The Murdoch empire's crocodile tears and the phony outrage of the Wall Street Journal editorial board

PLUS: Remembering Joe Lieberman

Chuck Todd and Kristen Welker on the March 24, 2024, episode of “Meet the Press”

“Our bosses owe you an apology.”

They do. They surely do. 

The words belong to NBC’s Chuck Todd who, according to The Wall Street Journal editorial board, was “upset” and delivered an “on-the-air jeremiad” against his employers. 

When I think back over the course of my life, and ponder the changes I have seen, there is no concept that seems more utterly extinct across vast swaths of America than self-awareness. This holds at both an individual and institutional level. 

There is indeed a crisis of trust between the American media and the American people, who have been abused by a vast propaganda industry that agitates, inflames, divides and misleads busy people for billions of dollars. 

There are no perfect television networks, but there is one much more deeply imperfect than all the rest. 

In fact, that network is a wellspring of America’s nationalist cancer and extremist politics. It has created, for millions of Americans, an inability to distinguish between reality and make-believe, and a thousand conspiracies from big to small, exceedingly stupid and completely made up.

It is known throughout the land as Fox News, and it is a cesspool of staggering dimensions.  What public company has tolerated more sexual misconduct and day-to-day depravity than Fox News? It is steeped in a culture of abuse that is simply staggering. This matters because a fish rots from the head down, and corruption carries sewage downriver. 

Before continuing, I’d like to define what I mean by rancid. Watch Megyn Kelly and a gaggle of mean-spirited bullies below. Before you do, let me ask you a a question: do you think any of them considered saying, “No. I’m not doing that?”

Let’s watch: 

Where does that lead? Where does the current push? 

Bret Baier is the supposed “hard news” face of Fox News. He was terrified of reporting the results of the 2020 election to the Fox audience. He recoiled from the job because he worried about the reaction. Can you imagine? 

Think about that. He was afraid. 

What was he afraid of? Why was he afraid? 

Simply, there are two answers. 

First, he knew his audience and evaluated them in the main as a “shoot the messenger” group. Baier was the messenger, and he knew that he would be recriminated because his $20 million didn’t come without accommodations, including being a party to the revitalization of “replacement theory,” the bedrock of all racial supremacist ideology. 

A body so august as the WSJ editorial board must surely know what the Tree of Life killer wrote in his manifesto? 

No? Forgot? 

It was all about the migrant caravans. I wonder what might have incited him? He found his way down the rabbit hole, and when he came out the other side, he rushed into the Tree of Life synagogue and killed Jews. He was heavily armed and aggrieved. “Jews will not replace us” was the rallying cry in Charlotte, where Trump, and thus Fox, held open the possibility of there being good Nazis carrying torches. 

There are no fact matters at dispute over the outcome of the 2020 election. Joe Biden won. 

Any irregularities were infinitesimally small against the whole, and utterly meaningless against the outcome. Yet, the results were opposed, deliberately, purposefully and intentionality by Donald Trump and his propaganda appendages — one more so than the home to a conspiracy of lies so outrageous the network settled a defamation suit for $787 million rather than go through discovery. 

Each night, over many years, Fox anchors abused Fox staff off-camera, while abusing their audience on camera. The names are infamous in the moment, and so long as the truth matters, will be long remembered for the long stench that followed them: Carlson, Ingraham, Pirro, Waters, Levin, Gutfeld, Guilfoyle, McCallum, to name a few. 

Of course, there is something obviously different between this group and the roster at NBC/MSNBC. The differences are clear, stark, documented and real. They are as real as the sun rising in the east and the sun setting in the west. They are as real as the mountains and the oceans. They do not need clarification, enunciation, explanation or explication. They simply are. They exist as does the air. The juxtaposition exists in symmetry and perfect harmony. They are ying and yang. They are alpha and omega. 

Yet, there is one interesting facet that deserves attention because it helps to see the ground upon which The Wall Street Journal advances a flimsy argument blindly as if made of sinking sand. 

Here is what The Wall Street Journal editorial board cannot comprehend and cannot see. They are misaligned like an amateur astronomer, who greets the forthcoming eclipse by looking up, ignorant of the importance of location and the significance of horizons, only to be disappointed by the limitations of their view and imagination. 

Fox News and its employees are completely aligned with management. They share a golden bond of cynicism within a community of arrogance that holds that money, combined with power, always justifies lying. Lying brings money and power. 

Rupert Murdoch is the most dangerous immigrant who has ever arrived on American shores. What he has built is a threat that has best been described by former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. Turnbull has said that Murdoch has created “enormous damage to the democratic world,” an “anger-tainment ecosystem that has left the US angrier and more divided than it’s been at any time since the civil war.” Turnbull also said that his media empire “sought to enrage Americans, divide Americans, and divide them against each other, and it has knowingly – and Murdoch had a personal hand in this … it has knowingly spread lies, most consequentially the one … where Donald Trump claimed to have won the 2020 election. And, of course, that created the environment which made the January 6 insurrection possible.”

NBC/MSNBC journalists and hosts are deeply misaligned from their management, and specifically four executives who exposed themselves as simultaneously, shallow, out of touch, deeply cynical, utterly transactional and completely detached from their duties, journalists and audience at this moment in time. 

