Meet De Pressing

Kristen Welker is a reason I'm ending my beautiful-women picture blog.

One of the articles of faith the led me to create that blog was that women of all backgrounds, not just actresses, models and dancers, are beautiful.  That would certainly be true, of course, of TV newswomen . . .  like Kristen Welker.  I had always emphasized the journalistic qualifications of women I have featured as much of their beauty, and when I first posted the picture of her above on my beautiful-women picture blog in July 2011, Kristen Welker - then an NBC reporter - seemed to be the perfect example.

And my followers agreed - the post got 56,436 pageviews, the most views any post on my blog had ever gotten.  It was also gratifying and reassuring to see so much interest in Kristen Welker in light of her mixed heritage - she's the daughter of a white father and a black mother.  This led me to write the following paragraph on my blog: 

"I have to say once again that I'm very pleased that a post of a biracial woman, at a time of increased racial animosity in America, has gotten so much [positive] attention. Not just in pageviews, but in comments; my original post of Ms. Welker has received ten comments, all favorable (adjectives used to describe her have included 'hot,' 'smart,' 'beautiful,' 'knowledgeable,' 'articulate,' 'focused,' 'elegant,' and 'professional'). Her transcendental quality as a woman of black and white origin proves that racism is slowly dying."

I was wrong about racism slowly dying, of course, but not as wrong as I was about Kristen Welker, who has since turned out to be just another corporate-news-media stooge.  When I posted this picture of her on my beautiful-women picture blog, in 2011, Kristen Welker was just a reporter at NBC.  But in September 2023, she succeeded Chuckles the Clown (also known as Chuck Todd) as the moderator of  NBC's "Meet the Press."  I eagerly awaited her debut on the program, only to see her "interview" Donald Trump and get run off course by his lies and half-truths instead of countering his falsehoods.   That was bad enough.  But what happened this past Sunday was too much - and inspired less flattering adjectives to describe Welker, such as "appalling," "lunkheaded," unserious," "clueless" and "derelict."

She brought up in a phone interview with Trump the topic of Trump's ambition for run for a third presidential term and asked if he was just kidding about that, but he said he was "not joking."  He said that his astonishing popularity in the polls demanded that he run again, and he offered possible end runs around the constitutional ban on third presidential terms that has been in place since 1951.  Welker failed to challenge Trump abut his poll numbers - they're actually in the toilet - and at no point did Welker call out Trump or explain to him why he couldn't circumvent the 22nd Amendment and how his ideas to do so were, essentially, illegal.  She just blew it off.

Welker also blew something up - her credibility.

Even though my beautiful-women picture blog will be shut down at the end of May, I went ahead and deleted my two posts of Kristen Welker (the second one was an experiment to see if it would get as many views as the first; it never even came close).  My blog may be only be around for two more months, but I don't even want Kristen Welker on my blog for even two more weeks.  I'm actually embarrassed - humiliated, even - that this blog attempted to feature TV newswomen known for their beauty but still celebrated them for their professionalism and substance as journalists . . . though, when you get right down to it, there I was, objectifying for her looks an NBC reporter who demonstrated the Peter Principle by getting Tim Russert's old job. 😧

And somehow it was my most popular post. 😞

MSNBSeeYa!

When MSNBC launched in 1996, the last year a presidential-election day fell on my birthday before this year, comedians and conservative pundits laughed at the number of initials in its name, but the cable-news channel was named with a purpose.  The name was a portmanteau of the Microsoft Network (MSN) and the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) that symbolized how the channel was a joint venture between the two entities.  MSNBC has long since lost its connection to Microsoft; now it's about to lose its ties to NBC News.

Comcast announced that MSNBC, along with CNBC, USA, Oxygen, E!, SYFY and the Golf Channel, will be launched into a separate company.  I was going to say that spinning off CNBC - which ostensibly stands for "Consumer News and Business Channel" - and MSNBC is like "The Jeffersons" being spun off "All In the Family," but that would be misleading, because at least those two sitcoms had Norman Lear in common as their creator.  And, they both aired on the same network.  This spinoff is nothing like that.  The new cable company will be completely divorced from NBC News, and therefore the reporting end of the channel will no longer be available to the commentariat end.  Comcast is keeping the parent NBC network and its news department.  Cable channels simply don't make money for media conglomerates anymore; streaming is the wave of the future.

I've been listening to numerous podcasts since the election, and there seems to be a sense of schadenfreude over MSNBC's sudden collapse in the ratings, and not just because of the Joe-and-Mika debacle.  The network built up this narrative that Donald Trump was a mere aberration from the ongoing evolution of American politics and that certain demographics - white women, Hispanic men, politically centrist suburbanites, anti-Trump Republicans (the only anti-Trump Republicans, it turns out, were MSNBC guests) - would hold Trump accountable in the 2024 election and that Kamala Harris would prevail.  I myself realized on the morning after the election that this was certainly not the case, and thanks to these podcasters and Comcast's business decision, I have to concede that what MSNBC reported was not reality but the network's interpretation of it - an interpretation as wrong as the parallel universe MAGA Republicans inhabit.   

