MSNBC is imploding in real time
All news outlets have their ups and downs. The real time decision making involved in the TV news format means that cable news networks are prone to having bigger ups and downs. But MSNBC is easily having the worst five day stretch in its history. It’s been caught massively overhyping a phony Biden scandal that it knew was false – and now some of its hosts seem to be imploding.
Chris Hayes started this mess when he falsely characterized the allegation as being credible and corroborated, when the evidence says it’s neither, in a fairly transparent attempt at pandering to the “Bernie or Bust” niche he’s spent five years cultivating. When the rest of Hayes’ audience rebelled against him so overwhelmingly that his name was trending for twenty-four hours, he openly mocked his own audience during his show the next night. But Hayes has always been a problem, and one might have expected the tone-deaf arrogance to stop there.
When Joe Biden decided to do an interview with Mika Brzezinski in order to correct the record, she flunked it in fairly cringe-worthy fashion. She kept asking the same handful of questions over and over, even though Biden had already thoroughly answered them, apparently under the mistaken belief that this is what tough interviewers do. Now she’s still defending herself today, insisting that she had merely questioned Biden “vigorously.”
Even the normally reliable Ali Velshi inexplicably spent the weekend obsessively hyping the phony Biden allegation as if it were an actual scandal. The audience pushback against his Saturday morning show was so brutal, his name began trending on Twitter. By the time he circled back for his evening show, the Associated Press had put the final nail in the coffin of this phony scandal. Velshi acknowledged the AP report, but then kept obsessing about the scandal – even absurdly asking a guest if women will still be willing to be Joe Biden’s running mate, now that they know they’ll have to defend him against a fake scandal.
To his credit, Velshi was willing to discuss the matter with me last night, at length and on the record. Notably, he had no idea his name was even trending – nor did he seem to think it was important. He expressed the view that Twitter is a “bubble.” When I tried to explain that it’s one of the few ways his regular audience has of letting him know when he’s gone off the rails, he seemed to have no interest. He said he has his standards of journalism, and they’re not impacted by what anyone might be complaining about.
Velshi is correct in the sense that if you’re doing your job correctly, you shouldn’t start doing it incorrectly just because you’ve annoyed some people by doing it correctly (and this is a host who, until yesterday, had consistently done his job well). But that’s not the same thing as refusing to listen to and consider criticism from your regular audience members when they suddenly decide en masse that you’ve done something that’s beneath your usual journalistic standards.
This mindset is endemic of everything that’s going wrong at MSNBC right now. Cable news hosts seem to think of their “audience” as a theoretical construct. Hosts base their “journalistic standards” on little more than gut feeling, and then they decide that their audience is surely applauding them for following those standards. When actual audience members start speaking up to the contrary, even en masse, they have to be actively ignored – so as not to get in the way of the host’s theoretical abstraction of the audience.
Throw in the fact that most liberal newspapers and online news sites will never openly criticize any MSNBC host, because they get too much free advertising whenever MSNBC books their writers as guest panelists, and you realize why it’s so easy for MSNBC hosts to live in a bubble. They broadcast in an almost god-like format, directly into millions of people’s living rooms. They never hear an ounce of criticism from within the industry. They’re walled off from audience criticism until it reaches a fever pitch, and even then they tell themselves that it’s a sign they must be doing something right.
No wonder these hosts can’t simply admit that they shouldn’t have bitten on this obviously phony scandal, or even quietly move on from it. They just keep doubling down on the notion that their decision to hype a fake scandal was the correct one, because every decision they’ve ever made was the correct one. Meanwhile MSNBC is imploding in real time, and permanently alienating viewers in the process, and potentially sabotaging a presidential election, all for no good reason beyond tone-deaf arrogance. When will it stop?
