"The problem with the mainstream media is they're desperate to get access . . . they don't challenge power" (Cenk Uygur)

Why Cenk Uygur Left MSNBC, Part 1

"I'm holding onto the story that I've been talking about the whole time on The Young Turks, about how the problem with the mainstream media is they're desperate to get access, they don't challenge the government, they don't challenge power. . . .

"If I take the money, and I get a reduced role, and I just do whatever I do with it, and maybe I even rise up in the ranks again, what's the point? The point of this show was truth-telling. That's what we're supposed to do. And we're supposed to challenge the government. That's the role of the media."

-- Cenk Uygur, explaining his decision not to accept MSNBC's offer of twice the money for a much-reduced role as a power-respecting "insider"

by Ken

Look again at the short version of Cenk's quote that I've made the title of this post, or better the fuller version I've pulled out in the quote above. Then ask yourself how many professional media people would say "amen," as opposed to how many would sidle away until it's safe to break into an open trot. Of course right-wing media have no trouble challenging government when it's not being right-wing enough for their tastes, but that doesn't count. One thing that certainly isn't about is "challenging power."

In my other life as a scribbler about music, a quote I carried in my head was one from composer Virgil Thomson concerning his long service as a daily music critic for the New York Herald-Tribune, in which he described criticism as "our only antidote to paid publicity." Again, this isn't how most, or even many, practitioners see their role. I think back to my most important editorial job covering the classical music business, when my boss had to explain to me that "we're part of the music business." And at this remove, I have to own that he was right, and maybe if we had been a more enthusiastically energetic part of the music business, the magazine would still be around. (Not really, but we can have that discussion some other time.) The question would be whether the magazine would have any reason for continuing to exist.

Think about it: our only antidote to paid publicity.

Shift the discussion to general news and public affairs, and the stakes become starker. It's not just "paid publicity" we have to be concerned with, it's the crushing weight of the political and financial establishment, where it's now understood that the role of "news" media is to serve it. Central to the whole concept of "the Village," or the "Inside the Beltway" mentality, is that politicos and journos are really all in it together, that they are one industry, or one something.

And again, this seamless alliance seems to me one of the issues that's most truly troubling about the News International scandal: the extent to which Master Murdoch's Minions, in this case at his four British newspapers (now only three, of course, with the shuttering of the embattled News of the World) have been intertwined in successive British governments. It's important to note that while the arrangement may be more open and egregious with a Conservative prime minister, it's far from exclusive. The former Labour government and the News International swells courted each other pretty assiduously, and the early years of the cover-up of the News of the World phone-hacking allegations were overseen by that Labour government.

The video clips at the top and bottom of this post have been popping up all over the Internet, and rightly so: In his characteristically bluntly eloquent way, Cenk takes us through his view of what happened to him at MSNBC: basically, that he had to be yanked from that evening time slot because "people in Washington" were complaining to his boss, "the head of MSNBC" (Phil Griffin, whom he doesn't bother to name), as he was informed in a meeting he describes pretty vividly in Part 1, that they "were concerned about his tone."

Here's how Glenn Greenwald interprets the objection in an excellent Salon piece, "Cenk Uygur and the ethos of corporate-owned media":

Uygur often refused to treat members of the political and media establishment with deference and respect. He didn't politely imply with disguised subtleties when he thought a politician or media figure was lying or corrupt, but instead said it outright. In interviews, he was sometimes unusually aggressive with leading Washington figures, subjecting them to civil though hostile treatment to which they were plainly unaccustomed.

In case you were assuming, when you heard about Cenk being canned as interim host of the MSNBC 6pm show, that the problem was ratings, it turns out: not at all. Cenk goes into the numbers in some detail in Part 1. In fact, as of April, when (a) the crush of world breaking-news stories, which draw viewers to CNN, subsided, and (b) especially when Cenk decided to ignore the notes he'd been getting from his superiors and do the show his way, his ratings were fine and growing steadily.

