MSNBC’s Epic Week of Fail

MSNBC’s Epic Week of Fail, Generation Complain and Now Is The Time To Enlist In The Marines
By Derek Hunter
7/24/2011

I watched MSNBC this week so you wouldn’t have to...not that you would have anyway, but still...

Would You Like Some Crow With Your Foot?

To say MSNBC is a left-wing propaganda outfit is to say the sun rises in the east. It qualifies as a “duh” statement. But that wasn’t always the case, nor were the embarrassing ratings. Believe it or not, people used to watch MSNBC and they had credibility. Telling that story today is like your father talking about walking to school in the snow, up hill both ways, but it’s true. That day is done.

Today MSNBC is the punchline to an unfunny joke someone you’re stuck in a car with feels compelled to tell. No longer interested in objective truth, MSNBC has become the mouthpiece and main propaganda outlet for the “progressive” movement, such as it is. The fringe Left-wing tax-exempt activist group Media Matters for America has a T-1 line directly into the heads of MSNBC producers, as demonstrated here, here, here and here. Chris Matthews, the balloon-headed buffoon on a 5:00, in a deliberately dishonest edit, chopped up a Ronald Reagan press conference from 1987 to try to paint the former President as supporting tax increases to lower the deficit. Newsbusters (Thank God for them and their massive archives) exposed this blatant lie brilliantly here.

More and more the leftist who populate the echo chamber of lies on MSNBC are invoking the name Reagan to justify their delirious desire for power and tax dollars. Joan Walsh, Editor-at Large of Salon.com and proven liar, now loves her some Reagan. She thinks Obama is the modern day Reagan. (I’ll wait for you to stop laughing.) They also have Ron Reagan Jr., the former President’s unaccomplished son and failed radio and TV commentator, who spends every chance he gets urinating on his father’s grave. Only on MSNBC does being the lucky sperm that cracked the egg qualify someone as a “political commentator” (See Meghan McCain).

The brass at MSNBC will tell you these are all opinion shows, that their straight news programs are just that - straight news. But the stench of dishonesty coming off MSNBC like stink lines off of Pigpen in the old Peanuts comic, have permeated the entire organization.

Contessa Brewers, the “straight news” host of a daytime show, had Congressman Mo Brooks (R-AL) on the other day to discuss the debt ceiling. Showing her objectivity, Brewer listed every White House talking point about how the country would’ve faced another depression had Obama and the Democrats not spent trillions of dollars more than we have. She failed to note the promise they made that unemployment wouldn’t reach 8 percent if they spent it, but that’s the least of her problems. When Congressman Brooks dared to disagree, Brewer, in a fit of impartiality, slapped her hand down on her desk like a 5 year old told they couldn’t have a piece of candy and asked “Do you have a degree in economics?”

Congressman Brooks replied, “Yes, ma’am, I do. Highest honors.” (Watch it here, it’s soooo worth it.)

Had Brewer, or any of her producers or staff, done even a minimal research on the Congressman they would’ve known that. As a matter of fact, it’s the 4th line of his Wikipedia entry, so the research involved could’ve been as basic as a Google search and a click. But that’s too much to expect from MSNBC’s “straight news” outfit. Brewer, whose educational background is a B.S. in Broadcast Journalism from Syracuse (which I have to assume involved an intense teleprompter reading course with a focus on delivering talking points as if they’re your own deeply researched thoughts), didn’t miss a beat and went back to the talking points put before her. A serious person would have A) known her guests was uniquely qualified to speak on the subject at hand, or B) once educated to that fact, sought the guest’s expertise and listened to their opinion. But MSNBC doesn’t have serious people, so...

Not completely oblivious to having stuck her foot in her mouth up to her ankle, Brewer, after the video started making the rounds on Twitter and conservative blogs, tweeted out, “Just learned why lawyers are told never to ask a question they don’t know the answer to...”

That realization won’t change the way Brewer does her job, the agenda IS the culture at MSNBC and NBC News, not an anomaly. But it might give her pause, if only for a second, the next time she blindly regurgitates Media Matters spin as if it were remotely based in reality. Or maybe, just maybe, she’ll realize journalists are supposed to asked questions they don’t know the answer to, just not in an arrogant, partisan way, and bring that suspicion to her next interview with a liberal...Considering what comes next, probably not.

You Just Haven’t Caused Enough Riots Or Evaded Enough Taxes For Us, Cenk.

Every single time I think MSNBC couldn’t possibly sink any lower in the cesspool of left-wing activism, they find a way to surprise me. As if their primetime line-up weren’t already the bottom of the barrel, they’ve broken through the barrel and are now sifting through the sludge looking for a new host. They are considering Al Sharpton.