MSNBC has largely fallen into disarray because it has relied primarily on getting access to the Washington Democratic establishment that saw things the way it wanted to, not as they actually were.  The information its on-air personalities have gotten from establishment Democrats turned out to be based on wishful thinking more than facts on the ground.  In the end, that access is all that mattered, and the alliance between MSNBC and the Democratic National Committee may very well have been the reason both were out of touch with what was going on on the ground with regard to the presidential election in places like, well, all seven swing states.

The conventional wisdom among liberal podcasters is that MSNBC has so long been the television arm of corporate centrist Democrats that those same Democrats, working in tandem with MSNBC's movers and shakers, sabotaged both of Bernie Sanders' presidential campaigns in order to directly help Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020.  It's more complicated than that, and this theory dismisses President Biden's progressive accomplishments (building infrastructure, lowering the price of insulin, the CHIPS Act, allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices with Big Pharma) as well as his own alliance with Sanders.  Given how many MSNBC insiders have framed the trajectory of politics, though, it's easy to see how the channel's narrative favored the mainstream Democratic perspective of the issues and the 2024 presidential campaign, presenting on-camera hosts and guests that agreed with each other without getting the perspective of the average voter.

"We were so [into] Harris propaganda that when she lost, viewers were shocked," an anonymous on-air pundit told  The Daily Beast. "It turned into one giant circle j--k and echo chamber. If MSNBC wants to be of service to its viewers, they can’t keep them in fantasy land."

Now that Trump has won and we see MSNBC hosts bowing to him to stay relevant, it's hard to see how MSNBC itself can stay relevant.  Folks like Nicolle Wallace and Lawrence O'Donnell will continue to call Trump out for his lies and his cruelty, but how much good can they do when the channel will be completely untethered from NBC News and the channel's ratings are already in the toilet thanks to viewers realizing that the idea of President Harris was all a mirage?  MSNBC was pretty much the only network that called Trump out during the 2024 campaign while other networks were "sane-washing" Trump's craziness, but who cares when all that matters now is to tread lightly going forward when Trump is once again going to be in charge?  

MSNBC made lots of money for its parent company delivering hopeful commentary (reporting? No one watches cable news for actual reporting) in the fight for democracy and against Trumpism, but now MSNBC and other Big Media outlets have turned out to be like the Wizard of Oz - look behind the curtain, and you realize that there's nothing there.  Comcast is happy to let go of MSNBC and stop spending so much money for its diminishing returns.  When MSNBC - and CNBC, which is less about consumer news and more of a business channel - re-emerge as subsidiaries of a different company, they will most likely have different names, thanks to their divorce from NBC News.  But they will both likely share the same fate.

Oblivion.

And rather than wait for MSNBC's spinoff and inevitable demise, I might just stop watching it much sooner.  After trying to watch less news earlier in the year, I started watching more of MSNBC over the summer and early fall to keep up with the election campaign.  After months of being told that Trump was doomed and that black was white and up was down, I'm ready to declare myself over and out.  Time to go back to the BBC.

The Doctors Are In

I thought I'd let others do the talking on my blog this time.

After NBC News and the Daily Kos - two apologist media outlets for the Democratic establishment, the latter being especially adept at mainstream-liberal smugness - reported on a trip Green Party leader Jill Stein made to Russia in December 2015 in an effort to paint her as a stooge of Vladimir Putin and a willing participant to undermine Hillary Clinton for Donald Trump's benefit, Dr. Stein waited for awhile to muster up a defense.  She finally offered one last week.  Here are her comments in their entirety:  

NBC recently reported that I had been at an event in Russia along with Vladimir Putin in 2015. Notice that whenever you see this story in the corporate media, it consists of nothing more than a photo, because if they reported any of the facts behind the photo it would undermine the story they are trying to invent. In reality, the NBC report didn’t say anything that wasn’t in my campaign’s press release about the Moscow event in December 2015. My trip to Russia, like my visit to the COP21 climate conference in Paris as part of the same trip, was about promoting diplomacy, peace, and international cooperation on pressing global issues. I criticized the militaristic policies of both the Russian and US governments, and proposed an alternative vision: working together on a “Peace Offensive” to de-escalate conflict in the Middle East and around the world. I was one of a number of American advocates for a more peaceful and just foreign policy in Moscow, including Thom Hartmann, Rocky Anderson, Ray McGovern, Max Blumenthal, and Jesse Ventura. The Moscow conference featured public figures, politicians and academics from across Europe and North America, as well as journalists and major media leadership from India, China, Russia, Europe and the US. It was an honor to be able to address the international community, and show them we Greens are fighting for a foreign policy based on international law. human rights and diplomacy, not on economic and military domination.

