Dem
47
GOP
53
One of the most depressing storylines of the last few months has been the various media outlets falling all over themselves to curry favor with Donald Trump, prior to his re-inauguration. There were a few developments on that front yesterday.
First up is The Washington Post, which continues to bring shame upon itself. It would seem that the slogan the paper adopted back in 2016, "Democracy Dies in Darkness," does not jibe too well with its current editorial mission. While the slogan is not going to be retired, at least not yet, it is going to be downplayed. Meanwhile, the newspaper's staff will be expected to take to heart the paper's new mission statement: "Riveting Storytelling for All of America." We are generally disdainful of mission statements, but this one might be the worst we've ever seen.
And it gets worse. With this new mission statement comes "three pillars" of the newspaper's overall battle plan: (1) "great journalism," (2) "happy customers" and (3) "make money. "We have the sense that not all of those pillars are equal, since Chief Strategy Officer Suzi Watford also revealed that a key element of fulfilling her vision is making the Post "an A.I.-fueled platform for news." It is hard to believe that people can say such things with a straight face. In any case, it's no surprise that so many high-profile staffers have jumped ship in recent weeks. Maybe nobody has told Watford that what AI does is absorb a huge amount of information from the Internet and answer questions based on what it found there. That doesn't work for something that happened 3 hours ago, which is what news is. If they really do this, expect many, many errors.
Moving on, CNN is also looking for ways to keep themselves, and parent company Warner Bros. Discovery, out of Trump's crosshairs. Jim Acosta, who currently anchors the 10:00 a.m. hour, is Trump's least-favorite CNN anchor. At a 2018 news conference, for example, Acosta and Trump had a testy exchange that culminated in the then-president declaring: "You are a rude, terrible person. You shouldn't be working for CNN. You're a very rude person."
In order to solve this apparent problem, CNN chief executive Mark Thompson just told Acosta that the anchor may be moving from 10:00 a.m. to... midnight. Thompson framed this as "shaking up the network's lineup," but nobody takes that seriously. The overnight shift is the TV news equivalent of the Bermuda Triangle; broadcasters go there and then are never heard from again. A midnight exile works particularly well when trying to keep Trump happy, as he keeps a senior citizen's sleep schedule, and is rarely awake that late at night.
And as long as we are on the subject of CNN, there was another news item yesterday that is not directly related to kowtowing, but is related to the right-wingers vs. the media war that has been ongoing for years, so we'll mention it here. Zachary Young is a U.S. Navy veteran and a Trump supporter who does a thriving business in extracting refugees from unfriendly countries. When you are a brown-skinned Mexican in that line of work, they call you a "coyote." When you are a white-skinned American in that line of work, they call you a "security consultant."
Anyhow, in the final days of the Afghanistan mess, Young extracted 22 Afghans, at $14,500 a pop. Obviously, that is a lot of money, even in a wealthy, western country. In Afghanistan, it's a veritable fortune. CNN did a segment on this generally exploitative practice, mentioning Young, among several others. The chyron that was on screen, for at least part of the segment, used the phrase "Black Market." Young argues that because CNN did not report that his fees were paid by corporate sponsors, and because the outlet used the phrase "Black Market," implying "illegal activity" (although he was not mentioned while the chyron was up), he was defamed.
Young sued, of course, and yesterday the case concluded and was sent to the jury. By the letter of defamation law, his case is shaky, since his lawyers would have to prove that CNN acted with malice, or that the network had reckless disregard for the truth. Still, you can never know what a jury will do, particularly if they see Young as "the little guy" who got screwed by the corporate behemoth. As you might imagine, this case has gotten a lot of attention from right-leaning media figures, focusing either on how biased the non-right-wing media is, or else how CNN's alleged defamation of Young is even worse than Fox's defamation of Smartmatic/Dominion Voting Systems. This latter claim is dubious, to say the least.
Finally, while The Washington Post and CNN are capable of being preemptive, so too is the incoming presidential administration. Yesterday, Trump announced that he wants to make Hollywood "bigger, better and stronger," and so he was appointing three "Special Ambassadors to a great but very troubled place": Mel Gibson, Jon Voight and Sylvester Stallone. Why James Woods, Tim Allen and Kelsey Grammer were not also tapped is anyone's guess. It's definitely not because they were asked and declined; Trump made his announcement without talking to anyone. Gibson, in particular, was surprised to learn about his new title.
It's not clear what the new "ambassadorial" trio might actually do, since the entertainment industry is pretty decentralized, and since all three of them are decades removed from being A-list stars. Presumably, this is mostly performative theater for the base, along with a shot across the bow for the major film producers ("You damn well better fall in line, like CNN, the Post, The Los Angeles Times, etc."). Given that the biggest and richest studio in Hollywood is Disney, and Disney has already kowtowed to Trump in other ways (e.g., paying off his flimsy defamation claim), maybe this maneuver will cause the Mouse to examine its upcoming slate of films. For example, the next Star Wars movie is going to be Star Wars: New Jedi Order. The other films in the franchise were anti-fascism; perhaps this one will take the position that fascism isn't so bad. (Z)