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Media Flame Out – by Nancy Rommelmann

Last Tuesday evening I attended Mark Halperin’s first stage performance in New York City The morning meetinga weekday newscast that airs live on YouTube and on Halperin’s new channel 2-way Platform on which I have appeared as a talking head several times. The meetings, held most weekdays at 9 a.m. and 6 p.m., are attended by hundreds of people via Zoom, each of whom has the opportunity to ask in-depth questions of the day’s hosts.

Unlike the news climate we’ve been subjected to since at least 2015, 2Way’s audience doesn’t lean in any particular direction. Before the election, Halperin often asked Zoomers where they were from and how they voted, and the results were usually evenly split between R’s and D’s, with a few Bernie bros and maybe a Stein fan and more than a few “I’s” “I’m not voting for either presidential candidate,” including yours. With the exception that co-host Sean Spicer once made an exception when Halperin called RFK Jr. “a weirdo,” the contestants show no appetite for denigrating others or, as I wrote in an article coming out tomorrow will “opportunistically chew on chewing the other guy’s face.”

I’m pretty sure the divide that cable news fell into immediately after the election began to form when the media decided that the best way to stay successful was to pit citizens against each other. At first this happened at least semi-organically. Trump was a bizarre choice for Republicans, the presidency was seen as Hillary’s destiny, it didn’t take much to trigger partisan agitation, make people overly susceptible to believing the worst and make them worried about the state of things, what which happened to be the case, was pretty good for the end result.

While cable had once covered the news, it now became the arbiter of the news and then its curators. Any tidbit that could be shoveled into the overheated oven and thrown in our faces would do. It didn’t matter whether the stories were absolutely true or true at all; It was important that people become addicted to the news being presented to them and that they could be turned into cable television’s cash cows, reliably pumping out dollars.

Until they weren’t anymore.

Not undoable, CNN’s primetime viewership fell 43%. Last week, Comcast announced the spinoff of its cable networksincluding MSNBC.

For an informed discussion about how traditional media has accelerated its own demise, I recommend the discussion between The Fifth Column and its recent guest Ben Smith, co-founder of Semafor and before that New York Times And Buzzfeed.

#480 – The Media Chaos / Gaetz retires (with Ben Smith)

An hour in which Semafor founder Ben Smith spoke about the sad state of the media, followed by a Smith-free hour in which the boys discussed, among other things, two very different people who nevertheless shared a very deep love for young people. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯…

2 days ago · 73 Likes · 68 Comments

Do I feel bad that places like CNN and MSNBC have lost their hegemony as it was? I don’t. While I won’t celebrate people losing their livelihoods – I’m not that big of a monster – but ethically I can’t celebrate people who screwed up one of the biggest stories of the last decade – the violence in the US in 2020 Granting quarters to fuel an “us versus them” narrative that kept ratings high.

I will never understand how the aforementioned Chyron can be expected to do anything other than let viewers know that their intelligence is not respected. I don’t think it was more a matter of ignorance on the part of the broadcaster than of entitlement. Why give cows quality content if they poop in your hands no matter what you give them?

Until they don’t anymore. Until they tire of the overheated rhetoric, or are told to hate half the country, or feel nothing more than a kind of sad embarrassment as they watch yesterday’s stars pivot to try and win back viewers’ trust and/or to save their own skin.

It’s painful for me to watch this video, although it doesn’t evoke much sympathy either. You can’t constantly tell viewers partial truths that just happen to make you rich and famous and expect them to stick with you when those truths fall apart. It was another MSNBC personality who argued with me on Twitter after I pointed out that the protests I covered in Portland were not peaceful, even in the video I shot below. Not only was it wrong for me to describe the protests as violent, the personality said, it was also an irresponsible action by a journalist in such a politically divided climate.

Well, I’ve done my best to show viewers and readers a middle-class, left-of-center city that’s completely unhinged, with the steady support of much of the cable media that has almost steadfastly refused to see the whole picture show, and who felt that It is more in the interest of their viewers and certainly in their own interest to spread partial truths.

I’m still doing my job. Are they?

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