What has played out is a clash between idealism and cynicism. The victory of principle over expediency, and courage over fecklessness, has left the editorialists of Murdoch’s most dignified realm stupefied and stumbling as if they had been concussed. What else could conceivably explain the obtuseness required to write these paragraphs in The Wall Street Journal’s homage to situational ethics, propaganda and moral neutrality against authoritarianism:

The mainstream media seems determined to give ordinary Americans reasons to ignore it. This week’s collective tantrum at NBC News over the hiring of former Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna McDaniel gave them one more……

On Tuesday the NBC brass bowed to their employees and cut ties with Ms. McDaniel. The network’s viewers will be fine without her analysis, but the episode explains why Americans don’t trust the news media. The network’s bosses were plainly trying to avoid the mistakes of 2016 by recruiting some non-crazy voices on the Trump-aligned right. Eight years ago mainstream outlets covered Mr. Trump with little but withering scorn, alienated millions of Americans who felt deep reservations about Mrs. Clinton, and after the election couldn’t explain how he won except by recourse to the false Russian collusion narrative.

The tempest over Ms. McDaniel suggests the press is preparing to make the same mistake again. This is bad for the country, but it’s even worse for the press, which still doesn’t understand why it is so mistrusted.

Like I said, self-awareness is a gift. Like integrity, courage and grit, it is rare, but not so rare as the otherworldly display of obtusity and projection below:

The network announced its hiring of Ms. McDaniel as a political analyst on Friday. She would provide, NBC politics editor Carrie Budoff Brown said in an internal memo, “an insider’s perspective on national politics and the future of the Republican Party.” 

We hold no brief for Ms. McDaniel as a spokeswoman for conservatives or Republicans, but NBC brass were trying to provide an alternative view of Donald Trump to the one viewers get from the NBC-MSNBC conformity caucus.

“Conformity?” Come again?  

Surely The Wall Street Journal editorial board can distinguish the ordinary from the sublime, the accidental from the providential, and the routinely hypocritical from the illiberal cult of personality they enhance by pretending it isn’t real. 

You see, after all this time, it is suddenly clear: the man who threatens retribution, vengeance, imprisonment, violence, mayhem, bloodshed for dissent and imprisonment for defiance stands as a bulwark against the imposition of “conformity” at the hands of a closed-minded tyranny at MSNBC. 

By the way, what is the “alternative view” of Donald Trump that would have been afforded by Ronna McDaniel? Seriously, what does that mean? 

Does it refer to the furthest reaches of the Fox News delusion-sphere? Does it mean Trump really won the election? Might have won the election? 

The next paragraphs are another sign of concussion, or a moral disorientation triggered by some sort of sensory deprivation. The amazingness of what comes next is how an observation of a simple declaration becomes a preface for something sinister. Of course, there is always something sinister afoot. There is always a conspiracy in the air. Again, from the WSJ editorial board:

“Morning Joe” hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski added their disapproval on air. Ms. Brzezinski insisted their objection wasn’t to a conservative Republican but to the hiring of an “anti-democracy election denier.” MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow devoted half an hour to the subject. It’s not about whether Ms. McDaniel is a Republican or Democrat, she said, “it’s about our system of government and undermining elections and going after democracy.”

Ms. McDaniel’s chief affront seems to be that she participated in a phone call on Nov. 17, 2020, in which Mr. Trump urged two Republican canvassers in Wayne County, Mich., not to certify the election results. She also said that President Biden didn’t win the election “fair.” We don’t think the election was stolen, and Mr. Trump’s post-election behavior was awful, but spare us this high-minded excuse about “democracy.”

The paragraphs above are the very definition of how propaganda works. They are insidious.

First, Ronna McDaniel is an election denier. Because she was the chairwoman of the RNC, this is a big deal. Her lies threaten the American way of life and our civilization. 

I have worked at the highest levels of two presidential campaigns, and was intimately involved in two presidential concessions. There is no planet where it is normal for the president of the United States and the chairwoman of the RNC to call two American citizens in a local jurisdiction, and ask them to do anything on election night — let alone interfere in a certification process that involves the most powerful official in America. The call was corrupt. The request was corrupt. The intent was corrupt. The WSJ editorial board’s cover-up and diminishment of the event is corrupt.  

All of this explains so perfectly the rage being directed against Chuck Todd on the MAGA right and from the MAGA media. 

Chuck Todd obliterated the concept of: “Everyone does it. Everyone lies.” They don’t.

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VIDEO COMMENTARY: Remembering Joe Lieberman

Joe Lieberman served four terms as a Senator from Connecticut and made history as the first Jewish politician on a major-party ticket when he was chosen to run alongside Al Gore in the 2000 election. I spoke with Scripps News last night immediately following the news of his death about Lieberman's legacy. I also share a story about how Lieberman was very close to being John McCain's running mate:

Note: If you would prefer to read the transcript, instead of playing the video right on this page/email, click on “Watch on YouTube” on the video screen below. At this point, you should be on the YouTube page or YouTube app. Scroll down past “Description” (section where it describes the content of the video) to “Transcript,” and then click on “Show transcript.” If you’re still having difficulty, visit youtube.com, and just search for “Steve Schmidt The Warning.” You’ll be brought to my YouTube channel. All of my videos are there, and you will see the "Transcript" option after each video description.

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