It is not only justifiable to attempt to communicate with other nations, it’s essential to do so if we are to have any hope of solving the gravest threats to human survival: endless war, climate meltdown and the threat of nuclear conflict. The Greens are the only political party with a plan to address all these issues. No wonder we are under attack by both Democrats and Republicans, and their surrogates in the corporate media, even outside the election cycle.

NBC and other corporate media outlets have tried to create the impression that I refuse to answer questions about my Russia trip. Actually, I have answered these questions so many times I’ve lost count, but when the corporate media realize that the answers don’t support their pre-conceived smear narrative, they refuse to print the facts. No, I did not speak with Vladimir Putin. Nor did I receive any payment from Russia. Why has one reporter after another, after hearing these facts, decided not to publish them? Why do they choose instead to encourage sensational conspiracy thinking based on a photo?

This transparent campaign of neo-McCarthyism perfectly demonstrates why Americans’ trust in mass media has plummeted to an all-time low.

This is just the latest in a long line of smear campaigns from the corporate media. For a look at the many desperate attempts to discredit our grassroots movement, check out our “Haters Gonna Hate” page debunking the smears.

It’s time to withdraw our trust and support from these masters of misinformation, and put our resources towards building independent, non-corporate people’s media to provide the truthful information we need to create the future we deserve.

Meanwhile, the fact that Democratic apologists are attacking us outside of an electoral campaign is a great sign. We have become a force to contend with and they are rightly worried. The American people are clamoring for a new way forward and together, we're creating a future whose time has come, that puts people, planet and peace over profit.

And then there was Dr. Cornel West, who supported Dr. Stein in the 2016 presidential election and had supported Bernie Sanders in the 2016  Democratic primaries.  He went on Bill Maher's HBO talk show a couple of weeks after Maher criticized him and others for supporting Dr. Stein at Hillary's expense.   Although Dr. Stein never came up in the tête-à-tête that resulted over the election results, it is worth watching and Dr. West's comebacks should be taken quite seriously.  Here is the video of that exchange.

Peace, bro.

The Kelly Files

When I make a mistake, it's a beaut.  And here's the beaut.  Not a beauty, but a beaut.

It was announced this past week that Megyn Kelly, the Fox News Channel's biggest star, was leaving that right-wing network for NBC News, for which she will likely be doing coverage of political stories, hosting a Sunday night news program (opposite "60 Minutes?"), and hosting a new daytime program to replace the third hour of the "Today" show.  (Because of contractual issues with Fox News, she may have to wait awhile before she gets on NBC's airwaves; her last appearance on Fox was on January 6.)

Megyn Kelly on NBC News . . . sounds pretty good right?  Now Kelly can get on a real network news team that deals in facts and show what an accomplished newswoman she really is.

Not so fast.  A week and change ago,  I wrote that Kelly "has proven to be formidable newswoman, the one good thing to come out of [the Roger Ailes sex] scandal."  I based this on the fact that Kelly has grilled some Republican politicians about their positions and put them to shame by trying to get the truth of the matter.  But the truth of the matter is that, despite all that, Kelly is one of those straight white people whose takes on the issues are so reactionary and lunkheaded that she makes straight white people look even dumber.  It's not just her onetime insistence that Santa Claus, a fictional character, is white, which she made in response to the equally stupid suggestion from a black female journalist that Santa Claus be replaced with a race-neutral Christmas penguin.  It's little tidbits that Matthew Ingram of Fortune magazine recently cited, such as her fear-mongering accusation that the Obama administration was forcing racial diversity on white neighborhoods (it wasn't) and her dismissal of the Black Lives Matter movement by doubting that the recent rash of police shootings had anything to do with race.

And then there's this bombshell about the bombshell that Ingram pointed out: "Kelly has also made critical comments about gay and transgender issues on a number of occasions, according to the left-leaning media watchdog group Media Matters, and has repeatedly hosted anti-gay groups such as the Family Research Council, which believes that homosexuality is a sin and that gay men routinely recruit children to be homosexual."

Dear Matthew Ingram:  Thanks for setting me straight (no pun intended) about Megyn Kelly.  I appreciate it.

It's not that Megyn Kelly is changing or moderating her views.  It's that NBC News - which runs MSNBC also - is looking for a more conservative bent.  Because that's where the money is, and also because the Fairness Doctrine that guarantees diversity of thought in news reporting was done away with years ago. 

By the way, Kelly may even replace the likable Savannah Guthrie on "Today."

Bastards!    

And oh yes, I retract my earlier statement about Kelly's "formidable" journalistic chops.

Is she the only odious ex-Fox News personality to join the NBC family?  No - Greta Van Sustren is joining MSNBC.

Bearing all this in mind, Rachel Maddow, Chris Hayes and Joy Reid should be getting pinks slips with their pay checks very soon.  Personal note to Rachel, Chris and Joy:  You're f--ked. 

Although I suspect that Joy Reid may resign from MSNBC in protest of these two NBC News hires before MSNBC boss Phil Griffin even gets the chance to sack her . . .