MSNBC faces backlash over debacle involving Ari Melber and disgraced former Stormy Daniels attorney Michael Avenatti
Just weeks ago, numerous MSNBC hosts had to object on air in order to get NBC News and MSNBC to fire former RNC Chair (and current criminal suspect) Ronna McDaniel. While MSNBC hosts were lauded for their journalistic integrity, this week we got a reminder that those hosts really are there just to drive ratings by any means possible.
On Tuesday, MSNBC host Ari Melber decided that it would be a good idea to put former Stormy Daniels attorney and current disreputable prisoner Michael Avenatti on the air. The point was presumably to see what Avenatti had to say about Donald Trump’s upcoming criminal trial.
But a clearly bitter Avenatti merely spent the whole time baselessly claiming that the criminal case is a weak one, before going on to bizarrely bash the Democratic Party. The whole thing was a misleading, pointless farce. Yet Melber did basically nothing to stop Avenatti from using the interview to make controversial false claims.
The whole thing was such a debacle that “Melber” and “Avenatti” and “MSNBC” ended up trending on Twitter all day Tuesday, as everyone piled on in disgust. Melber took the worst of it, and he deserved to. He has a consistent history of booking dishonest guests and then doing far too little to correct any of his guests’ lies. But this is a much larger problem.
Melber was merely using Avenatti to do what MSNBC nearly always does these days, which is to hype the notion that Donald Trump is going to “get away with it all.” People who actually know what they’re talking about when it comes to the upcoming Trump trial, such as witness Michael Cohen and the various legal experts who are closely following the case, are all in agreement that the case is a strong one and that Trump is on track to likely be convicted. But how can MSNBC get audiences to stare at their screens in fear all day if it simply admits that Trump is likely to be convicted?
And so Melber digs up a disgraced clown like Avenatti on the air instead. Avenatti has nothing to lose and is willing to say the kinds of controversially inaccurate things that drive ratings, and so MSNBC used Avenatti as a means to an end. It’s just what the network does, and has long done.
It’s not just Melber either. Pretty much every host on MSNBC tried to convince viewers at one time or another that Fani Willis was going to be ousted by the Georgia legislature, when that was never on the table. At one point Maddow tried to convince viewers that Merrick Garland had issued a memo forbidding the DOJ from indicting Trump, when the memo clearly wasn’t even about Trump. And all along, MSNBC has generally tried to convince audiences that Trump would be magically able to push all of his criminal trials until after the election.
Yet here we are, half a year before the election, and Trump is now just five days away from the start of his first criminal trial. MSNBC can no longer try to scare us into staying tuned in by pretending that Trump’s trials will magically never happen. So now MSNBC is trying to scare us into staying tuned in by convincing us that Trump will magically get off at trial – even if it has to resort to putting a con artist prisoner on the air who’s willing to make such claims.
But the real problem isn’t MSNBC. The problem is the cable news format. There simply aren’t 24 hours worth of political news each day. A lot of days there aren’t 24 minutes of political news. Yet a cable news network will go out of business if it admits that slow news days are slow news days, because then everyone will just change the channel, and the ratings won’t be high enough to keep the network in business.
I don’t know what the answer is, but this isn’t it. The biggest problem of all is that about 95% of the political journalists and Twitter pundits out there are always trying to get themselves booked on MSNBC (CNN etc) each day, so they merely parrot whatever is being said on TV. This causes audiences to be flooded with near-unanimous false narratives each day. You’re all essentially watching MSNBC each day whether you ever turn it on or not. And given what MSNBC is devolving into, that’s just not a good thing.
