Comedy Gold from the Grauniad

You know, I often say that I read the Guardian so that you don’t have to, but maybe you really should read it occasionally. After all, why deprive yourselves of comedic gems like this?

For several years, Brian Stelter’s Sunday show on CNN, Reliable Sources, has been a reliable source of intelligent criticism.

Don’t worry, it gets even funnier.

The show was commercially successful. Its ratings have suffered somewhat lately but it was doing better than several of CNN’s prime time shows.

Doing better than other CNN shows is a bar so low that the average microbe would struggle to limbo under it. Without a steady diet of ‘Orange Man Bad!’ to pull in the NPC crowd, CNN’s ratings have tanked by some 90 per cent since 2021. It struggles to pull just over 500,000 viewers in a week: The BFD averaged more than that last year. Timcast had 34,000 viewers just to watch an empty studio, after they were swatted mid-broadcast.

So, who wrote the above knee-slappers?

Ohhh… Robert Reich. That explains everything.

Reich is to good journalism, let alone facts, what the Bubonic Plague was to public health.

A lawyer who pretends to be an economic commentator, and former Clinton hack, Reich has been called a “pestilential midget”, for suggesting that other Democrat senators slap Kyrsten Sinema, and mocked for his “incorrect facts and his embarrassing misunderstanding of basic issues about which economists agree”. He has, as other critics argue, written some very stupid words in the service of very stupid ideas.

Reich’s stupid words and ideas include railing at CEOs for supposedly making too much money: at the same time that he earns over a quarter-mill a year for teaching a single undergraduate course, one day a week at UC Berkeley. He also pulls in a lazy 40 grand for a one-hour talk, not including plus first-class travel for one or two people from California, hotel accommodations for up to two nights, ground transportation, meals and incidentals.

Oh, and he’s a Bernie Sanders supporter. ’Nuff said.

As a fearless champion of the poor and downtrodden, Reich clearly feels a twinge of sympathy for a CNN anchor who’s just been unceremoniously shown the door (I mean, how bad do you have to be, to get sacked by CNN?).

Because it’s all a dastardly, right-wing conspiracy, see?

CNN’s new corporate overseer is Warner Brothers Discovery, Inc, which now owns what used to be Time Warner, including CNN. The CEO of Warner Brothers Discovery is David Zaslav.

Zaslav has been prodding Licht to reposition CNN to the center, and be a network preferred by “everybody … Republicans, Democrats”.

I mean, how dare a media boss aim for his network to be centrist and appeal to as many people as possible?

And you just know that the ever-reliable Argumentum ad Murdochiam is coming, don’t you?

But CNN is never going to be the network preferred by Republicans. Fox News has that sewn up.

The Guardian

…Aaand, there it is!

One might be forgiven that that’s what’s really set a bee in Reich’s empty, echoing bonnet: Fox News is just slaughtering the rest of the legacy media. Fox pulls more viewers CNN and MSNBC combined, for up to 25 weeks running. Fox especially dominates the prime-time market.

It must be Evil Rupert Murdoch sending out his thought-control rays from his underground lair, as he cackles maniacally and pulls the strings of puppet governments around the world. Well, listening to gibbering loons like Reich and Australia’s own miserable ghost, Kevin Rudd, that’s apparently what he does all day.

Or maybe, just maybe, his networks put out content that people choose to watch and subscribe to. The Murdoch papers dominate the Australian news scene, not because he owns the most number of mastheads, but because they outsell the rest by a country mile.

This is the same reason – basic trust – that sites like The BFD are seriously challenging the legacy media, without a cent of government bribery money.

So, no matter what clowns like Reich may desperately want to believe, the market has spoken.