“Morning Joe” explosion is a seminal event in American media
Sometimes when I process events, trying to orient towards what I have seen, my mind often recalls a vivid image remembered from real events, which I witnessed on television news.
When considering the wreckage of Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski’s credibility the image in my mind’s eye is the debris field and vapor trails of the Space Shuttle Challenger and Columbia that painted a tragic Jackson Pollock against pale blue skies turned into a canvas of ruin.
In one instant, they are there. The next, gone forever, just shards and pieces.
What Scarborough and Brzezinski did to their reputations, show, colleagues, network and the proposition that anything is real or matters, is something to be deplored.
The “Morning Joe” explosion is a seminal event in American media.
In the same way that the Hindenburg’s flames ended the age of the Zeppelin in Lakehurst, New Jersey, in 1937, the capitulation to Hitler, er, Trump destroyed the access media era forever that has so badly harmed the country. It may prattle forward, but the death knell has sounded.
It was premised on the idea that relationships between powerful people that teased out over television or in The New York Times was the news that the plebes needed to hear — or maybe more precisely — deserved to know.
What Joe and Mika built was fresh — until it wasn’t. When it became stale, it was harmless, but then Joe loosed his wings and decided to be three things at once: morning news mandarin, presidential adviser, and presidential spokesperson.
The decision, in the end, turned him into Baghdad Bob.
The bill for all of the performative bullshittery has come due. It is tragic because what has been lost is something that is badly needed in America: trust.
On March 6, 2024, Joe Scarborough said that “this version of Biden, intellectually, analytically — is the best Biden ever,” and then told the viewers to “start your tape right now because I’m about to tell you the truth and a big f@#k you if you can’t handle the truth.” Here is the full clip:
This was a decisive moment. It wasn’t the moment when the ship hit the iceberg, but rather when Bruce Ismay told Captain Smith to head into the ice at flank speed on a moonless night because of...ego.
When word of the disaster reached America, a young man named David Sarnoff was operating the wireless. He would go on to found the National Broadcasting Company.
What Joe Scarborough did will be remembered as a moment of singular disrespect towards his audience that would turn him off for good when he doubled down with a self-serving meeting with the man whom his wife denounced as a rapist. and whom he called a fascist and the American Adolf Hitler.
There was a phenomenon that caused enormous strain in the Nazi party when Hitler took power and became Führer. The capitulators, the self-interested, and those who had attacked and denounced him for a decade suddenly lined up to make their submissions to him with acts of loyalty and obeisance. The German military high command, fiercely opposed, led the way by volunteering to replace the constitutional oath with the Hitler oath.
These newcomers were received with hostility and grievance by the old activists who had stood with Hitler at the Putsch, and had believed in him when everyone laughed.
The newcomers were given a derisive nickname: “Septemberlings.”
Scarborough and Brzezinski’s act of egotism and capitulation indicts the whole of the network, and wounds the credibility of the whole.
Their justifications make it worse. Much worse. The dressing-up of a cynical act and declaring it “journalism” makes a mockery of the practice of journalism, while burdening their colleagues with their cynicism.
Once again, a deep ethical abrogation has made me think of NBC north stars Tom Brokaw and Tim Russert.
Here is what I wrote about NBC’s inexplicable decision to hire Ronna McDaniel as an analyst in March 2024. Though the mistake was corrected, it is clear that no greater lesson was absorbed:
I can’t stop thinking about Tom Brokaw and the late Tim Russert in the aftermath of the astounding decision by NBC News and MSNBC to hire former RNC chairwoman Ronna Romney McDaniel as an analyst.
Of course, it is something that would never have happened if either man was still at NBC because both men were pillars of probity and journalistic integrity. They could be trusted. They were on your side, and they would never ever abide a liar as spectacular as Ronna McDaniel appearing under the NBC logo.
The hiring decision by NBC News president Rebecca Blumenstein, NBC News chairman Cesar Conde and MSNBC president Rashida Jones isn’t just cynical, it is depraved.
It makes a mockery of journalistic ethics and assaults the integrity of superb NBC journalists like Lester Holt, Savannah Guthrie, Hoda Kotb, Carol Lee, Richard Engel, Peter Nicholas, Chuck Todd, Courtney Kube and more, who work tirelessly to inform the American public about what matters in the world and what is happening in grave moments of global crisis.
Do you want to read something funny?
Below is an excerpt from an article written for NBCU Academy under the headline “Why basic journalism standards matter:”
One thing that all news organizations truly need is a strong reputation that begets credibility, trust and faith in the entire organization. Maintaining our reputation, our integrity, our independence is a vital role. And to accomplish that we must adhere to our journalistic standards.
These standards are the basis for our reporting, our newsgathering, our production. Whether broadcast, cable, streaming, digital, social media — all of our journalists follow the highest of standards. We have one huge responsibility to our audience: to get it right.
If we keep doing that, reputation intact, all else will follow.
Indeed. What a joke. Just for fun, let me repeat the words: CREDIBILITY, TRUST and FAITH.
How could something like this happen at any news organization that values their reputation and integrity?
The decision is so absolutely and utterly oppositional towards the culture, legacy, and glory of NBC News and the National Broadcasting Company.
Ronna McDaniel is unfit to join any news organization because she is an inveterate liar.
She is a chaos agent, who went fully along with Trump’s madness — right through the insurrection and beyond.
She didn’t just show indifference towards Trump’s threats of violence, societal mayhem and revenge, she abetted them, aided them and raised money for them. A hard count of the documented lies she told during her tenure at the RNC would number in the tens of thousands.
Perhaps NBC News viewers can look forward to Roger Stone being signed up as an analyst. Why not?
MSNBC is different than NBC.
MSNBC offers both news and a point of view.
MSNBC hosts have railed for years about the dangers of Donald Trump and his MAGA agenda.
We are about to find out who works in show business, and who has conviction, because any MSNBC host who sits down for a chit chat with Ronna McDaniel is full of shit on a truly epic scale.
It is inconceivable that Rachel Maddow, a person with deep convictions, integrity and ethics, would ever allow her show to be desecrated by McDaniel’s presence, but beyond that, we are about to discover some things about some people.
MSNBC stood apart in the early Trump years because it was the American news network that reported most directly, clearly, and vociferously what Trump was — a fascist.
What MSNBC has done with this hire is emulate the incandescent intellectual and moral corruption of men like Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and hundreds more who sold out their principles, party and country for the sake of ambition.
Here is what Scarborough and Brzezinski said about Ronna McDaniel when she left NBC after being hired:
Now, I’m no Captain Benson, but I can’t square the circle, so to speak.
The enormity of the contradiction and the chasm of emptiness beneath it cannot be ignored. Credibility is demanded because a tidal wave of lies is 57 days away from landing on the country.
How do you go from X in March 2024 to Y on “The Daily Beast” podcast this week, declaring that she felt like she had become a “punching bag” for “pundits and commenters online?” Brzezinski also called out her peers who wrote about her without “calling her first.” By the way, is anyone not online? Their comments that are most aloof from reality seem to hold that the world is segregated into two halves — there is the great unwashed of the online mob and the enlightened nobility who host TV shows. From the latter comes the depth of wisdom to see the depth of “Morning Joe’s” commitment to conversation and reporting.
There is something else that must be refuted because it is an insanity. It is the notion that covering Trump requires access to Trump. This is not true, and it is the journalism equivalent of JD Vance’s “Haitians eating pets” calumny.
How is it that Woodward and Bernstein could have uncovered Watergate absent brunch, cocktails and waterskiing with Bebe Rebozo and the rest of the gang in South Beach?
Wouldn’t they have needed to have a relationship with Nixon to understand him?
It’s enough to trigger an aneurysm in a stoic master!
Joe and Mika did not go to Mar-a-Lago to learn anything.
They did not go there to report anything.
They did not go there for you.
They did not go there for me.
They did not go there for MSNBC.
They did not go there to seek new understanding.
They did not go there to heal America and open new avenues of dialogue
They did not go there because Americans must start talking to each other again.
They did not go there in search of anything, except dispensation.
They went for a simple reason. They went because, as Dylan Byers at Puck News reported, they are terrified.
Unseemly doesn’t begin to describe it. The flop sweat can be seen condensing on the television screen. They are most afraid of losing what has become an entitlement to be “in the room where it happens” because…well…Mika spilled caviar on Deng Xiaoping as a kid, and visited Yasser Arafat’s compound with her dad (which you can hear her retell on The Daily Beast podcast).
Ahead, there is going to be crisis in America. The American people deserve better than cable news bullshitters and self-interested media elites making $20 million a year, who won’t stand firm and tell the truth about what is happening with fearlessness, conviction and integrity.
Trust me on this: if the first person from whom you get information in the morning thought it was a good idea to summit with Hitler immediately after his election then turn off the TV.
You can do much better.
Time erases memories, not just in individuals, but within societies. It is astonishing that within the span of a single human lifetime one of the most famous and important voices of an era could fade to relative obscurity.
It would have astonished Americans living in 1885 that the most famous man in the world, Ulysses Grant, who saved the Union, would at best ring a vaguely familiar bell for some Americans just two human lifetimes after his death.
The same is true of another American titan, though he died in 1965. His name was Edward Roscoe Murrow. He was a broadcast journalist. He was a truth teller in a world that was consumed by lies. He was a voice that the American people could trust in a moment of enormous consequence.
