I'm done with MSNBC.
I never did. In that time I was still recording (but not watching) MSNBC shows, I started contemplating how Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski had told viewers how Trump was a fascist and then tried to make nice with him, how the prime-time hosts had conditioned viewers into expecting a Kamala Harris victory in November, how Lawrence O'Donnell had had Simon Rosenberg on repeatedly to mindlessly reassure us how Harris was winning - "I'd rather much be us than them" - how Michael Steele dismissed Bernie Sanders' call to get big money of of the Democratic Party as irrelevant, how David Frum was kicked off "Morning Joe" for his joke about Fox News, how the Reverend Al Sharpton's National Action Network received contributions from the Harris campaign before conducting with Vice President Harris a softball interview that was less of an interview than a conversation, how MSNBC pundits who had been praising the Democrats for a great campaign the day before the election suddenly started excoriating the Democrats for a lousy campaign the day after the election, how Scarborough, after having said in the spring that President Biden was at the top of his game, then, after Biden's early-summer debate with Trump, decided that Biden was through . . . and then I remembered that Jen Psaki, President Biden's first White House press secretary, turned on her former boss after the debate and joined the decades-long Washington parlor game of always writing off Biden when he was at his low points instead of giving him the benefit of the doubt after he blew his debate with Trump.
That was it. I not only deleted the backlog of MSNBC shows I'd already recorded, I canceled all future recordings. It also became apparent that I was not so much getting news from the cable news channel as I was getting commentary that was accurate in pointing out Trump's failings as a human being but dead wrong in conveying the progress of the 2024 presidential campaign and what the voters were concerned about. Though, I do recommend MSNBC as a new source if you want to get your mind off foreign events. In 2024, there was barely a mention of the strains in the British economy that led to the Tories' defeat in the elections in the U.K., no coverage of the issues in France that didn't involve Notre Dame Cathedral, and nothing about the economic struggles in Germany. I also have a feeling that part of the reason I was so surprised by the fall of Assad in Syria was because there hadn't been much talk about Syria on MSNBC.
I've since returned to watching BBC World News America, having sworn off American mainstream legacy media - even the PBS NewsHour, whose arts and culture stories always seem to be about hip-hop and whose Monday pundit panel of Amy Walter and Tamara Keith can't stop laughing and joking about everything - and I get my commentary from YouTube channels like The Bulwark and Status Coup News. I can't believe anything that American mainstream legacy media says - least of all MSNBC, which had me and others anticipating the a politician - a politician that many in the Democratic Party didn't actually like - making history in becoming the first black female President, only to see Trump become the first former President since Grover Cleveland and the first Republican former President ever to be returned to office . . . and anticipating a California Jew (Douglas Emhoff) becoming the first male presidential spouse to move into the White House only to see the likelihood of another California Jew (Adam Schiff) moving into the big house.
MSNBC can't be spun off from Comcast and wither away soon enough.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment