MSNBC

“Patriot” Watch, Ctd. 2

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

NEWSFLASH FROM INFOWARS – Throngs of black people, filled with anti-white racism by MSNBC, are forming mobs and going around targeting “domesticated, docile” whites and brutally attacking them in broad daylight. You can most likely see it going on outside your window right now, if you take a look. And of course, if you just see a calm street scene, it’s probably a fake, government-projected hologram beamed down from space to fool you into thinking that everything is normal while they ruthlessly take over the world.

From last Thursday’s show:

 

You want the segment from 2 hours 46 minutes onwards, in which our intrepid host Alex Jones, livid at the injustice he sees going on around him, fulminates:

But then there’s epidemics all over the country of black folks who have been so filled with racism by MSNBC that whites are inherently racist and evil, that groups of black people, like what the Klan used to do to blacks, are now beating up whites, who are so domesticated – on record, including newspaper people – they roll over and flop around on the ground, so I guess they deserve it in some way. And this is happening all over the country.

And the media have articles about ‘struggling with reporting it’! Cause maybe it’s… maybe we deserve it! Maybe whites should all walk out, in public, and slit their throats! Find a black person, then grab a big double-edged knife and then just go “cchhhuh-aaaaaah! Whites die! I’m evil! Bluuugh! Gluuurgh!” And then just spray blood everywhere, and go “bleeeeeh” and just bleed out, and then Chris Matthews will dance in the blood, and it’ll be a big celebration…

I mean, because… whites are being murdered, tortured, killed, attacked, all over the country, and there’s never going to be a candle-light vigil, the news won’t even say that it’s blacks doing it. And again, I love black people! But there are racist black people full of this whole thing, and it’s all the media trying to create division in this country.

Alex Jones from InfoWars.com, acting out the dystopian vision of MSNBC
Alex Jones from InfoWars.com, acting out the dystopian vision of MSNBC

The thing is, Alex Jones actually is not a racist. I have now watched many hours of his show, and I do not believe him to be racist at all. In many ways, he’s probably actually quite a good man. He’s just either a) batshit insane, or b) a masterful…entrepreneur (to be charitable) who convinces himself of the worthiness of his own rhetoric enough so that he can sound sufficiently authentic to wring money from the wallets of his gullible subscribers with his rants about the coming New World Order.

But yes. White people sacrificing themselves in front of black people, and Chris Matthews from MSNBC coming to dance in the blood. This is totally about to happen all across the country right now.

Be prepared.

 

UPDATE (16:56, 05/05/2013) – How can you not love this picture of Chris Matthews and Al Sharpton, taken from the LA Times?

( Scott Eells / Bloomberg / April 27, 2013 )
( Scott Eells / Bloomberg / April 27, 2013 )

Friendly Advice For CNN

Samuel Hooper1 Comment

Politico reports on some of the cable news network’s more recent missteps:

Earlier today, CNN played an excerpt from Billy Joel’s “Only the Good Die Young” after a segment Monday on the shooting, prompting a familiar apology from the network just a week after it announced regret for playing Pink’s “Stupid Girls” ahead of a segment about Sarah Palin.

“We aired a song from a guest’s playlist on the morning show following a three-minute commercial break and before a segment on presidential politics, unrelated to the Wisconsin shooting,” the network said in a statement today. “Given the news of the day, this was regrettable and we apologize to our viewers.”

Here’s a radical idea.

Since CNN has probably already haemmoraged most of it’s wavering audience to Fox or MSNBC, why not quit catering to that tiny remaining sliver of their viewers who need their news to be lubricated with frequent doses of perky music, and just…y’know…report the news?

The world doesn’t need another Fox & Friends.

Cable News, Just Give Up

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

You long ago proved yourselves incapable of any serious, impartial, in-depth analysis of topical news stories.

And whatever claims you had to be the best at delivering breaking news are pretty comprehensively debunked by this failure to correctly call the Supreme Court’s decision on ObamaCare:

 

How about you sit the next few rounds out and leave it to the newspapers and armchair bloggers?

How Not To Cover An Election

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

It is very hard to disagree with this damning article from Politico, assessing the current state of cable news in America:

If ever there was a political event to lay bare the partisan ideologies of the cable news media, the Wisconsin recall was it.

MSNBC was blatantly rooting for Tom Barrett to defeat Gov. Scott Walker, even sending union champion Ed Schultz to cover an event with no apologies for the dog he has in the fight. (Earlier tonight, Chris Matthews even told Schultz that if he wasn’t an MSNBC host, he could be head of the AFL-CIO.) When it became clear that Barrett would lose, Schultz looked almost teary eyed. Not long after, the network’s contributors immediately began suggesting that this was, in fact, good news for Obama — who, after all, hadn’t even set foot in Wisconsin — and began attacking Mitt Romney.

Meanwhile, Fox News was blatantly rooting for Gov. Walker, and the moment it became clear that Walker might win, host Sean Hannity called it “a repudiation of big unions,” which did “everything they could do to demonize Scott Walker.” Guest Hugh Hewitt then predicted that, five months from now, Romney would follow Walker just “as Reagan followed Thatcher.” Fox’s Greta Van Susteren later hosted what amounted to a victory celebration for the Republicans.

Given this blatant partisan coverage, it was absolutely impossible to watch either network and weed out any clear understanding of the actual significance of the event, much less what effect it would actually have on the 2012 presidential election.

http://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2012/06/the-worst-night-on-cable-news-125389.html

Out of a mixture of boredom, insomnia and a ravenous (bordering on unhealthy) appetite for US political news, I stayed up until 2AM watching MSNBC’s live coverage of the Wisconsin gubernatorial recall election (MSNBC being the only channel I was able to stream on the internet since our satellite television decided to break at the weekend). And goodness me, the coverage was bad. And by “bad”, I mean really unworthy of a channel that purports to be a television news network rather than a propaganda station.

Don’t get me wrong – I like MSNBC a lot. As the US Republican Party has lurched ever further away from being a centre-right party favouring limited government towards becoming a win-at-all-costs, fear-stoking, hypocritical, economically and historically illiterate party for idiots I have found no small degree of comfort in having my displeasure and frustration validated by the likes of Chris Matthews, Martin Bashir, Rachel Maddow, Al Sharpton and the rest of the MSNBC cast. I think that’s a fine and healthy thing to do in small measures, so long as one does not go too far and close oneself off from divergent opinions and other sources of news. However, at some point – I’m not even precisely sure when – it became okay for news networks to openly cheerlead for certain politicians or parties, not just during the opinion shows but while covering live election events. No pretence at impartiality any more, just open bias toward one or other party throughout the broadcast.

MSNBC dispatched their entertaining and highly watchable anchor Ed Schultz to Wisconsin to cover the results in front of a crowd of union-supporting, pro- Tom Barrett people. After talking up Barrett’s prospects throughout the show, he did not try very hard to conceal his disappointment when Republican incumbent Scott Walker was projected to survive the recall challenge:

 

At this point it really goes without saying that the Fox News team were up to exactly the same type of shenanigans on their network, before and during the voting:

 

Of course.

What exactly is wrong – or detrimental to good ratings – with having a lively, spirited but even-handed broadcast while we wait for the results to come in and a victor to be declared, featuring moderated discussions with people from all sides of the political spectrum (so we actually have a chance to learn something rather than just have our existing prejudices reinforced), which could then segue into the usual partisan bombast, in a separately branded show, once the results were announced?

Look, I get it. Conservatives long perceived a bias in the news networks and took to talk radio to find a place where they could hear their opinions reflected in the coverage. Conservative talk radio was eventually augmented by the Fox News Channel, which became so successful that liberals felt that they also needed a channel of their own, at which point MSNBC was hijacked and directed to “lean forward”. CNN tried to maintain an ideological balance and haemorrhaged viewers as a consequence, supposedly validating the “pick a side” approach taken by the others, and has had to resort to ever more desperate technological gimmicks such as interactive video walls, holographic reports beamed into the studio, and Wolf Blitzer, just to remain competitive. Apparently we want our news delivered to us by people who share our political leanings. I’m all for the free market, so what’s wrong with that? Nothing, really.