The collapse of trust in the American media is a result of the business decisions that destroyed Murrow’s ethic. Some say that the following is the greatest news broadcast in history. There were no pictures that accompanied the report. Only Murrow’s words. Close your eyes and listen to them. You will quickly move past the scratchiness of the recording, and be transported back to a relatively recent moment at a profoundly evil place. Below is Murrow’s report from Buchenwald. This is where the fascist road led.
The man describing the scene had chartered a plane to Vienna seven years earlier, as the Nazi Army rolled into Austria during the Anschluss of 1938.
The justification for the Anschluss was a doctrine of racial purity that sought to unify Aryans and the Germanic people around a thousand-year Reich that promised freedom, prosperity and national greatness.
His broadcast from Vienna was a historic occasion beyond its being a harbinger of the Second World War. It was Edward R. Murrow’s first live report, a multipoint broadcast of a live event over shortwave radio that reached seamlessly into millions of American homes. Here are the words that began the greatest career in modern American journalism:
This is Edward R. Murrow, speaking from Vienna. It’s now nearly 2:30 in the morning and Herr Hitler has not yet arrived.
Murrow surely could not have predicted the journey that would take him from Vienna to Buchenwald, but the American people could count on him to explain what was happening as the crisis grew into human civilization’s greatest test and catastrophe. Murrow was trusted because he earned trust.
Trust is earned in drops — and lost in buckets. It seems an obvious point that the majority of America’s media mandarins are oblivious about.
“This is London” meant something because the man delivering the news could be counted on to explain it, as well as trusted to deliver it.
He built the greatest assemblage of broadcast journalists in world history. They illuminated the opaqueness, horror, truth and challenges of World War II. They looked over the edge of the abyss into the pit of tyranny, war, suffering and evil. They shared the experience without contempt, bombast, spin, exaggeration or a political agenda. They were truth tellers.
It says a great deal about the current state of American society and the putrification of our politics and media that 80 years after Hitler smashed the world, when a demagogue rose in America who echoed his poisonous rhetoric, that the morning television hosts who called that man the “next Hitler” were shallow performers who filled the role of modern day Chamberlin and Daladier by being first in appeasement, first in debasement, and first to offer a capitulant kowtow.
The main difference, of course, was that Chamberlin and Daladier had actual responsibilities for the peace of the world, and like their countries, remained traumatized by the First World War.
Joe and Mika just had to tell the truth and keep it straight.
They couldn’t do it because their self-interest blinds them to your interest and the nation’s interests.
They would make for silly characters in a “Veep” episode if we didn’t live in such a sinister time that is growing darker by the day.
Instead, the times have turned them into something that fits perfectly into the MAGA dystopia that they did so much to breathe life into for ratings, ratings ratings.
It’s worked out great.
What’s disturbing is people think all fascist regimes use Jews as the scapegoat, but the reality is, it’s always immigrants, which happened to be the Jews the time and throughout history. In both Mussolini’s Italy, and Hitler’s Germany, it was Jews, Gypsies, socialists, communists and the LGBTQ community. Or anyone foolish (heroic) enough to challenge the regime.
Moreover, Jews were considered the lowest form of scum on earth, and the usual scapegoat. Now it’s immigrants from so called “shit-hole” countries.
However, when the next recession hits, and it’s going to be worse than the 2008 debacle, you know one thing for sure; Trump and his minions will need a new scapegoat, and Jews could be on the menu. Or when Vance takes over after the 25th the anointed one. There’s no shortage of white supremacists and White Christian Nationalists in his administration. Remember, when the shit hits the fan, it can never be their fault, just like when they lose elections: It’s always RIGGED! Heads I win, tails, you lose!
Furthermore, the religious right is using Trump for their own nefarious agenda. And now that they’ve completed the wholesale takeover of the courts; when Alito, Thomas and Robert’s all retire by the midterms, if it looks like Trump could lose the senate; the courts will be free to rule by judicial fiat.
Mika and Joe, are just the symptom of a deeper rot that has consumed our country and the media; and it reeks to high heaven! And as Steve points out; it takes a lifetime to build a solid reputation of trust and honor, and just one false move to destroy it completely! And what Mika and Joe did, isn’t one false step; it was a giant leap into the abyss.
Congratulations Mika and Joe! You just wrote your own obituary for MSNBC, and also signed its death certificate! IMHO…:)
Speaking of insipid journalists, Kathleen Parker had a piece today about 43 monkeys escaping a facility in South Carolina.
Well, you’d run too if your elected representatives were Nancy Mace, Lindsey Graham, Tim Scott, and Henry McMaster.