JUST TO BE CLEAR, CENK ISN'T NECESSARILY
KNOCKING OTHERS ON THE MSNBC LINEUP

In the Part 2 clip, he stresses that the circumstances are different for everyone, in terms of contract (he didn't even have one) and the things that give an individual the kind of clout you can stare down even a cable network with. He makes it clear how much he admires the job Rachel Maddow has done, explaining that she has shrewdly marshaled the clout she has built up by doing the show her way and leveraging the terrific ratings she's developed. It probably helped too that when her show went on the air she enjoyed the enthusiastic support of Keith Olbermann, who still had lots of clout of his own at MSNBC.

Glenn Greenwald recollects an interview Rachel did last week with Bill Moyers,

who for years -- based on experience -- has been explaining that the corporate climate that preveails at large media companies significantly restricts and constrains what can be said. In response, Maddow said:

I mean, I work at a big corporate conglomerate controlled media outlet. And I feel like the way to handle this as an individual journalist for me is that I have carved out a sphere here of editorial independence.

And on MSNBC, my deal with the company is I will do shows on MSNBC, and you will not tell me what to say. And they are very comfortable with that. And I think a lot of individual journalists find ways to do that.

Glenn notes too Moyers' stress on the factor of self-censorship that develops in the corporate media cauldron.

I served time at CBS News, enjoyed it, seven years in all. I was here at MSNBC for the launch of it 15 years ago. I worked at NBC.

But I saw in every one of those environments the growth of the shadow of self censorship when -- I mean, I happen to know that when I was here, Newt Gingrich and Henry Kissinger did their best to mute my influence on "The Nightly News" because of the freedom and independence Andy Lack, who was then the president of NBC News, had given me. It's up there all the time, like gathering storm clouds.

You do a terrific job of maintaining your independence. And I must say out of the Murdoch scandal has come a reminder of the importance of a free and independent press.

Bill and Rachel then point out that the story was finally broken by the Guardian, which is run by, as Rachel explains it, "a public trust, set up by the founding family to make sure that 'The Guardian' would always be commercially and editorially independent."

Tim Karr did an excellent summary of what he billed as "Cenk Uygur vs. 'The Club,'" and in response to a commenter who noted that Cenk is to be a guest tonight on Countdown with Keith Olbermann, another refugee from MSNBC, Tim muses: "Curious about the level of Comcast involvement in this decision. MSNBC's new owner is deeply embedded among the 'Corporate Democrats' in Washington. Cenk's braver brand of journalism would no doubt put them on the defensive."

Do watch Cenk's clips. You'll especially want to hear him talking about the money MSNBC offered him to be a good soldier in the army of the establishment -- not to mention the "perks" with which infotainment noozers are customarily seduced from any sense of journalistic mission. Right now I'm going to watch Cenk on Countdown -- and you may still be able to catch one of the rebroadcasts. I'm sure there will soon be clips up. But Cenk has already laid out the basic structure of the situation.

Why Cenk Uygur Left MSNBC, Part 2

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From Keith Olbermann comes a perspective on Tim Russert which really alters my perception of him

Keith O, from the Rolling Stone interview

"I don't know that there's going to be anything hugely different that's visible to the viewer. It's not going to be like, 'I'm going to do the last half of the show topless.' But the freedom from the wear and tear of having to get past a bunch of people mumbling, 'Oh, I don't know . . .' It's the key to the operation, it really is."

-- Keith Olbermann, in Rolling Stone,
on the new Current TV incarnation of Countdown

by Ken

I don't mean to become a shill for Keith Olbermann, although I suppose there are worse things a person could become a shill for. But I really was surprised by how satisfying the Thurber celebration he ringmastered from his wheelchair (for his broken foot) Sunday night at the 92nd Street Y was. His own reading, with projections of the drawings, of the whole of the "parable in pictures" The Last Flower, one of the supremely great books ever to find its way into print, left me kind of shivery. (It was, by the way, E. B. White -- I couldn't remember whether it was White or Thurber -- who pronounced this his favorite Thurber book.)

ONE THING I MEANT TO MENTION SUNDAY . . .

Rosie and Keith backstage at the 92nd Street Y Sunday

The Last Flower also has one of the all-time great book dedications. Published as World War II was breaking out, it was dedicated: "For Rosemary. In the wistful hope that her world will be better than mine." What I didn't know is that the latest edition of The Last Flower, from the University of Iowa Press, was designed by Rosie's daughter, Thurber's granddaughter, Sara Thurber Sauers. Both she and her mother signed copies afterward.

