Congeries of cross connected concepts
Brothers Judds has a post about MSNBC “turning left” to get more viewers. I have been meaning to comment on that itself. My family went to the big city last weekend for a mini-vacation and one of the restaurants we went to had a TV on with MSNBC playing. It’s been too long since I’ve seen Old Media in action and I was stunned at how obviously biased it was. I suppose I shouldn’t have been, but it’s one thing to be intellectually aware of it and another to see it in action. Normally I would have been surprised that a major television network would stoop to hiring someone from Air America, but not now.
| cjm Sunday, 24 August 2008 at 09:59 |  |
a few more viewers — maybe. fewer advertisers — almost certainly. hopefully there will be some blowback onto NBC proper. given how badly air-ameica did on the radio, how does this move make any sense at all? pure desperation let’s-try-anything move.
| erp Sunday, 24 August 2008 at 10:01 | |
It’s the old cognizant dissonance at work. The further left they go, the fewer viewers/readers they get, the further left the they go …
| Hey Skipper Sunday, 24 August 2008 at 11:35 | |
Air America? What’s that?
| cjm Sunday, 24 August 2008 at 12:09 | |
a wind powered airline
| Annoying Old Guy Sunday, 24 August 2008 at 12:32 | |
Apparently a criminal organization so low it embezzled from a Boys and Girls Club in the Bronx.
As for the Leftward Spiral, I think it will bottom out in the not so distant future. One need only look at the readership for DailyKos and the Huffington Post.
| Harry Eagar Sunday, 24 August 2008 at 15:29 | |
Hilarious.
Jane Hamsher wants AP to fire its DC political editor because he’s a stealth McCain operative.
Eric Hofer was so right.
| Annoying Old Guy Sunday, 24 August 2008 at 15:42 | |
Jane Hamsher is the person who thinks that if Senator Joe Lieberman is elected as Vice President, she and many of her blogger friends will be put in to Guantanamo Bay. That’s the sort of person who’s view on Old Media bias you take seriously? Or are you saying you think I am equivalently delusional?
| cjm Sunday, 24 August 2008 at 16:10 | |
HE: i have read “True Believer” several times; which section of the book are you referring to?
| Harry Eagar Sunday, 24 August 2008 at 17:24 | |
It’s still a free country, Guy. Still permissible to take swings at the press from the left as well as the right, I think.
I wouldn’t necessarily call your criticism of MSNBC delusional. But if based on watching it for a few minutes at the airport, I’d characterize it as lightly informed. At that, you’ve seen more of MSNBC than I have.
Hamsher’s complaint is at least based on a factoid, that Fournier considered straying outside the fold. (Not unethical, in my view, by the way, but not something I would consider myself.) And the campaign against Fournier has been going on for weeks. It isn’t just Hamsher.
cjm: to Hofer’s concept of circularity, that politics is not linear but circular and the extremes do not diverge but embrace.
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