because for the last forty years they have been conditioned to think that publicly funded media is evil because it's SOCIALISM.



A very capable senior producer once said this:



Know who said it?
ROGER AILES, in a 1970 memo titled "A Plan For Putting the GOP on TV News"

Operation Mockingbird lives on!
 
Theres an ever increasing number of people who are coming forward and exposing our "news" media for the bitter partisans they truly are! The NYT, Wash Post, and many others have officially gone full-in with the left's modern ethno-tribalistic intersectional extremism AND cancel-culture, to where even the biased traditional liberals are being "canceled" because of something they said 20 years ago thats just now become "taboo" with the far-leftist SJW staffers there!

The left is now devolving into a purity spiral, where they are eating their own, because the most radical have the car keys, and they DEMAND that everyone else must conform to their level of radicalism, OR ELSE!! It seems that its difficult to be "extreme enough" to meet the mob's demands.

Love your post and your phrase "the left's modern ethno-tribalistic intersectional extremism AND cancel-culture".
I am going to borrow it and use it outside of this forum. Full disclosure - I am not a plagiarist. I simply enjoy seeing new descriptions for what I think is happening to our society.

Keep up the useful and educational posts.
 
FUX news is the worst msm for real news reporting, they spread conspiracies and falsehoods worse than the Liar In Chief himself. Their main goal is to cover up his corruption, lies and constant gaffes. I do tune in daily to watch what they are up to, and it's always the same, dancing around the facts to serve their purpose. I watch MSNBC, but also tune into NPR and PBS for a more rounded understanding of the daily happenings in the US and the world.

That's your Leftist narrative and you are sticking to it.
Basement Biden certainly has your vote.
 
Theres an ever increasing number of people who are coming forward and exposing our "news" media for the bitter partisans they truly are! The NYT, Wash Post, and many others have officially gone full-in with the left's modern ethno-tribalistic intersectional extremism AND cancel-culture, to where even the biased traditional liberals are being "canceled" because of something they said 20 years ago thats just now become "taboo" with the far-leftist SJW staffers there!

The left is now devolving into a purity spiral, where they are eating their own, because the most radical have the car keys, and they DEMAND that everyone else must conform to their level of radicalism, OR ELSE!! It seems that its difficult to be "extreme enough" to meet the mob's demands.

Media has always been biased and partisan from today till back in the day when Jefferson was president.
 
Read

AP Top News

It sells it's news to thousands of news papers and TV news shows. They try to remove as much bias as possible so that they can get more customers.
 
"I understand that the journalistic process is largely subjective and any group of individuals may justify a different set of priorities on any given day. Therefore, it's particularly notable to me, for one, that nearly every rundown at the network basically is the same, hour after hour. And two, they use this subjective nature of the news to justify economically beneficial decisions. I've even heard producers deny their role as journalists. A very capable senior producer once said: "Our viewers don't really consider us the news. They come to us for comfort." "

First Bari Weiss at the NYT and now Ariana Pekary (a Producer, Lawrence O'Donnell) at MSNBC.

Well, yeah. No kidding journalism is dead.

one could almost call it a pandemic.
 
News today thrives on one thing: being able to sell advertising. It is their main form of income, and the only way they can pay the staff. That means they will focus on the stories that get the views and clicks.

Sad, but obviously true.

The 24 hour news cycle didn't help either in that it created this insatiable need for content.
 
Love your post and your phrase "the left's modern ethno-tribalistic intersectional extremism AND cancel-culture".
I am going to borrow it and use it outside of this forum. Full disclosure - I am not a plagiarist. I simply enjoy seeing new descriptions for what I think is happening to our society.

Keep up the useful and educational posts.

No problem, I didnt originally coin the "ethnotribalist" term. Its a term that is being used by sociologists to accurately describe the intentionally divisive and purely superficial, segregationist, racial/ethnic/gender/ "grievance" politics of the "progressive" movement. Its why some refer to the new leftist strategy as "cultural Marxism", because they've largely replaced the poor(proletariat) versus wealthy(bourgeois) dynamic, because we have a huge, mostly content middle class, whereas 1918 Russia didnt!

