#CNN Early Start With Kasie Hunt

[thenewdemocratus]

Kasie Hunt: Special Counsel Report Says Donald Trump Would’ve Been Convicted in Election Case

Source:The New Democrat “Attorney General Merrick Garland has publicly released special counsel Jack Smith’s report on his investigation into Donald Trump and efforts to overturn the 2020 election, detailing the president-elect’s “criminal efforts to retain power” and projecting confidence in the investigation.” Source:CNN with a look at the insurrectionist and convicted felon, to ever be elected…

[bllsbailey]

Scott Jennings Drives the Final Spike Into the 'Never Trump' Campaign As Only He Can

There's been a lot of talk since Election Day about the winners and losers in the various races, but one group on the losing side that hasn't gotten a lot of attention in the aftermath of what's gone down so far has been the infamous Never Trump grifters.

We've written about them often here, and how for eight years they've betrayed their supposed "principles" every time they've opened their mouths, have cashed another check from their fat cat Democrat donors and/or media overlords, or in one group's instance allegedly looked the other way during a sexual predator scandal.

Among the worst of the lot, of course, are the co-founders of the Lincoln Project, for whom no low is too low to stoop.

SEE ALSO:Lincoln Project's Rick Wilson Can't Escape His Own Stench After Moving on to Latest Grift

With all of that in mind, we turn to more Election Day post-mortem commentary from Republican strategist/CNN political analyst Scott Jennings, who - as we previously - reported - delivered some harsh reality checks to his colleagues and Democrats in the early morning hours about the "we're fed up" message sent by voters during Tuesday's elections. 

A few hours later, Jennings proved that he was not done after a statement issued from anti-Trumper Liz Cheney regarding the president-elect's resounding victory prompted him to drive the final spike into the whole Never/Anti-Trump campaign. 

Here's how the segment started:

KASIE HUNT: Liz Cheney tweeting her reaction to Donald Trump's win just moments ago. Here's what she says, quote, "Our nation's democratic system functioned last night, and we have a new president-elect. All Americans are bound, whether we like the outcome or not, to accept the results of our elections. We now have a special responsibility as citizens of the greatest nation on earth to do everything we can to support and defend our Constitution, preserve the rule of law, and ensure that our institutions hold over these coming four years. Citizens across this country, our courts, members of the press, and those serving in our federal, state, and local governments must now be the guardrails of democracy." So, of course, Liz Cheney had devoted herself to preventing Donald Trump from ever entering the White House again, but the never- Trump movement inside the Republican Party, honestly, not borne out here today.

This was Jennings' response:

SCOTT JENNINGS: A bang-up job. I mean, I -- this never-Trump whole complex that grew over the last several years, nothing has ever failed as hard in politics as this. The Lincoln Project, all these people that built millions upon millions upon millions of dollars from Democratic donors, and all the eggs that was put in this basket. The split was amazing. Trump got like 94 percent of Republicans. I don't think they accomplished anything, except probably build a bunch of beach houses. That's about what they did. Republicans being lectured to, condescended to, browbeaten by all these folks over the last -- look, at some juncture, it's OK if we have different opinions about the election. You don't have to beat people to death over it. And the more you do that, the more it drives people away. Total failure

I don't think there's any room for argument there. 

And while Trump's "NeverTrump" detractors like Rick Wilson and the like would say "Well, we helped kick him out of office in 2020," the net effect of that effort was a) to make Trump get even louder and b) to drive even more people in Trump's direction (including bigtime movers and shakers like Elon Musk and Joe Rogan), which culminated in one of the most (if not the most) spectacular comebacks in American political history.

Something equally delicious about the voter repudiation of these types of tactics on Tuesday will be that five or 10 years down the road and beyond, very few people will remember much about the NeverTrump movement. But they will for sure remember how Trump seemingly rose from the political ashes to get his revenge in the best way possible: by way of the ballot box.

RELATED:House Democrat Drops Truth Bomb on Woke Elites in Aftermath of Party's Election Day Drubbing

[ausetkmt]

Chaos on Twitter Leads a Group of Journalists to Start an Alternative

Nov. 21, 2022Updated 8:50 p.m. ET

It’s one thing to hope for a better community online, and another, very different one, to build it. Just ask the users and administrators of journa.host, which was started by journalists concerned over the direction of Twitter.

“Come on in, the water’s confusing but fine — and more swimmable,” the journalist Virginia Heffernan wrote on journa.host on Nov. 6.

On Nov. 7 the MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan posted: “I feel like a new kid in a new school.”