Rosie, by the way, among other contributions, read the great fable "The Little Girl and the Wolf" (which we read here), which she recalled first reading at about the same time she found out that Thurber was her father, when she was eight, and was delighted to find that it was her father who had written the moral, "It is not so easy to fool little girls nowadays as it used to be," and understood this about what little girls understood.

I do want to make sure everyone knows that the new Countdown with Keith Olbermann debuts on Current TV this coming Monday at 8pm. How many people will be able to watch is another question, and one that Keith is clearly agonizing over. In the question period of the Thurber program, an audience member expressed the hope that he would soon be able to see Current TV on Cablevision, and Keith wished him luck. Evidently there have been discussions with "Mr. Dolan" and his people which haven't been terribly fruitful.

NOW, ABOUT KEITH O AND TIM RUSSERT (AND
ALSO, NOT TO HIS CREDIT, TOM BROKAW)

Anyway, none of this is why I brought Keith up again. It's because of some things he says which I found fascinating in a recent interview with Mark Binelli in the June 23 Rolling Stone. If you haven't read the interview, you really should -- and also the selection of "outtakes" from the interview published online. 

Here's the thread that particularly got my attention:

When did things start to change for you at MSNBC?

It was three years ago, when Tim Russert died. One of the reasons I got as far as I got was that Tim was there to run interference for me. He never made a big deal out of the fact that he probably was my biggest supporter within the network. He used to go to them and say, "Leave him alone, we can handle the blowback, I'll take care of it." After he died, Maureen, his wife, told me that she used to have to wrest the channel-changer away from him every night, because he loved to watch the show. She said, "You deal with this all day and you have to watch it again?" He said, "I have to see what he's saying about it, it's the best." I teared up and said, "I didn't know that." She said, "He thought you already had a big enough head."

Mark asks Keith about Tom Brokaw's public criticism of him "for 'going too far' in injecting commentary into your campaign coverage," and apparently before he gets Brokaw's name out, at the words "during the 2008 election," Keith is fetching a piece of paper from his wallet.

Let me read this to you. You can see how old it is -- it already came apart. March 5, 2008, Wednesday morning, 9:45 a.m. "Keith, game ball goes to you for last night. I've been at this for 40 years and have a full appreciation for how tricky it is to go from commentator to anchor, get the news out, manage the many egos, make sure lots of different points of view are represented, maintain your own place in the proceedings, you did it all splendidly." You can see the name of who sent that [Tom Brokaw].

So there you have it. I've never shared that with anybody before. Now you have a private comment that he didn't seem to remember when he made his public comment five months later.

Originally, Keith says, he carried this note around because --

it was confirmation from somebody I had great respect for. What he said there was that you can be a commentator and an anchor, you can get your points across and yet be neutral when you're supposed to be neutral. From one of the best in the business, it meant a great deal to me. Then what it meant to me is, "Wow, things change fast after people like Russert die."

I have to say, what Keith has to say about Tim Russert really does change my view of the guy. Not of his performance on the air, which still seems to me to have been cowardly and self-serving, but of what we learn here about his impact behind the scenes, where he really does seem to have extended himself to make it possible for NBC News people to be, well, less cowardly and self-serving than the pressures of the business would otherwise have permitted.

Is it possible that this effort was so heroic as to confuse him into thinking he was being heroic on the air? Because my very strong image of Russert as a journalist is that he was the consummate, perhaps even ultimate, Village Insider, using those considerable smarts and that quick verbal agility to enforce the conventional wisdom of the status quo. In fact, the very fact that he came to Big Media from the political world (first as chief of staff to Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, later as counsel to New York Gov. Mario Cuomo) seems to have helped cement the alliance of Beltway politics and media.

I don't suppose Russert was necessarily beloved of the pols who trooped onto Meet the Press and ran into his "gotcha" buzzsaw. But I think even the stumblingest victims understood that he was on their side, that they were in it together -- and unfortunately they were in it together largely against us, the unwashed and unserious masses. That he was as good at what he did as he was made it on the whole worse.

