CULTURES: Reid and Psaki and Maddow oh my!

THURSDAY, MARCH 7, 2024

But also, Watters and Gutfeld: On one major cultural point, the two cable channels agree.

There must never be heard a discouraging word! Tribal viewers must never be exposed to any hint of nuance or complexity.

It's stunning to see the level of dumbness which results from this cultural practice. To cite one example, here's the way Jesse Watters began one segment on his prime-time Fox News Channel program last night:

WATTERS (3/6/24): The House passed a half a trillion-dollar spending bill today. Thousands of pages. No one had time to read it.

We didn't even know about it and we just opened it up and here's what we found: $850,000 for "bus stop equity" in California.

We don't know what that means. We don't know if they're going to put a bus stop in a rich neighborhood or a poor neighborhood, but a bus stop is just a small thing that keeps you dry in the rain and a sign that says "Bus Stop." 

Eight hundred fifty grand? What!? 

Please don't ask us to catalogue the various aspects of the dumbness displayed in that passage by this silliest primetime child. For a recent report about this general topic, you can just click here.

At any rate, that's how dumb our "journalism" can get when practitioners know that nothing they say will ever be questioned, critiqued or challenged—when they know that their pronouncements, however dumb, will be swallowed as gospel. 

In our view, the first eighteen minutes of last evening's Gutfeld! was pretty much equally dumb. Surrounded by the usual gaggle of flyweight pseudo-commentators, the program's host yakked right up to 10:18 p.m., working from this premise:

GUTFELD (3/8/24): All right, let's do a monologue. 

So with Trump cruising to victory in the primaries and Biden's slow implosion, we should once again get used to the media's curiously timed stories that will bash the Don. This week's comes from Rolling Stone...

As it turned out, Gutfeld said the curious timing in this matter dates back to "a report released in January by the Defense Department." According to Gutfeld, that report "detail[ed] how the White House Medical Unit managed drugs during the Trump administration."

Here's the January report by NBC News about that study by the Defense Department's Inspector General. (Just so you'll know, the White House Medical Unit is staffed by military and civilian employees, but is overseen by the Defense Department.)

Gutfeld and his acolytes burned the first 18 minutes of last night's prime time program assuring viewers that the Defense Department report was the latest attempt by the Deep State to get President Biden re-elected. Most simply, we'd say this:

Within a journalistic culture defined by "segregation by viewpoint," there will be nothing so dumb or so improbable that it can't be pleasingly flogged.  

Viewers will see no one raise an objection to whatever statement or claim has been advanced. Given that circumstance, it may not occur to the casual viewer that what he is being told is improbable, silly or wrong. Unyielding true belief may tend to emerge from such presentations.

At this site, we're trying to find a way to approach the misogyny-adjacent material which regularly flows from the Watters and Gutfeld programs. (Bronze Age Pervert, come on down!) For now, we're planning to go there tomorrow, building upon some recent soul-draining conduct by Watters. 

For today, let's consider something offered to blue tribe viewers this past Tuesday night. The brief exchange in question occurred during the interminable, largely pointless coverage of that evening's Super Tuesday primary results. 

Especially on MSNBC, analysts tend to fill the long, useless hours on such evenings with examples of their matchless comedy stylings. So it went when a panel of five MSNBC hosts laughed about a silly idea advanced by many Republican voters in the great state of Virginia.

Many Republican voters had reported, as part of the day's exit polling, that immigration and the situation at the southern border seemed like the current top issue to them. 

This produced several minutes of eye-rolling and laughter from the MSNBC panel—several minutes of mockery which have now gone viral within the red tribe world. 

Was anything "wrong" with what was said? As you can see by clicking here, the exchange began with Joy-Ann Reid offering a sweeping assessment of the way red tribe voters vote:

REID (3/5/24): Republican voters don't vote that way. They don't vote on economics or things they're getting economically from the president. They're increasingly, from the Tea Party on, they're voting on race, on this idea of an invasion of brown people over the border, the idea that they can’t get whatever job they want. 

A black person got it? Therefore, drive all the blacks out of the colleges! Get rid of DEI! That is what they’re voting on. They’re just voting specifically on racial animus at this stage. It isn’t about economics.

That was a remarkably sweeping assessment of the basis on which such voters vote. Jen Psaki took it from there, and she turned to those exit polls:

PSAKI (continuing directly): No, which is why Trump killed the immigration bill. That's why! And because otherwise, he can’t run against The Other, and brown people, and people who don’t look like him, like his supporters, his base of supporters, coming across the border and scaring people, and killing people, or whatever he’s threatening out there.

I mean, if you look at some of these exit polls— I mean, I live in Virginia. Immigration was the number one issue.

By now, the chuckling had started. Inevitably, Rachel Maddow jumped in with a joke:

MADDOW: Well, Virginia does have a border with West Virginia. It's a very congested area!

VOICE OFF-CAMERA: Build a wall!

By now, the laughter was general. As she continued, Psaki seemed to marvel at the fact that she'd heard people in New Hampshire expressing concerns about the northern border. Mercifully, a commercial break now intruded.

This brief exchange between these thought leaders has gone viral across the red tribe universe. It doesn't seem to have been discussed by mainstream outlets, except for this scolding presentation at Mediaite.

(Operating more from the left, The Young Turks also scold the panelists in this YouTube presentation.)

Was something wrong with the MSNBC presentation? Can it, in any way, be compared to the steady-state dumbness emitted by Gutfeld and Watters?

That, of course, is a matter of judgment. We'd be inclined to say this:

First, to consider the problems, and the deaths, occurring at the northern border, you can see this February 11 news report in the New York Times. The dual headlines say this:

Migrants Face Cold, Perilous Crossing From Canada to New York
Increasingly, migrants from Latin America are risking their lives to cross illegally into the United States along the northern border.

The northern border can be a scene of peril too. That said:

In our view, Reid's sweeping assessment of the motives of pro-Trump voters is extremely unwise as a matter of politics and is basically indefensible on anything resembling "the merits." Concerning the way the ensuing exchange seemed to mock the voters in question, we would only add this:

Tonight, President Biden will likely speak about the bipartisan border bill which was recently killed by Donald J. Trump and the House GOP.  It has also been widely reported that President Biden hopes to issue executive orders to address the situation at the southern border.

It's hard to know why President Biden would be doing such things if there was no serious problem at the southern border. Mainly, though, it's the sheer enjoyment of these cable news thought leaders—the group laughter they enjoy, all through the night—which helps make election night programs like this unwatchable as a matter of basic journalism and basic public discourse.

That short exchange on Tuesday night strikes us as profoundly unwise. It may not strike you that way. In our view, this is all part of the ongoing task of taking The Blue Tribe Challenge!

In our view, it's pretty much Watters and Gutfeld and Reid and Psaki oh my! More generally, it's amazing to see the fruits that emerge from "segregation by viewpoint." 

In our view, that's especially striking in the emerging case of Psaki, a person who is much more experienced and sophisticated than the fellows who are currently hosting primetime "cable news" programs as they toil in the vineyards at Fox.

Reasonably or otherwise, that mocking exchange from Tuesday night has gone very viral. Just yesterday, we quoted Bret Stephens, who was still puzzled as to why red tribe voters are still supporting Trump.

At any rate:

As a matter of journalistic culture, two major "cable news" channels agree on one basic point:

Let a single set of flowers bloom! Viewers will only hear one point of view, and they'll hear it repeated all night!

Tomorrow: Glorious Hector, hero of Troy, seized female captives too!