So, theyve pushed the "traditional" proletariat vs bourgeois to the back burner, and replaced the innocent, oppressed, moral proletariat(poor people) with "innocent, oppressed, moral, non-white (neo-proletariat)" versus the "evil, oppressive, amoral white people (neo-bourgeoisie)".

To the 2 new "classes" of shoehorned, stereotyped, categories, they also add "other" proletariat members, such as gay, trans, etc. Then they add their intersectionalism to the mix to make it even more convoluted and ridiculous.

Your "value" as a human being is based NOT in your personality or character, but in how much melanin your skin contains, combined with whichever intersectionalism points you can check off. So, a gay black woman is "higher ranked" than a straight black woman, who in turn is higher ranked than a black man, who in turn is higher ranked than a white man. Figuring out the social ranking of a black man to a white woman is debateable, because they each can claim 1 intersectionality brownie point!

Identity group is ALL that matters, and as Biden and most leftist elites have told us, you are just part of an identity group, and you are EXPECTED to "adhere" to the "group dynamics", and NEVER become an independent, thoughtful individual who doesnt blindly follow along! As Biden said, If you are black and you do that, "then you ain't black"!
 
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FUX news is the worst msm for real news reporting, they spread conspiracies and falsehoods worse than the Liar In Chief himself.

Fox is the only cable news network that currently allows for any kind of diversity in political thought. And you can tell by watching Chris Wallace and several liberal anchors scheduled over the weekend.

MSNBC allows for extremely minimal political diversity, slim to none, and CNN fires people for disagreeing with Jeff Zucker, and requires that anchors frequently read off teleprompters to ensure their opinions do not deviate from Zucker's.
 
"I understand that the journalistic process is largely subjective and any group of individuals may justify a different set of priorities on any given day. Therefore, it's particularly notable to me, for one, that nearly every rundown at the network basically is the same, hour after hour. And two, they use this subjective nature of the news to justify economically beneficial decisions. I've even heard producers deny their role as journalists. A very capable senior producer once said: "Our viewers don't really consider us the news. They come to us for comfort." "

First Bari Weiss at the NYT and now Ariana Pekary (a Producer, Lawrence O'Donnell) at MSNBC.

Well, yeah. No kidding journalism is dead.

Why does you computer do that?

I’

Are you a Russian troll?
 
Why does you computer do that?

I’

Are you a Russian troll?

Yeah I hate when that happens.
I went through and changed all those crazy unicode things to the correct punctuation ... except for the thread title ... d'oh!
 
No problem, I didnt originally coin the "ethnotribalist" term. Its a term that is being used by sociologists to accurately describe the intentionally divisive and purely superficial, segregationist, racial/ethnic/gender/ "grievance" politics of the "progressive" movement. Its why some refer to the new leftist strategy as "cultural Marxism", because they've largely replaced the poor(proletariat) versus wealthy(bourgeois) dynamic, because we have a huge, mostly content middle class, whereas 1918 Russia didnt!

So, theyve pushed the "traditional" proletariat vs bourgeois to the back burner, and replaced the innocent, oppressed, moral proletariat(poor people) with "innocent, oppressed, moral, non-white (neo-proletariat)" versus the "evil, oppressive, amoral white people (neo-bourgeoisie)".

To the 2 new "classes" of shoehorned, stereotyped, categories, they also add "other" proletariat members, such as gay, trans, etc. Then they add their intersectionalism to the mix to make it even more convoluted and ridiculous.

Your "value" as a human being is based NOT in your personality or character, but in how much melanin your skin contains, combined with whichever intersectionalism points you can check off. So, a gay black woman is "higher ranked" than a straight black woman, who in turn is higher ranked than a black man, who in turn is higher ranked than a white man. Figuring out the social ranking of a black man to a white woman is debateable, because they each can claim 1 intersectionality brownie point!

