A right-wing billionaire is asserting his right-wing control.
BY ERIC ALTERMAN
AUGUST 26, 2022
GRAEME SLOAN/SIPA USA VIA AP IMAGES
Loyal Altercation readers would not have been surprised when CNN announced it would be canceling its longest-running show—at 30 years—despite its quite good ratings, and firing its host of nine years, because, no doubt, they’d read and likely memorized this post from June 24. Everyone is denying that John Malone, the right-wing billionaire who is behind the guy who is behind the guy who is in charge of remaking CNN, had anything to do with it.
The New York Times published a hagiographic profile of Malone this week in which he insisted that he was all in favor of “wacko” programming so long as it was labeled as opinion. The Times reporter also noted that Malone had attempted to recruit Rush Limbaugh and had advised Rupert Murdoch when he decided to start Fox “News” and turn it over to the right-wing sex criminal and paranoid lunatic Roger Ailes. This is presumably what Malone had in mind when he told the Times, “I am an American,” and “I do believe that these organizations have a duty to try and bring the country together a little bit, instead of trying to exploit differences endlessly.”
“John Malone only watches CNN via Fox News,” according to a recently quoted CNN staffer. Also this week, a Times newsletter published a story about Chris Stirewalt, authored by Blake Hounshell and Jeremy W. Peters, that noted that Stirewalt was the head of the Fox team’s election night decision desk, which declared Joe Biden the winner of Arizona in 2020, despite the desperate protestations direct to Murdoch from Jared Kushner. Not surprisingly, Stirewalt was fired. Now, he is “speaking out about a network he says incites ‘black-helicopter-level paranoia and hatred.’” Yet the reporters call Stirewalt’s “take” on Fox “counterintuitive”—because, they write, he insists that “offering content that tilts hard to the right” is “not to elect Republicans or really even to help them at all … Rather, it’s about making money.”
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This is actually the falsest of false choices. It’s also impossible to test, much less verify, since the only thing Fox has ever done since its founding in 1996 is “tilt hard to the right”—that is, to lie on behalf of its menu of white supremacy, nativism, Islamophobia, and basically everything else while raking in billions of dollars of profit.
One, albeit hardly dispositive, argument in favor of Stirewalt’s take is the fact that the only people who appear to get any results from Fox are not those who merely seek to shame the network but rather the people who sue them for a lot of money. That latter category would include the family of Seth Rich, whom the network repeatedly tortured after his murder by concocting absurd stories about him, and more lately the manufacturers of Dominion voting machines. Among the lunatic lies put forth by Fox’s anchors in the aftermath of the election were those of Maria Bartiromo, who insisted that Nancy Pelosi had “an interest in this company,” and Jeanine Pirro, who speculated that “technical glitches” in Dominion’s software “could have affected thousands of absentee mail-in ballots.” Writing about the Dominion suit, the Times’ Jeremy Peters has noted that “the case threatens a huge financial and reputational blow to Fox, by far the most powerful conservative media company in the country.” Thing is, Fox’s “reputation” can be damaged only by people who think it has one—that is, those who care nothing whatsoever for truth or decency. Its lies and absence of “reputation” are no secret to anyone who cares to look.
Thanks to Malone and his team’s takeover of CNN, we can see that management plans to push the network in Fox’s direction.
Back to CNN’s firing of Brian Stelter. He closed out his final show with this patriotic plea: “It’s not partisan to stand up for decency and democracy and dialogue. It’s not partisan to stand up to demagogues. It’s required. It’s patriotic. We must make sure we don’t give platforms to those who are lying to our faces.” To that, we at Altercation can only reply, “Right on, my brother.” Alas, he loses us with his next sentence: “But we also must make sure we are representing the full spectrum of debate and representing what’s going on in this country and in this world. That’s why CNN needs to be strong.” Actually, that would be a good reason to get rid of CNN altogether. This country would not be in the mess it is in, and Donald Trump would still be a nose-in-the-window real estate huckster, had CNN, under Jeff Zucker’s regime, not dedicated itself to broadcasting his lies, unedited and unending, during the entire 2015-2016 campaign. (You can read about that here and here and here and here.)
