Fire Chuck Todd

We can hope enough people are finally getting pretty fucking sick of the bullshit that passes for reportage on the "news shows".

Press Poodles are being put on notice - kinda - as "Both Sides Don't" starts to sink in and take hold in our brains.

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

-- Upton Sinclair

Jay Rosen, PressThink:

‘Round midnight on Christmas eve, Rolling Stone posted a short interview with Chuck Todd, host of “the longest running show on television,” NBC’s Meet the Press.

Its contents were explosive, embarrassing, enraging, and just plain weird.

Three years after Kellyanne Conway introduced the doctrine of “alternative facts” on his own program, a light went on for Chuck Todd. Republican strategy, he now realized, was to make stuff up, spread it on social media, repeat it in your answers to journalists — even when you know it’s a lie with crumbs of truth mixed in — and then convert whatever controversy arises into go-get-em points with the base, while pocketing for the party a juicy dividend: additional mistrust of the news media to help insulate President Trump among loyalists when his increasingly brazen actions are reported as news.

- and -

The ostensible purpose of the Rolling Stone interview was to promote a special edition of Meet the Press on December 29 that will focus on the weaponization of disinformation. But its effect is to bring MTP — and by extension similar shows — into epistemological crisis. With Todd’s confessions the mask has come off. It could have come off a long time ago, but the anchors, producers, guests, advertisers and to an unknown degree the remaining viewers colluded in an act of make believe that lurched along until now. One way to say it: They agreed to pretend that Conway’s threatening phrase, “alternative facts” was just hyberbole, the kind of inflammatory moment that makes for viral clips and partisan bickering. More silly than it was ominous.

In reality she had made a grave announcement. The nature of the Trump government would be propagandistic. And as Garry Kasparov observes for us, “The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.” This exhaustion, this annihilation were on their way to the Sunday shows, and to all interactions with journalists. That is what Kellyanne Conway was saying that day on Meet the Press. But the people who run the show chose not to believe it.

Question: What happens if The Press boycotts Cult45? They should still report on whatever is said, but they don't have to play the video recorded of everything that spills out of the pie holes of the stooges being paid to spill it. And they don't have to book KellyAnne and Stephanie and Ronna - or Lindsey Graham or Ron Johnson or the other defenders of POTUS - on their shows, especially when 45* insists on taking it directly to the American public.

I don't pretend to know exactly what has to change, or how it can be changed for the better, but the way this shit gets covered by the press has to change. 

I know we've been losing, and it seems like maybe we're starting to get a handle on it, but shit's gotta change or we could easily fall right back into the old pattern again.