Chris Lehman is editor in chief of The Baffler and author of Rich People Things. His latest book, The Money Cult, is out now from Melville House. He writes—Trump TV? CNN’s Jeff Zucker explains how he became Donald’s useful idiot:
Until very recently, it seemed self-evident that Donald Trump was the biggest raging moron in American public life. But that was before CNN president Jeff Zucker’s star turn before the guardians of establishment wisdom at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.
A full year and a half after Zucker’s network began cheerfully airing hour upon hour of unedited footage of Trump rallies in all their blood-and-soil rancor, the cable honcho wanted his audience of serious policy intellectuals to know he now has misgivings about the decision. “If we made any mistake last year,” Zucker announced, “it’s probably that we did put on too many of his campaign rallies in those early months and let them run.”
You don’t say, Mr. Asshole Corporate Executive. The ability to assess what is genuinely worthy of sustained news coverage versus what is merely titillation or breathless sensationalism is one of those things that media professionals are supposed to master as a first-order condition of the public trust they hold. How far away is Jeff Zucker from meeting this elementary job requirement? Why, just listen as he proceeds, in his very next breath, to rationalize his ethically bankrupt choice: “Listen, because you never knew what he would say, there was an attraction to put those on the air.”
In that instant swerve out of mea culpa mode, Zucker demonstrated that he has no business deciding what is and isn’t news—and what should engage the public’s long-term interest. After all, there are all sorts of figures in America’s cultural-political Guignol who regularly spew unpredictable bile and nonsense—from David Duke to Jill Stein, Milo Yiannopoulos to Jon Voight, Susan Sarandon to Curt Schilling. That is zero justification for sticking a mic in their faces and having them free-associate, in self-dramatizing fashion, for hours on end.
No, what Zucker displayed before his Harvard audience wasn’t a chastened commitment to news values in the wake of the ongoing media debacle of Trumpism; rather, he summoned a half-hearted argument for the Trump campaign’s entertainment value—the chance that he’ll bellow a new round of bigoted slurs, or float new authoritarian immigration strictures, or hit upon some new way to debauch constitutional government and/or the female sex, or cruelly mimic a reporter’s disability. The idiot logic of Zucker’s proclamation doesn’t pivot on anything so high-minded as imparting valuable background on the issues of the day to CNN viewers. It promises, rather, only to produce a passing jolt of befuddlement, righteous agreement, or outrage—states of mind better suited to the passive and infantile distractions of reality TV than to deliberating over who should be entrusted with the maximum powers of the American state.
And small wonder, because reality TV has produced the unsightly specter of Jeffrey Zucker, arbiter of civic good, just as assuredly as it’s given us Donald Trump, prospective handler of the nuclear codes. Zucker was head of NBC when the network launched Trump’s Apprentice franchise, and delivered exactly the same ratings-besotted appreciation of Trump-the-reality-host as he did for Trump-the-bread-and-circuses-demagogue: “Trump delivered on PR, he delivered big on ratings.” [...]
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At Daily Kos on this date in 2007—Fire, Water and Political Leadership in the West:
It's hard not to fall into the land of cliché when contemplating the scope of the disaster engulfing southern California, with hundreds of square miles burned, hundreds of thousands of residents forced to flee, and hundreds of homes and businesses destroyed. The Santa Ana winds and the havoc they've carried with them provide the starkest reminder since Katrina that nature in its fury is (in the actual meaning of the word) awesome.
But there's a slower, more insidious and even more inevitable threat than fire Westerners are facing; a challenge inextricably tied to those fires, the conditions that created them, and the destruction wrought. Water, or actually our ever diminishing supply of it. A terrifying article in Sunday's NY Time's Magazine lays it out.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show, Greg Dworkin slings data & cracks the mystery of the “most accurate” IBD/TIPP poll. Which collapses first: House Gop leadership or the Trump brand? Trump calls disabled vets deplorable! Have I mentioned Trump World & the “alt-right” are sex cults?
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