Alterman on journalist shils
Posted on April 1st, 2022 by Jim Sleeper
Altercation: CBS News Hires a Prevaricating Trumpoid (bluelena.io)
| ALTERCATION |
| A NEWSLETTER WITH AN EYE ON POLITICAL MEDIA |
| CBS News Hires a Prevaricating Trumpoid |
| Because that’s the kind of thing that TV ‘news’ does. |
| The Washington Post reports that “CBS News’s decision to hire former Trump administration official Mick Mulvaney as a paid on-air contributor is drawing backlash within the company because of his history of bashing the press and promoting the former president’s fact-free claims.” CBS News co-president Neeraj Khemlani gave away at least part of the game in a staff meeting with the explanation: “Being able to make sure that we are getting access to both sides of the aisle is a priority because we know the Republicans are going to take over, most likely, in the midterms … A lot of the people that we’re bringing in are helping us in terms of access to that side of the equation.” The Post notes that CBS’s new journalist hire, Mulvaney, has insisted that media coverage of the growing coronavirus pandemic was meant to “bring down the president,” and defended a Trump administration decision to withhold military aid from Ukraine, among other egregious lies and attempts to undermine our system of laws and accountability. The unnamed CBS producer who told the Post that “it makes no sense to hire a guy whose entire job was to lie to us on behalf of Trump” clearly needs to go back to TV journalism school. The people who run the network—any television network, and pretty much any news division of any television network—don’t care what the journalists who work for them think. Those journalists are paid the big bucks not to think—or, in most cases, even to report. Rather, their job is to radiate likable personalities on the air while, at the same time, to make the kind of “news” that can potentially go viral on social media. A lie is as good as the truth for these purposes. CBS sought to elide the problem of having hired a professional liar by introducing Mulvaney to viewers only as “a former Office of Management and Budget director,” rather than telling them what they needed to know to judge his standards of honesty: that he was a long-term Trump appointee who rose to become his acting chief of staff. But the people who think of themselves as journalists at CBS—or any of our commercial television networks—can only lose their virginity so many times. The networks are going to keep booking and hiring liars, insurrectionists, and the people who are purposefully seeking to destroy our democracy because that’s the only way they know how to do their jobs. They need “access,” especially to those officials who will make “news” by saying mean things about their opponents. Obvious lies will be met with only the gentlest opposition, lest an anchor’s crucial “Q-rating”—that is, his or her measured likability quotient among the audience—take a dip due to overaggressiveness. What’s more, right-wingers watch TV news at least as much if not more than almost anyone else. (They also tend to own its advertisers.) One often hears people say that Trump’s presidential campaign “rewrote” the rules about how much lying, obvious racism, sexism, ethnocentrism, etc. a politician could get away with. That’s not quite true. He simply exploited the fault lines that had already been put in place. (See under: “Is Obama a Muslim?”) That’s why the former CBS chairman and CEO Leslie Moonves—later forced out for allegations of “sexual misconduct”—was not spilling any secrets back in 2016 when, speaking of the Trump phenomenon, he explained, “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.” The same words could easily have been spoken about ABC, NBC, CNN, and, of course, Fox. And speaking of both Fox and CBS, we note that Lara Logan, the employee of the former and alumna of the latter, recently reported that the “Rothschilds paid Darwin to invent evolution theory.” (It’s a wonder she managed to scoop Marjorie Taylor Greene on this news.) Finally, if you suspected that American conservatives actually prefer lies to truth on their news broadcasts, well, yes, of course. But they also like money. It turns out if you pay them to accept the truth, they get a little better at it. That’s one conclusion from this study. The introduction of filthy lucre into the equation “improved accuracy and reduced partisan bias in belief in news headlines—especially for conservative participants.” Even so, “Replicating prior work, conservatives were substantially less accurate than liberals at discerning true from false headlines. Yet, this gap between liberals and conservatives closed by 60% when conservatives were motivated [by cash payments] to be accurate.” |