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It’s always worth remembering that MSNBC had to choose between the market and ideology when its most popular host opposed the Iraq War in 2002 and 2003. It chose the latter. Oddly enough, this kind of thing gets airbrushed out of MSNBC’s history of these events.
We’re now hundreds of thousands of dead and more than $2 trillion later.
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Don’t you mean the former? Or, if not, what do you mean by “market” and “ideology”?
Donahue was its most popular host; he was making MSNBC the most money. It fired him anyway. That’s ideology trumping market if it ever existed.
They also consciously tried to flank FOX NEWS on the right. They hired Michael Savage and Alan Keyes and put up an ‘America’s Heroes’ wall where watchers were encouraged to send in pictures of their soldier sons and daughters in uniform.
GE always made a lot more money selling weapons to the government anyways.
Don’t you mean the former?
No. Unless you think that networks make more money from lower ratings.
I don’t think they do, and that’s what confused me. The “former” in your sentence is “the market” — by which I thought you meant the ability to make more money. The “latter” is “ideology,” which I took to be MSNBC’s purported liberal lean. So it didn’t make any sense to say that MSNBC chose it’s ideology (liberal) over the market (moneymaking) by firing the liberal guy. But if their ideology is moneymaking, it makes some sense . . . but then what would “the market” be?
And if the “market” reflected the fact that Donahue made money for them and they fired him, then what was the “ideology” again?
Not saying you’re wrong. I’m just confused about what you’re trying to say.
The ideology is cheerleading for the Iraq War. Which they did, vocally and at length.
Ok — I think I got it now.
I’m with C.S.: Donahue having the largest audience on MSNBC doesn’t make him a money maker for the network unless that audience, a) translates into advertising dollars, and b) becomes an audience for other MSNBC shows, translating into advertising dollars for those shows.
The website that received the leaked internal NBC memos, did some good, in-depth reporting; the best quote:
Ideology probably played a big role in blinding NBC executives to the possibility of creating a liberal opinion network around Donahue; but once they realized the money they could make by creating an entire slate of liberal shows, ideology pretty clearly didn’t get in the way.
Beginning in the spring of 2003, NBC also grounded MSNBC reporter Ashleigh Banfield, refusing to either send her into the field or release her from her contract, for raising questions about media coverage of the war. They not only punished people for talking the wrong way about the war, they also punished folks who pointed out they were doing so.
Found her lecture here very good:
http://www.k-state.edu/media/newsreleases/landonlect/banfieldtext403.html
video and audio is also available.
If MSNBC wants to be truly introspective, they’d mention Donahue and Banfield by name and admit, with flags flying and firecrackers popping, that they cocked it all up. But they won’t.
The media is just like the government in its refusal to ever admit a mistake.
Any organization, once it achieves sufficient size, will devote a measurable percentage of its time to hiding the bodies and not mentioning the unmentionable. I think the lower bound is about four people.
Does anyone remember the SNL skit that NBC aired in late 2002 early 2003 who’s entire premise was that nobody watched Donahue and that people didn’t like liberals? They included a joke about Al Sharpton making up figures and Michael Moore not bathing.
A lot of parts of that show, especially Weekend Update, went pretty rightwing after 9/11. It was just reflecting the hysteria of the time.
How does that “just reflecting” work? Did the writers try to write non-rightwing Weekend Update sketches, but the hysteria of the time somehow changed their words on the page by itself?
People are responsible for what they write, whatever the atmosphere of the time.
Also too: Remember the tongue bath SNL gave Rudolph Giuliani on its first post-9/11 show? What a hideous spectacle that was.
Tina Fey, I would remind everyone, was head writer and Weekend Update co-anchor as the show was going Full Metal Neocon. Jon Stewart’s occasional lapses into Both Sides Do It, which cause apoplexy among the liberal purity trolls, are downright harmless by comparison.
Guiliani at least actually had to engage in emergency operations management, and pulled it off with a degree of skill. He deserved credit for being a good mayor.
Meanwhile, Commander Bunnypants sat stunned in the classroom in Florida, then flew around the country to keep himself safe while not actually running things, and still got the Churchill treatment.
Giuliani is the most overrated politician I’ve ever seen. Whenever I ask people what EXACTLY he did after 9/11 that was so monumental, I hear crickets. Manipulating the Press Corpse was his greatest skill. How about his pre-9/11 decision to install the emergency “bunker” within the World Trade Center itself? Yeah, brilliant.
