The descent was gradual—a slide into the tawdry, the trivial and the inane, into the charade on cable news channels such as Fox and MSNBC in which hosts hold up corporate political puppets to laud or ridicule, and treat celebrity foibles as legitimate news. But if I had to pick a date when commercial television decided amassing corporate money and providing entertainment were its central mission, when it consciously chose to become a carnival act, it would probably be Feb. 25, 2003, when MSNBC took Phil Donahue off the air because of his opposition to the calls for war in Iraq.
Donahue and Bill Moyers, the
last honest men on national television, were the only two major TV news
personalities who presented the viewpoints of those of us who challenged the
rush to war in Iraq. General Electric and Microsoft—MSNBC’s founders and defense
contractors that went on to make tremendous profits from the war—were not about
to tolerate a dissenting voice. Donahue was fired, and at PBS Moyers was
subjected to tremendous pressure. An internal MSNBC memo leaked to the press
stated that Donahue was hurting the image of the network. He would be a
“difficult public face for NBC in a time of war,” the memo read. Donahue never
returned to the airwaves.
The celebrity trolls who
currently reign on commercial television, who bill themselves as liberal or
conservative, read from the same corporate script. They spin the same court
gossip. They ignore what the corporate state wants ignored. They champion what
the corporate state wants championed. They do not challenge or acknowledge the
structures of corporate power. Their role is to funnel viewer energy back into
our dead political system—to make us believe that Democrats or Republicans are
not corporate pawns. The cable shows, whose hyperbolic hosts work to make us
afraid self-identified liberals or self-identified conservatives, are part of a
rigged political system, one in which it is impossible to vote against the
interests of Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, General Electric or ExxonMobil.
These corporations, in return for the fear-based propaganda, pay the lavish
salaries of celebrity news people, usually in the millions of dollars. They make
their shows profitable. And when there is war these news personalities assume
their “patriotic” roles as cheerleaders, as Chris Matthews—who makes an
estimated $5 million a year—did, along with the other MSNBC and Fox
hosts.
It does not matter that these
celebrities and their guests, usually retired generals or government officials,
got the war terribly wrong. Just as it does not matter that Francis Fukuyama and Thomas Friedman were
wrong on the wonders of unfettered corporate capitalism and globalization. What
mattered then and what matters now is likability—known in television and
advertising as the Q score—not honesty and truth. Television news celebrities
are in the business of sales, not journalism. They peddle the ideology of the
corporate state. And too many of us are buying.