Nothing Keith says here changes my opinion about any of that. But that there was more to what Tim Russert was and did, that someone like Keith thought of him as both an inspiration and a protector -- well, this really adds a dimension to my image of him.

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The Media Has Always Been And Will Always Be Liberal-- Just Ask Any Republican

It was probably apparent to astute observers since the day Obama was elected that the Republican Party would do their worst in trying to delegitimize him and to even go so far as to punish America for electing him, all in the service of recapturing the government for their never changing fascist agenda. From day one Kyl, the #2 man in the Senate Republican caucus, said they would block his nominees, while Jim DeMint started off the year by talking about "breaking him" and bringing on his "Waterloo." Meanwhile, the GOP's top communications force, Rush Limbaugh, has only gotten more hysterical and more extreme since his "I want him to fail" fit at the beginning of his term. Wednesday we tried to demonstrate how driving up the unemployment rate has been Republican Party policy since Obama became president. Thursday Robert Parry did a brilliant analysis of Republican strategy over at AlterNet. The whole thing is very much worth reading (which is why I provided the link) but below are some takeaways:

Modern Republicans have a simple approach to politics when they are not in the White House: Make America as ungovernable as possible by using almost any means available, from challenging the legitimacy of opponents to spreading lies and disinformation to sabotaging the economy.

Over the past four decades or so, the Republicans have simply not played by the old give-and-take rules of politics. Indeed, if one were to step back and assess this Republican approach, what you would see is something akin to how the CIA has destabilized target countries, especially those that seek to organize themselves in defiance of capitalist orthodoxy.

...Obviously, given the wealth of the American elites, the relative proportion of the propaganda funding is derived more domestically in the United States than it would be in a place like Chile (or some other unfortunate Third World country that has gotten on Washington’s bad side).

But the concept remains the same: Control as much as possible what the population gets to see and hear; create chaos for your opponent’s government, economically and politically; blame if for the mess; and establish in the minds of the voters that their only way out is to submit, that the pain will stop once your side is back in power.

Today’s Republicans have fully embraced this concept of political warfare, whereas the Democrats generally have tried to play by the old rules, acquiescing when Republicans are in office with the goal of “making government work,” even if the Republicans are setting the agenda.

Unlike the Democrats and the Left, the Republicans and the Right have prepared themselves for this battle, almost as if they are following a CIA training manual. They have invested tens of billions of dollars in a propaganda infrastructure that operates 24/7, year-round, to spot and exploit missteps by political enemies.

Parry is only just beginning and, again, I urge you to read his entire post. I just want to add that the right-wing control of the media is something they've been perfecting since the ruling elites were stung by the muckrakers in the early 1900s. As we saw last month, the robber barons simply got together at bought enough of the media to control the conventional wisdom from then on. It's worse than ever now. Glen Yeadon has a subchapter in his book, The Nazi Hydra in America called "The Press Sells Out To The Nazis," and while it certainly did, I want to draw on some of his research that emphasizes how the Republicans have used the media to further they far right political agenda (rather than Hitler's, which is well documented by Yeadon). In the 1930s, with only 3 or 4 exceptions "all the large newspaper columnists and radio commentators were right wing reactionaries... The 1930s media was overtly pro-fascist, especially the major chains of newspapers. Hearst admired Mussolini and even paid him to write articles for his upstart United Press wire services. Mussolini was paid $1,750 per article an amount that would be the equivalent of about $17,000 today. The articles were poorly written by Margherita Sarfatti, Mussolini's mistress." Hearst tried to get Hitler as well. How different is it today? Do you watch Fox News? Or even Meet The Press?

The situation remains unchanged in the 21st Century. The columnists and the radio mouthpieces are almost fully hard right in their views. ... Today the media is even more consolidated than the media in the 1940s, less than ten corporations control over eighty percent of the airwaves and press. The Republicans have repeated the lie that the media is biased to the left so many times that many people buy into it-- even though the reverse is true. ... In the sixty years that have followed WWII the Republican Party and the far right wing extremists have adopted the philosophy at the heart of fascism, corporate rule. It is the basis for the intense hatred of unions and working people. In the entire eight years of the Reagan administration the minimum wage was not raised once although inflation still raged through the early 80s.

What does the video below have to do with the stuff above? Use your imagination