If I remember correctly that among other things the WTC emergency Bunker included a collection of Cigars for Rudy and was used once or twice as a place were well connnected folks could get a little afternoon delight –
The two best comments ever about Rudy G were one: “Guilian would take credit for the coming of spring if he thought he could get away with it it” and Jimmy Breslin’s judgement: “A small man looking for a balcony.”
His performance after the attacks wasn’t monumental.
It was head-down, competent, plugging away at a mountain of work – exactly what we should hope for from a mayor. He coordinated between departments, with federal and state officials, and served as the main public face of City Hall. It wasn’t superhero stuff, but he wasn’t supposed to do superhero stuff. He was supposed to be the mayor, not the Die Hard d00d, and that’s exactly what he did. He performed his duties as the mayor, well, in very difficult circumstances. He gets an attaboy from me for that.
But, yeah, the scale of the praise he received was absurd. You’d think he held up the towers while people escaped.
He performed his duties as the mayor, well, in very difficult circumstances.
With the notable exception of floating the idea that the election to choose a new mayor could be, you know, suspended.
I’m not saying he didn’t do anything bad; I’m say that, unlike Bush, he actually did do things that were worthy of praise.
Yeah, they had Michael Moore referring to a “Mexican shower”, which is totally not racist, also too.
Chris Hayes will have a discussion tonight after a replay of Rachel Maddow’s Hubris documentary. Wonder if it will come up. He’s often perspective on such matters.
Wasn’t just the networks.
Around this time the largest and best known local tv news consultants group, Frank Magid Associates, in its monthly or quarterly advisory to member stations that news organizations should limit coverage of anti-war protests and the like because we’d be likely to find ourselves viewed as unpatriotic given the public emotion associated with 9/11.
This doesn’t sound like a big deal, but it really is in the world of local TV news. When Magid speaks, news directors listen — especially the weak, stupid, and fearful ones. It’s not the sort of thing that plays out as a dictate from above “though shall not cover those dirty hippies” (i mean unless you work for fox, of course). But it’s the sort of thing that will play into the calculus managers make during the morning editorial meeting, and next thing you know you get to spend the day with the National Guard or the American Legion instead.
Oh, yeah, also in that same bulletin, Magid advised that anchors not wear colored dress shirts with white collars, because it was perceived as a ‘French’ style.
Our local Fox affiliate, in its coverage of the protests against the war, spent several minutes of airtime filming a bottle half-filled with a mysterious fluid that just might have been a Molotov cocktail. (It might also have been wino urine, but that went unmentioned.)
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At the time (’02-’03), I definitely got the feeling that the media, particularly the cable networks, were promoting the war not because they believed in it, and not to suck up to conservatives, and not because of 9/11 (although that did color things), but mainly they did it because they felt a war would be profitable and professionally exciting. You could almost imagine them flipping through catalogs picking out designer flack jackets. Their slant felt much more self-interested than legitimately political.
(Whereas with liberal hawk bloggers, the motivation seemed to be — in part — a need to not be seen as reflexively anti-war. “We’re not the UNCOOL kind of liberal, really! Let’s bomb somebody, yo!”)
At the time, I thought Donahue was a bit of a loon, and Janeane Garofalo just couldn’t hold her own in a policy debate. But I could never figure out the case against the war was left to a goofy daytime host and a comedian. God bless ‘em, they did their best, but where were the big guns?
Who, exactly, would be considered a big gun among anti-war people? Al Gore seemed like a sizable personality. I guess he was too fat. I don’t remember if he had the beard at that time.
Other than him, anyone who was against the war was immediately branded as a traitor or, at best, unserious.
The American corporate press/media do not consider any anti-war types to be anything more than DFHs.
And more importantly, are anti-war people allowed to refer to them as “the big guns?”
“Janeane Garofalo just couldn’t hold her own in a policy debate”
I saw her once when the host asked her “why should we listen to you? Your nothing but a comedian” to which she replied “Then why am I the only anti-war guest you invited to this show”
In the end, it shouldn’t be a surprise that Hans Blix, former head of the IAEA, was more knowledgeable than Michele Malkin
But wat does it say about the Bush Cabinet, when Janeane Garofalo, “the Bowler” from Mystery Men, was proven more knowledgeable than the Secretary of Defence?
[...] have been a host of articles on what we’ve “learned,” a drive to make sure we remember and shame those who supported it, as well as arguments that it’s too early to really appraise what happened in Iraq and even [...]