Identity group is ALL that matters, and as Biden and most leftist elites have told us, you are just part of an identity group, and you are EXPECTED to "adhere" to the "group dynamics", and NEVER become an independent, thoughtful individual who doesnt blindly follow along! As Biden said, If you are black and you do that, "then you ain't black"!

I wish I could keep all of those social labels straight and in the right order.
They do add up to a certain number of votes Biden will be going after.
 
News today thrives on one thing: being able to sell advertising. It is their main form of income, and the only way they can pay the staff. That means they will focus on the stories that get the views and clicks.

Sad, but obviously true.

Prior to the 1980's local and network TV news amortized their costs with revenue from entertainment programming.
With the rise of cable news this was no longer sufficient, thus the painful transformation from public service to profit center was now set in concrete, leaving publicly funded news operations as the only alternative.
But as profit centers now, news networks had to repackage their product as something sensational and attractive. And that is precisely what they have done.
It is also precisely what news media had to do in the age of the Penny Press, the Hearst empire and the yellow journalism tabloids.
Only the names have changed. Instead of Hearst we now have Rupert Murdoch.
 
Bitter partisans or simply profitable business?
If you want journalism that looks and sounds more objective like public radio and TV, then watch and listen to public radio and TV.
Know why more people don't do that?
Because for the last forty years they have been conditioned to think that publicly funded media is evil because it's SOCIALISM.



A very capable senior producer once said this:



Know who said it?
ROGER AILES, in a 1970 memo titled "A Plan For Putting the GOP on TV News"

If publicly funded radio and TV were nonpartisan and objective, like its SUPPOSED TO BE, because its funded by THE PUBLIC's HARD EARNED MONEY, then they'd be happy with it! But when partisan progressives and literal Marxists are running the show at Public radio and TV, corrupting the reporting, ON THE TAXPAYER'S DIME, then its no damn wonder they call it "socialist news", because for the most part, IT IS!!

It never ceases to blow my mind how progressives think its "unreasonable" for the public to expect to be actually told the truth by objective reporters in the news media,! Let me make it easier to understand, by using an analogy with the tables turned.... Imagine how you'd feel if almost the entire, enormous "news" and entertainment media were infested with hardcore far right wing partisans! Now that sounds a bit scary, huh?? Well, despite the fact that the vast majority of the media are actually biased on your side of the spectrum, that doesnt suddenly make it OK and proper!
 
If publicly funded radio and TV were nonpartisan and objective, like its SUPPOSED TO BE, because its funded by THE PUBLIC's HARD EARNED MONEY, then they'd be happy with it! But when partisan progressives and literal Marxists are running the show at Public radio and TV, corrupting the reporting, ON THE TAXPAYER'S DIME, then its no damn wonder they call it "socialist news", because for the most part, IT IS!!

It never ceases to blow my mind how progressives think its "unreasonable" for the public to expect to be actually told the truth by objective reporters in the news media,! Let me make it easier to understand, by using an analogy with the tables turned.... Imagine how you'd feel if almost the entire, enormous "news" and entertainment media were infested with hardcore far right wing partisans! Now that sounds a bit scary, huh?? Well, despite the fact that the vast majority of the media are actually biased on your side of the spectrum, that doesnt suddenly make it OK and proper!

Ladies and gentlemen, another DP truism...just like when you see "truth, logic, integrity, real, reality" in the handle, expect none.
Same goes for words like "moderation".
Public radio and TV are too liberal because they're not repeating Trump's talking points, therefore Moderation Now believes that they're all communists despite the fact that one of the largest donors to PBS are the Koch Brothers.

How much of the public radio and TV budget do you actually think comes from the taxpayers these days?
The answer is, NOT MUCH...

How much funding is appropriated to the CPB?
Annual funding for the CPB has been level at $445 million for several years.
That amounts to about $1.35 per American per year and that represents 0.01 percent (one one-hundredth of one percent) of the federal budget.

...and it's possibly headed to ZERO if Trump gets his way.

The 1970's called, they want their federal budget appropriations restored.

AP080410052593_6_16x9_992.jpg
 
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