If you’re like me, you have some festering anger with at least several highly paid talk show hosts for being propaganda patsies.
Chris Mathews seems to have overdosed on happy pills. I wanted to yell at Chuck Todd when he had Reince Priebus on Meet the Press today. Chuck asked a three part question. Reince didn’t answer any of them, instead he blathered on with a canned diversionary speech. Don’t get me started on Greta Van Susterten: useless, if she was only making Actor’s Equity scale she be getting paid too much.
I don’t know about other networks since I only watch MSNBC. They have quite a large stable of hosts, reporters, correspondents, and presumably paid regulars. They also have regular guests, two of the best recently being David Corn and Malcolm Nance, a former intelligence agent. They have been on Brian Williams new show frequently talking about the BUZZFEED allegations/revelations (choose one).
Kudos to Brian Williams for having guests with something important to say, and for knowing when to shut up himself. In that’s he’s the un-Chris Mathews.
I hardly ever catch Morning Joe since I’m in Oregon and it’s usually off air when I wake up. From the little I’ve seen it is an Easy Bake oven version of covering politics, as opposed to cooking in a real kitchen.
I’ve heard & read a few critics of this kind of sloppy journalism give a few simple guidelines — some of my pet peeves added.
1) Begin the interview by stating they expect questions to be answer directly and not ignored while the surrogate rambles on with irrelevant planned taking points.
2) Ask one one part questions. In news conference this is more important. The next reporter called on should ditch their planned question when it is imperative to follow up on an unanswered previous question.
3) If not answered do not move on to another question until it is answered.
4) If the answer is a lie or propaganda confront the surrogate.
5) Have fact checkers monitoring all untrue or distorted answers and don’t let the surrogate off until the fact checkers have found proof.
6) Do not discuss sports.
7) Don’t pretend to be overly friendly or overly respectful if they don’t respect you. These people are not your friends. They are propagandists trying to manipulate you and your audience.
8) Do not let surrogates excuse, normalize, or make light of Trump’s Tweets or his appointments.
9) Do not let surrogates translate Tweets for Trump. Take the Tweets literally.
10) When Trump is rude or insulting in the Tweet confront the surrogate about this being unpresidential (and unprecedented).
I have personal advice for Rachel Maddow. Take a cue from Joy Reid and Lawrence O’Donnell and notch up the seriousness a few levels. You may be having a good time now that the news has gotten more interesting than you anticipated, but don’t let it show that much.
Recommended reading for talk show hosts from Amazon: