It’s all a game for these people


This Saturday Night Live clip about Anderson Cooper and Kelly Anne Conway show how these talk show are just ritualized show busness, like professional wrestling, where each player knows what role they are to play. Conway knows that she has to say wild and crazy things in defense of Trump while Cooper’s role is to feed her opportunities to do so. In this way, CNN’s ratings go up and Trump’s fans are pleased.

Comments

  1. Matt G says

    As many have already observed, the most honest news reporting comes from late night comedy shows. What the hell happened to journalistic ethics?

  2. says

    Matt G@#1:
    What the hell happened to journalistic ethics?

    They never had any. They’re just operating under new ownership -- instead of being part of the establishment propaganda machine, now they’re part of the corporate marketing machine. There are always a few that have ethics -- that love to dig out and tell the story -- but they’d probably do that no matter what.

  3. says

    I’m not sure precisely when this turn occurred, but several years ago I remember a survey of high school students whose No. 1 answer to the question what “What do you want to be after school” was “Famous.” This may be apocryphal.

    For a particularly egregious example of this phenomenon, google “Jake Paul.”

    For politicians, the shift may have come when Richard Nixon appeared on Laugh In, although I’d like to hear of earlier examples.

    As for journalists, I might point to Walter Winchell as an early adopter.,

  4. lanir says

    I just wish they’d admit when there are agreements to not talk about certain subjects during an interview. Or explicitly say that there are none. So that when you see an interview that’s just a bunch of softball questions anyway, you can tell there’s no real news reporting going on with that show.

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