Bye, bye, Chris Matthews

The veteran TV personality on MSNBC has announced his retirement from his show Hardball effective immediately. I for one am not sorry to see him go, because in addition to his highly problematic treatment of women and his virulent antipathy towards progressive ideas in general and Bernie Sanders in particular, he was a terrible interviewer, constantly interrupting his guests and not letting them finish their thoughts. This last behavior seemed to happen more frequently when his interview subjects were women or people with ideas he disagreed with.

The veteran MSNBC host Chris Matthews announced his immediate retirement from Hardball, citing his inappropriate comments about women and a conversation with network executives.

“The younger generation” is “improving the workplace” with “better standards than we grew up with, fairer standards,” Matthews said.

Matthews said “compliments on a woman’s appearance” that some men, himself included, once “incorrectly thought were OK, were never OK.”

I hope other TV personalities take note. The times, they are a changing.

Anderson Cooper is no journalistic hero

The CNN TV personality has been garnering a lot of praise for his interview of former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich where he really dragged him across the coals. Blagojevich was one of the well-connected people Donald Trump pardoned recently when he was serving his sentence for trying to sell the Illinois senate seat that became vacant when Barack Obama became president. In the interview, Cooper strongly challenged Blagojevich’s attempts to rewrite history in self-serving ways.
[Read more…]

“Out-of-touch aristocrats in a dying aristocracy”

One of the interesting features about Bernie Sanders’s rise in the Democratic race is that in addition to the panic that it is causing in the party and media establishments and the oligarchy, one also senses a deep sense of puzzlement. In a political and media environment that has been dominated by political and media consultants who carefully polish and market test the image and words of candidates, how can a cranky, disheveled, old person who calls himself a socialist be generating such enthusiastic support across such a diverse population, especially the young?
[Read more…]

Don’t mess with the ‘misfit black girls’

Someone named Jason Johnson, a commentator on MSNBC (that is one of the most anti-Sanders mainstream media outlets) and elsewhere, has been promoting the idea that the Bernie Sanders campaign is largely supported by ‘racist white liberals’. This is of course a variation on the Bernie bros narrative that originated in 2015 despite the lack of a strong evidentiary basis and was heavily promoted by Hillary Clinton’s supporters during the 2016 campaign. The originator of the term Robinson Meyer expressed some regret in 2016 for coining a term that had exploded well beyond the very limited usage he had originally intended, especially since the Sanders coalition has grown to be so wide and diverse.
[Read more…]

And people wonder why Sanders gets such an enthusiastic reception

In the clip below from a town hall in Las Vegas hosted by CNN’s Anderson Cooper, in response to a question from a union member about how his proposal for Medicare For All would affect the health insurance policies that they already had, Bernie Sanders gave a clear and detailed response without any waffling. It is such a difference from the equivocating of so many candidates on this major issue. It is quite electrifying. Is it any wonder that we hear that the people at his rallies give him such a rousing response?
[Read more…]

Matt Taibbi and Mehdi Hasan tear into mainstream media analysis

Matt Taibbi writes that the dynamics of the 2016 Republican primaries are playing out again in the 2020 Democratic primaries and that it favors Bernie Sanders.

In reality, the results for Sanders cut both ways. On one hand, it’s amazing he can win any state after years of propaganda depicting him as a half-dead cross of Hitler and Stalin (MSNBC before New Hampshire outdid itself with Looney Tunes commentary about “executions in Central Park” and a “digital brownshirt brigade”).

On the other hand, there are signs after New Hampshire that some of the relentless corporate messaging against Sanders is landing. This will inspire orgies of excitement – it’s already happening – as pundits revel in every storyline suggesting Democratic voters are scrambling to find an “electable” alternative.
[Read more…]

Livestreaming suicide

Paulo Victor Ribeiro writes about the disturbing trend in young people livestreaming taking their own lives and about the response by the streaming service Tik-Tok to the suicide of a 19-year old vlogger named João (a pseudonym) who livestreamed his suicide on that platform that was watched by 280 people. After being informed, the company focused its time and energy on the best public relations strategy to deal with this tragedy before taking action, spending three hours on it before informing the police.
[Read more…]

Cultivating deliberate obliviousness

The rise of Bernie Sanders just before the Iowa caucuses has given rise to real concern in the Democratic party establishment that they might lose control of ‘their’ party and they are steadily rolling out critics. NBC News reports on a conversation that was overheard involving 2004 Democratic nominee John Kerry who is now canvassing for Joe Biden.

Former Secretary of State John Kerry – one of Joe Biden’s highest-profile endorsers – was overheard Sunday on the phone at a Des Moines hotel explaining what he would have to do to enter the presidential race amid “the possibility of Bernie Sanders taking down the Democratic Party – down whole.”

Sitting in the lobby restaurant of the Renaissance Savery hotel, Kerry was overheard by an NBC News analyst saying “maybe I’m f—ing deluding myself here” and explaining that in order to run, he’d have to step down from the board of Bank of America and give up his ability to make paid speeches. Kerry said donors like venture capitalist Doug Hickey would have to “raise a couple of million,” adding that such donors “now have the reality of Bernie.”

[Read more…]