The 6:00 pm slot opened up when they canned the failure known as Cenk Uygur (pronounced Jenk, for reasons unknown to people familiar with the English language) on Thursday.

More on Sharpton in a minute, but let’s first explore a little about who Cenk Uygur is.

He’s the leader of a “Progressive Youth” group called The Young Turks who have a show on YouTube. Yes, you read that right - MSNBC hired a dude from a show on YouTube to do a real show, at least for a while.

But Cenk, to hear him say it, is no ordinary opinionated moron filming videos in his basement with his friends and posting them on the Internet, he’s number 1! That’s right, YouTube’s “tallest midget” and his friends have more than half a billion views of their videos since 2005. That number sounds impressive, as long as you take it the way they want you to take it.

The Young Turds, er, Turks, do have a lot of views of their videos, just not their videos about politics. When not talking about their wildly unpopular political views in their least viewed videos, they are essentially tabloid trash...and YouTube viewers love animal videos and tabloid trash. The titles of their most viewed videos aren’t things like “Obamacare is the best option to save the country” or “Republicans are actively seeking to ruin the country,” they’re titles like “Woman orgasms 300 times a day,” “Hot teacher in trouble for being too hot” and “Lady Gaga - Alejandro video controversy.”

So while “Tea Party (R) goes off on DNC chair” gets 8,500 views, “Burger King’s sexy shower babe” pulls in 3.2 million. Starting to see a pattern?

The Young Jerks, er, Turks use the tagline: “The Largest Online News Show In The World.” Well, technically they are. The only problem is what they like people to infer from that - that millions of people follow them for their “progressives” politics. That is simply NOT the case. They are good at search engine optimization - hopping on trends and controversies in the celebrity world and sex scandals in general - and get traffic that way.

Cenk, with no political background or specific policy expertise, is essentially the drunk guy at the bar who has an opinion on every issue and knowledge on none. Why MSNBC thought he would be a good host who people would respect and seek out his opinion on anything remains a mystery. But they don’t think that anymore.

If you’re a TV host and you’re given a show that no one names, that’s a sign you might be on thin ice from the start. Cenk’s show was called “MSNBC Live,” or basically “We’ve got something on at 6:00, but we’re open to better ideas.”

After being yanked from the 6:00 pm slot, Cenk quit MSNBC. He rambles on about his reasons for leaving, and takes perverse glee in implying he turned down a lot of money to be a contributor, like he did it to shore up his street-cred or something, in a weirdly defensive video. He blames MSNBC, not his poor ratings, and principle for his departure. He says the suits at the network wanted him to tone it down, didn’t want him to “challenge power.” What power they didn’t want him challenging remains unclear. He claims to criticize the White House and Democrats, but evidence remains lacking.

For the record, MSNBC denies Cenk’s account of his departure and, in this case, I believe them. They have nothing to gain from lying, Cenk has face to try to save (though who would want to save that face remains a mystery).

Being the worthless pile of human flesh that he is, he naturally ran to the king of worthless piles of human flesh, Keith Olbermann. Keith, always a fan of schadenfreude, as long as it’s not about him, gave Cenk a platform upon which to nail himself to a cross.

Speaking of crosses, Cenk’s replacement is rumored to be a man of the cloth - the Reverend Al Sharpton. As a host, Sharpton looks absolutely terrified at the prospect of what the next word on the teleprompter could be. How bad do you have to be at your job to have your employer think Al Sharpton is a better option?

Sharpton, who rose to prominence by cooking up and promoting the bogus Tawana Brawley case, helping promote racism in Howard Beach and the Crown Heights riot as well as allegedly inspiring the murder of “white interlopers” at Freddie’s Fashion Mart, is a disgrace to the human race. The fact that MSNBC, or any news outlet, would have him on as a guest, let alone a guest host and consider him as a full-time host, is disgusting. How anyone can take this bucket of post-digested food (you know what I mean) seriously is a testament to how far we’re fallen as a society. He should be shunned, not hired.

On the plus side, if there is such a thing in this case, maybe Sharpton can finally get around to paying the $3.7 million in back taxes he owes. Though, given his history and being the good “progressives” that he is, he’ll find a way around that too. Society needs to flush the toilet that contains him and start over.