Except that aside from doing a disservice to the many excellent television journalists who have gone before, it is just plain tacky to call yourself a news network and then park yourself in front of a bunch of partisan supporters and openly support one candidate over another, before polls close, during a segment that is billed as live election coverage rather than political commentary or opinion piece.

Really, really tacky.

On Closed Information Loops

Samuel Hooper2 Comments

Apparently we are all busy fleeing from, unsubscribing from or de-friending people who espouse differing political opinions on the social media sites that we frequent. Or so says Howard Kurtz, writing in The Daily Beast in an article entitled “Unfriending Over Politics”:

“According to a fascinating survey by the Pew Internet Project, 9 percent of those who frequent social networking sites have blocked, unfriended or hidden someone because they posed something about politics or issues that the user disagreed with or found offensive.”

I find this interesting because it doesn’t chime with my personal experience at all. While I will never know how many people have spat out their morning coffee and hurriedly de-friended me after reading one of my rants on Facebook, I do know that I have never even thought of doing this to anyone else. Well, with one disclaimer – I once defriended someone after she posted a comment in which she eagerly anticipated the death of Margaret Thatcher, a callous thing to say but really only the straw that broke the camels back in terms of that particular connection.

facebookdislike
Computer, cross-reference my friend list with the electoral register…

 

Perhaps I am the exception to the rule, but I rather like hearing contrary opinions expressed on Twitter and Facebook. I like dissenting and hearing other people disagree with me. Sometimes it makes me change my mind, and other times it makes my own arguments stronger. Life would be so dull if we lived in a world where everything that you posted was automatically “liked” by everyone else, with no dissent or discussion. But apparently this is the world that a lot of people are slowly moving towards.

Of course, we have observed this phenomenon for some time in terms of the traditional media, the newspapers and television news. With ever more options at our disposal it has never been more easy to gather one’s news from friendly sources and voices with whom one shares the same biases, prejudices and political leanings. I am guilty of this to some extent myself. As the US Republican Party has drifted ever further to the reactionary right over the course of the Obama presidency, I have found my television news habits shifting from a blend of CNN, Fox and MSNBC to the significant exclusion of Fox News and a slight decline in MSNBC viewing, compensated for by a large reluctant increase in CNN. And in terms of UK politics, when The Times Online went behind a paywall, my first instinct was to gravitate to The Daily Telegraph as a natural substitute, over The Guardian or The Independent.

However, I try to always remain very aware of the political biases of the news sources that I consume, and to compensate for them by reading or watching alternative outlets too. This is really important if we are to avoid buying in to the two-dimensional caricatures of our political adversaries that the television talking heads often perpetrate. Most Republicans are not racist, backward people harbouring a cultural resentment against President Obama and interested only in their own economic wellbeing, and most Democrats are not union-beholden thugs committed to subverting America and establishing a socialist economic model in the United States.

But at times you could be forgiven for holding one of these opinions, given the poisonous rhetoric and lack of balance that exists almost everywhere now. Take CNN for example, the only major cable news network that makes an honest effort to tow a middle-line and avoid political bias in its coverage – they are consistently beaten in the ratings by FOX and MSNBC, each of whom have carved out a lucrative niche catering to and reinforcing the preexisting leanings of their viewers.

Should we go back to the old days, when the trusty voice of Walter Cronkite or the generic BBC News announcer was the sole source of information and the undisputed truth? Surely not – though it is hard to see that movements like the “birtherism” movement in the US, questioning President Obama’s citizenship, would have prospered were it not for a television news network ready and willing give such radical voices succour and airtime.

Surely we would all do well to take time to watch and read the news from alternative perspectives sometimes – and not just to laugh at the crazy stupid liberals/conservatives, but really to watch and see the world from another perspective. We don’t have to change our minds, but we can change our tone and improve the level of public discourse in our respective countries.