COMMENT
MSNBC's Bad Bargain
In Its Desperation, the Network Made a Deal With the Devil
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| © Marcellus Hall |
The current "narrative" in the cable news business goes this way: Fox News Channel is the ratings leader, CNN is a strong second, and MSNBC — the offspring of General Electric and Microsoft, with NBC News as its sibling — is so far behind as to be virtually a nonstarter (despite its exemplary coverage of the war). Recent indications are that MSNBC will do just about anything to get into the race.
Witness: In February the network hired Michael Savage, host of a widely syndicated radio talk show (more than 300 stations) to serve as host of an hour-long weekend call-in program titled The Savage Nation — also the title of Savage's extraordinarily popular book, the subtitle of which is: "Saving America From the Liberal Assault on Our Borders, Language and Culture."
So far so good. But let's sample some thoughts from Savage's book and radio show:
Immigrants: They come from "turd world nations," he tells his audience. "You open the door to them and the next thing you know they are defecating on your country and breeding out of control."
Blacks: It bothers him that TV correspondents in Iraq often interviewed black soldiers. "Ninety percent of frontline troops are white boys," he said. "So stop your big lie. Liberalism of this kind is not a philosophy, it's a mental illness." Ghetto children killed by guns are "not kids, they're ghetto slime."
Women: "Today in America we have a ‘she-ocracy' where a minority of feminist zealots rule the culture," and have "feminized and homosexualized much of America to the point where the nation has become passive, receptive, and masochistic." Before being hired by MSNBC, Savage called its reporter Ashleigh Banfield "the mind-slut."
You get the idea. A few media voices have been raised in response to Savage's views. The weekly New York Press wrote: "MSNBC's desperation has brought it down into the mud, and it's only going to sink deeper." Entertainment Weekly called Savage "a nasty, stupid piece of work — a puffed-up hate monger, pure and simple-minded."
MSNBC also has hired the former Republican Representatives Joe Scarborough and Dick Armey and former Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura. Savage's arrival is clearly part of a strategy by the network to mimic Fox News Channel's successful formula by appealing to conservative sentiment, although Fox has shown no sign of taking so low a road.
In a statement, MSNBC said the addition of Savage to its line-up "was made with the full awareness of his reputation for controversy . . . . We also strongly defend his new show as a legitimate attempt to expand the marketplace of ideas." Bob Wright, chairman of NBC, said Savage "brings a style that has a great deal of popularity." Savage, perhaps on orders from MSNBC, has been marginally less virulent so far on TV than he is on radio and in his book.
Nonetheless, we can only wonder how much hate, bigotry, and divisiveness General Electric and Microsoft are willing to underwrite in pursuit of audiences and profits.
COMMENT
Trouble at the Times:
Why Did Top Editors Ignore Warning About Jayson Blair?
It happens to priests and politicians. It happens to cops. A percentage of every group that holds itself to a high ethical standard succumbs to some combination of need and mendacity and betrays that standard, damaging colleagues and wounding institutions along the way. Journalism is not immune. We should know that by now.
The latest case is Jayson Blair at The New York Times, and the proper questions now are, What is it about the operation and culture of that newsroom that allowed a troubled cell to mutate into a cancer? And what can the rest of us learn from the episode?
The Times is to be commended for reporting the story on May 11, a four-page blockbuster that explained Blair's scary methods and corrected his falsehoods in the newspaper of record. Still, the piece was longer on Jayson Blair than it was on newsroom management. It did not fully explore, for example, the question of whether some editors were so eager for this charming and ambitious young black reporter to succeed that they did not want to confront his shortcomings. Enemies of newsroom diversity now see Blair as exhibit A in their argument that diversity programs promote double standards. They are wrong. But that doesn't mean the implementation of such programs can't be critiqued. And diversity pressure is only a thread in a story with many ragged edges. Blair, for example, was apparently a master at what is politely called managing up.
The central lesson that the Times seems to draw so far is that, in an institution all about communication, the Blair episode represents a failure to communicate. That's the wrong lesson. From its own reporting it is clear that top Times editors dismissed serious warnings about Jayson Blair. This looks less like a failure to communicate than a failure to listen.
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