Also-Ran Stories

Our Future’s So Dim, We Gotta Wear Night Vision Goggles. Labels are stupid, but they’re also commonplace, so they have to be used sometimes in order to make a larger point. That being said, have you heard of “Millennials”? They used to be called Generation Y, but that probably didn’t sell enough movie tickets and t-shirts, so now we have “Millennials.” Whatever you call them, they’re the people between the ages of 18 and 30, they have inflated self-esteem, unearned egos and a sense of entitlement that rivals anything you’ve ever heard about any Hollywood diva. CNN has a story where the title says it all - “Millennials need fun, flexibility at work.” If we were each allowed to punch one person in the nose based upon their title, my choice would be Jason Dorsey. Why Jason? Because he is a “Gen-Y Consultant” who, according to CNN, makes “up to $25,000 per speech teaching Fortune 500 companies how to work with his generation.” Actually, I’d rather punch anyone who hires Dorsey. He teaches companies how to make nice with Millennials so they don’t run crying to the bathroom or throw a hissy-fit every time something doesn’t go their way. Dorsey’s says, “The reality is, we've had parents who have told us how great we are since we were kids, you know. We listen to Baby Einstein to get smarter. We go to school and suffer from grade inflation, and if we didn't get an A, we went and negotiated. We've built up our self-esteem, and the result is, we can't deal with adversity.” Maybe I’d rather punch their parents in the nose...Hell, there really isn’t a winner in the bunch. This is the end result of the liberal’s desire to make everyone feel good about themselves all the time, the mentality that gave us the “participation ribbon,” trophies for everyone and not keeping score at kid’s sporting events. The Millennials are in for a big, wet dead fish across the face as they get older if they don’t remove their heads from their ocular self-colonoscopy and get in touch with reality. When asked about the complaints he hears about this generation, Dorsey says, “The big one I hear about, and I'm guilty too, is a sense of entitlement...It's showing up and just feeling like people owe you things.” Maybe we owe people with this attitude that punch in the nose I was talking about. At least we’d do it out of the hope of waking them up rather than the way their attitude will inspire a guy in a bar to do it. At least that’s what we can tell ourselves to justify our smirk and sense of satisfaction after we do it.

Celebrity Stalkers Rush To Join The Marines. First it was Mila Kunis, then Justin Timberlake, then Betty White was asked to the Marine Corp Ball. While Kunis and Timberlake have agreed, White has a scheduling conflict and had to decline. To fill the void left by Betty’s absence, up stepped Sarah Connor herself, Linda Hamilton. The star of the Terminator and TV’s Chuck has offered herself up as a consolation date to Sgt. Ray Lewis to the November event. Expect this trend to continue and more invites to happen. This is a great trend that is a long time coming. Hollywood has spent the bulk of the last decade, even longer, making flop after flop where the military were painted as evil, racist or the enemy (Lions for Lambs, Green Zone or Rendition anyone?), so some love is long overdue. While this love is great, it would be much nicer if the producers who are willing to waste tens or hundreds of millions of dollars making movies where the military is the villain decided to make some where they are portrayed as the heroes they are, but that might be a bridge too far at this point. Baby-steps...

And In The End...

Friendly Fascism. The BBC has decided they no longer need to include scientists whose opinions or studies disagree with the orthodoxy of the Holy Church of Global Warming. That’s right, if you aren’t on board with Pope Al Gore’s money-making scheme you aren’t needed at the BBC. They might still have differing points of view on the air, but the “false balance” presented by those who, say, point out these enviro-alarmists were warning of a new ice age in the 1970s will no longer be sought out. It’s amazing how science in this one area has gone from empirical evidence and provable conclusions to best guesses and majority vote. It’s particularly odd that media outlets, who are quick to point out any study on, say, oil exploration by a group remotely funded, even in the past, by an oil company is suspect when the global warming industrial complex is so completely dependent upon government funding and these “voting” scientists would see their funding dry up if this hoax were exposed. In fact, if global warming is proven, why are we still studying whether or not it’s happening? Shouldn’t that funding be eliminated? No one studies why we have tides, we know why, so why study what we already know? No one is proposing to stop the gravy train because it’s just that - a gravy train. It’s much easier to get paid trying to prove the unprovable than it is to get a real job where they expect results. Hmm, maybe we should study how many of these “scientists” are Millennials...

You Can’t Even Get A Refrigerator Box This Cheap. Finally, neighbors are upset with this guy in Texas who got a $330,000 house for $16. (I’m upset that it wasn’t me.) Instead of being upset by the guy who took advantage of the rules, maybe they should focus their animus at those who made the rules. This is a testament to that fact that government, even in a conservative state like Texas, can grow so big that no one, or almost no one, knows all the rules they’ve created until it’s too late. More power to this guy...until there is less power to the government.

Much more to cover, not enough time. I’ll just say RIP the Space Shuttle program. Sad that little kids will now grow up dreaming of being astronauts...who have to fly to Russia to hitchhike into space.

That is all, go about your week.
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To read another article by Derek Hunter, click here.