The implication of Stelter’s valentine to the company that fired him is—as Malone pretends—that it’s possible to represent the Republican Party by balancing its construction of an alternative reality defined by racism, sexism, conspiracy theorizing, etc. with the perspective of the political world where relative sanity and no less relative honesty prevail. But during the Trump administration, reporter Daniel Dale had the exclusive purchase at the network on telling the truth about Trump’s lies, while the rest of the network was given over to both-sidesing of them at best.
Now, thanks to Malone and his team’s takeover of CNN (due in part to his massive shareholdings in the newly merged Warner Bros. Discovery), we can see that management plans to push the network in Fox’s direction—minus, one presumes, the legally actionable content. One can already see which way the wind is blowing the day following Stelter’s farewell, as Jake Tapper invited famed liar Dan Crenshaw on his program to insist, “I still haven’t seen any evidence that Trump was even asked to give these documents back.” Tapper not only failed to challenge this comically phony assertion, he also proceeded to retweet this ridiculous claim by Ivanka Trump on behalf of her husband’s execrable excuse for a book. (Don’t take my word for its awfulness. Take Dwight Garner’s.) And can Tapper really believe, as is claimed in this tweet, that Trump has a “good shot at prevailing” in court about having stolen secret documents? I wonder …
A great deal of what drives mainstream coverage is a belief in the apparently holy grail of “centrism” as a cure to our political ills, as well as to the mainstream media’s unpopularity. Thing is, the “center” keeps shifting further and further away from reality as the Republicans get crazier, more dishonest, and conspiratorially minded. For its part, the public has not shifted, but a position that does not align with the crazies’ becomes labeled “liberal” instead of merely “not insane,” and positions considered far-right suddenly become “centrist.” This phenomenon is the product of many factors, but the most significant of them are: (a) right-wing cable TV is a lot more profitable than its counterparts, and (b) the right is approximately a trillion times more effective at “working the refs” than the left is.
Here’s a reality check on actual American political opinion at the moment. According to a recent NBC news poll:57 percent of registered voters say that the investigations into alleged wrongdoing by Trump should continue, while 40 percent say they should stop.58 percent of voters disapprove of the Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade and ended the constitutional right to an abortion, compared with 38 percent who approve.The Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act is more popular than unpopular (42 percent call it a good idea, while 31 percent say it is a bad idea).
And most importantly, “threats to democracy” is now the most important issue facing the country.
Now, let’s take a few moments to examine the question of the role of “the liberal media” in all of the above.
Example 1: One of the myriad questions raised by the publication of this piece by National Review editor Rich Lowry on the New York Times op-ed page (headline: “Can You Tell Me What Would Happen if the FBI Were Investigating a Democrat?”) is “Has anybody at the New York Times editorial staff ever heard of Hillary Clinton?” A second is “What could possibly have been the point of publishing this?” It degrades the reputation of the page for anyone who even cares about accuracy. And it’s not as if Lowry does not already appear everywhere in the media all the time anyway. (Wikipedia informs me that “he regularly appears on various cable shows and network Sunday shows, including NBC’s Meet the Press, ABC’s This Week, and FOX News Sunday.”) I generally understand the calculations at work in these cases, but this one is actually a shocker, coming as it does after the last editor of the page lost his job after publishing Tom Cotton’s neofascistic op-ed during the Black Lives protests of 2020.
Example 2: According to [social] science, “Conservative media and influencers engag[e] in network amplification of politicized information and misinformation significantly more than liberal media and influencers.” They also exhibit a “stronger tendency to retweet and align their messages with conservative media than liberal influencers did regarding liberal media.” Moreover, “traditional media partially [drives] partisan influencers’ amplification,” leading to an asymmetry of right-wing partisan misinformation as compared to its liberal counterpart. Again, no need to take my word for it. Rather, take the word of these researchers who collected 358,707 Twitter accounts that followed 2,069,311 accounts and detected nine distinct networks of traditional media and emerging partisan influencers, and then examined their 3,540,629 tweets related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The news that HBO was purging over 200 Sesame Street episodes led me to fond memories of watching something like 18 (don’t check that) episodes in a row with a child born in April 1998 about the adventures of Slimey the Worm and his trip to the moon, sponsored by WASA (the “Worm Aeronautics and Space Administration”), only to be rewarded for my patience with its finale in which the great Tony Bennett sang “Slimey to the Moon.” Check out Season 29, Episode 3844 on April 8, 1999.
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