Tag: cable news

The Jig is Up

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I read today that Rachel Maddow is taking a pay cut over at MSNBC.  She will go from making $30 million to $25 million a year.  Well, I guess she’ll still be able to afford all the lesbian leisure wear and sensible shoes her heart desires.  But it must be devastating knowing she’s already peaked and from now on she’ll have to start clipping out coupons to take that trip to Davos.

I guess the changing world isn’t just impacting the deplorables.  The Masters of the Universe haven’t just disrupted the lives of the factory workers whose factories were shipped off to China but they replaced cable television with on-line video games, TikTok and YouTube.  The market for Maddow, Anderson Cooper and the rest of the cable news “stars” at CNN, MSNBC and even Fox News is rapidly shrinking.  The era of thirty or even twenty-million-dollar cable news contracts is over.  That kind of money is reserved for people who can draw enormous audiences.  Joe Rogan is an example and so are the ”influencers” who have YouTube channels that draw tens of millions of viewers.  Meanwhile CNN and MSNBC can’t even break the hundred thousand viewer mark lately for their crummy shows.  And yet all these shows pay their talent millions of dollars.

That math doesn’t work.  As previously discussed, these cable channels will be spun off from their parent companies and forced to sink or swim.  And the only way they can swim is to either:

  • Reduce their costs down to almost nothing, or
  • Provide value that will attract more customers

But how can people like Joy Reid or Joe Scarborough attract an audience?  They’re talentless hacks.  All they can do is keep reducing their price to match their employer’s death spiral.

But eventually an equilibrium will be reached and a new model will take hold for providing news and opinion to the digital masses.  I’ll be honest I’m not sure exactly what will emerge.  What makes sense is a bunch of subscriptions that run the gamut from hard news outlets that possess reporters in the field, to opinion writers, to entertainers.

Something like that makes sense to me.  After all there was nothing permanent about the cable networks or even the “big three” news teams of the broadcast networks.  All of them were artifacts of the changing landscape created by the waves of innovation in journalism caused by the introduction of first radio, then tv, then cable tv and finally the internet.  All of these were commercial endeavors and each eventually changed shape to accommodate the market forces that developed.

The dominance of leftists in the current media landscape seems to guarantee that the majority of those about to be unemployed will be people I despise.  I can’t pretend that won’t provide me with great satisfaction in the weeks and months ahead.  So many of these people are smug, entitled losers who lack the self-awareness to anticipate what they are heading for.

Well, enough lefty bashing.  Time will tell if what replaces the current system will be an improvement over the MSM.  All I know for sure is that it won’t include Joy Reid and Joe Scarborough pulling down multi-million-dollar salaries.

Going, Going, Gone

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As I noted today, Morning Schmoe is kneeling in the snow outside the Pope’s window begging for clemency.  And he’s just the first.  There isn’t enough money at CNN and MSNBC to employ 20% of the talentless hacks that are currently on the payroll.  I can’t imagine that Warner Bros. Discovery wants to continue paying Anderson Cooper $20 million a year for doing whatever it is he does.  And there’s no way on Earth that NBC Universal is going to pay Joy Reid anything at all for the toxic sideshow that she puts on over there.  But the question mark is who gets to stay?

Will they keep some of the marquee players to maintain the pretense that these cable channels are “serious” journalism?  Or will they keep the cheapest talent and try to turn a profit that way?  If they’re smart, I think they should follow the latter course.  Their ratings have already reached the bottom so quality is no longer a consideration.  Cutting costs might extend the viability of these companies for a little longer.  But what’s going to happen to all of these unemployed “journalists?”  In a way CNN did a favor to Chris Cuomo and Don Lemon by letting them go first.  They got the first chance to find jobs before the glut of their peers.  Both of those guys probably lined up some sweet assignments with Uber and Papa Gino’s.

And things aren’t going to be much better for the Fox News guys.  Cable News is a dying industry.  For the foreseeable future it will be like a giant game of musical chairs with fewer and fewer chairs to go around.  Think of all the amazing characters that will disappear from your tv screen (well, that is if you regularly watch MSNBC and CNN.  Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough.  Jonathan Capehart, Chris Hayes, Rachel Maddow, Andrea Mitchell, Lawrence O’Donnell, Jen Psaki, Joy Reid, Al Sharpton, Chuck Todd, Dana Bash, Anderson Cooper, Van Jones and Jake Tapper.

Look at those names.  Irreplaceable talent.  Almost like friends; like really, really annoying friends.  The kind who says inappropriate things and borrow money.  The kind who won’t leave at the end of a party.  And suddenly they’ll all be gone.

Well maybe I can cope with the sadness of their loss by making a game of it.  Maybe I can start a betting pool on who goes first.  Who cries on screen?  Who takes the largest voluntary pay cut?  Who has to share an office with the security staff (my money is on Lawrence O’Donnell, he looks reasonable)?  Who goes postal (Mika)?

But most interesting is which if any will make the ultimate compromise and become a conservative to try and get a job at Fox News?  I’d say the early money is on our good friend Joe Scarborough.  After all he was a Republican congressman before having the lobotomy.  It wouldn’t take hardly any makeup to turn him into a rabid MAGA attack dog.  And I’m sure Mika could make the same transition with no real difficulty at all.  Boy, it’s good that the fourth estate is there to take care of us.

Podcast Musings on a Friday Morning

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So, I started my Friday as I usually do, listening to the mellifluous tones of the ZMan Power Hour podcast while I exercise.  And as luck would have it, today’s show was made up of several segments about things in the news.  I like this kind of show because he puts his slant on these topics and it gives him a chance to be amusing at the expense of the clowns involved.

For instance, he commented on the recent Banking Sub-Committee meeting that featured Senator John Fetterman.  After a few clips of Fetterman attempting to articulate complete sentences about the recent bank failures ZMan opined that the real takeaway was that the Democrats want Fetterman there because having a brain damaged hobo in the Senate further disrupts the norms of our society.  After all, if the most powerful deliberative body in the world can include a man who can no longer master the use of the definite article, “the” in his sentences then why shouldn’t the country go for decades without negotiating a budget for the federal government.

And I get his point.  But the reward for me is listening to someone who can interlard his speech with a description like “brain-damaged hobo.”  There’s an eloquence, a style there.  We have to enjoy our lives and having someone as witty as that provides the opportunity.  And he has a number of these witticisms.  Some he borrows from impeccable sources.  He has taken Oscar Wilde’s phrase, “It would take a heart of stone not to laugh at …” and used it to very good effect on a number of occasions.  He invented that excellent trope “Xirl Science” where he reads from the published papers of mostly female practitioners of usually social sciences like “gender studies.”  The contents are sometimes hilarious in their use of pseudoscientific jargon and obvious lack of rigor or even coherence.  But my all-time favorite ZMan-ism was when he called David French an obsequious rumpswab.  It doesn’t get better than that.

I don’t always agree with all of the ZMan’s conclusions.  But his analysis of what’s going on is usually very insightful.  And his podcast is extremely well done.  The audio quality is good.  His thought process is clear and well enunciated and there is enough humor with the often-distressing message about our times to keep us from gagging on the medicine.

So, he did a segment on Tucker Carlson’s banishment from Fox News and their replacing him.  And while discussing this he made the point that eliminating Tucker Carlson may have also been a business decision based on the reality of cable news economics.  Not enough people are getting their news from cable channels to make it a lucrative business.  The highest rated news channels get one or two million viewers.  There are YouTube channels that get ten times that.  If Fox News pays Tucker Carlson millions of dollars a year, then there isn’t that much left for their bottom line.  And they would prefer to pay chump change to some kid to read off the teleprompter instead.  And I think he’s right.  They’ll be “retiring” all the high salary pundits and hiring kids who just want a job.

And that makes sense.  If a place like Twitter will give a megaphone to independent contractors like Tucker Carlson it may not be long before cable news is a thing of the past.  And that’s good.  The news channels have been shown to be a racket with their sham objectivity and their willingness to lie for the powers that be.  In a sense what I do is no different from what the pundits perform.  The only difference is the economics.  And honestly, that seems to be shifting too.

The ZMan provides a quality product.  The value proposition he provides is very equitable.  He provides entertainment and valuable information.  That’s much more than you get from many cable news shows.  So, it was a good lesson I took away.

Now to figure out a way to make it pay!