The network is the brainchild of Adam Davidson, a journalist who helped found “Planet Money” and has worked at The New York Times and The New Yorker. He said the jump from Twitter to the new site reminded him of his family’s move to Vermont from New York City, a few years ago.

Journa.host is part of Mastodon, a vast network of thousands of servers that look and function much like Twitter. Over the past three weeks, hundreds of thousands of people, seeking an alternative to Twitter as Elon Musk took over, have signed up for Mastodon, according to Eugen Rochko, who created the software in 2016. Many of them are journalists.

But because so much news happens on Twitter — and because Twitter itself is such a news story — the social network symbolized by a tiny bird casts a very large shadow over the social network named after a giant prehistoric beast.

Shortly after Mr. Musk bought Twitter, he offered up the blue check mark verification to anyone willing to pay $8 a month. (The rollout has since been put on pause.) To Mr. Davidson, this was a crisis for journalists. If anyone could pass themselves off as, say, Adam Davidson, who could trust that Adam Davidson was Adam Davidson?

“It felt scary to imagine a world where false verification would reign,” Mr. Davidson said.

Indeed, a wave of verified impostors followed Mr. Musk’s decision, including a fake LeBron James account that tweeted a trade request and a fake Eli Lilly account that claimed the drugmaker would be providing insulin to the public for free.

On Nov. 4, Mr. Davidson started journa.host. To join, applicants have to prove that they are journalists, through a working professional email account, say, or recent clips.

The network currently has almost 2,000 members, and they include the hyperlocal and the national, weathermen and sports reporters. Jelani Cobb, the dean of Columbia Journalism School, is a member, as is Kasie Hunt, the CNN anchor.; some journalists from The Times are also members.

To manage the flood of applicants, Mr. Davidson has been joined by a part-time volunteer staff of nine journalists, who verify new members; Mr. Davidson said that a few applicants had been rejected because they work in public relations. Journa.host received $12,000 in funding from the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY’s Tow-Knight Center, which has been used so far to pay server and domain registration fees.”

For the many journalists who use Twitter, it serves several roles: assignment editor, ombudsperson, sourcing tool, clubhouse, hype machine, pillory, legitimizer.

Journa.host bills itself as “a reliable home for journalists,” and it has greater ambitions than just verifying journalists’ identities, though its rollout has not been without bumps.

Mr. Musk’s early run at Twitter has been chaotic, as he has slashed thousands of jobs and reinstated banned accounts. Many journalists have publicly criticized these and other moves, often on Twitter itself, and some have started, or joined, conversations about Twitter alternatives.

“The period in which Twitter served as a clubhouse for journalists was valuable for journalism as a profession,” said Steven I. Weiss, an investigative journalist who is one of the moderators of journa.host.

Mastodon is an idiosyncratic place, a so-called federation of nearly 8,000 servers, many with their own community norms. Users pick a server — such as journa.host — and can interact with other users throughout Mastodon, with exceptions. If this all sounds complicated, that’s because it is; links to guides and F.A.Q.s about the service are frequently “boosted” (similar to a retweet).

Journa.host users are figuring out almost everything about Mastodon on the fly, including, for starters, what to call Twitter. For many, it’s “the bird site.” For others, it’s “the bird app” or “the Bad Place.” For years, the Mastodon equivalent of “tweets” were “toots,” as from a trunk. On Nov. 14, as part of a software update, the service replaced “toot” with “publish.”

Using journa.host feels a little like crossing the border to a kinder, more rule-bound, less dynamic country. Susanne Althoff, a user and former magazine editor, compared journa.host to zine culture.

“The conversation is still very much a low murmur,” Mr. Weiss said.

Many journa.host members use the service no differently than they use Twitter, sometimes posting the same text simultaneously to each platform.

Indeed, at times, journa.host looks a lot like Twitter, just without all the non-journalists and most of the nastiness.

Frequent topics on journa.host include the deficiencies of Twitter (hate-filled, attention-addled, ruled by an impulsive billionaire), the deficiencies of Mastodon (hard to use, lacking a quote-retweet function, boring), and journalists’ ambivalence about the transition.

“I am having a hard time letting go of the birdsite but I was raised by an alcoholic so I understand what a trauma bond is,” the political journalist Ana Marie Cox wrote on journa.host on Nov. 20.

Mr. Davidson said that he had become concerned in recent years about what he called the “extreme emotional engagement” encouraged by Twitter. The slower pace and calmer rhythms of Mastodon have made him appreciate how a platform’s algorithms and options for, say, retweeting, shape the way its users interact, he said.

“I’m not sure the versions of me on these different platforms would like each other,” he said.

And some of the relative calm Mr. Davidson sees may also be a function of journa.host’s narrow user base. It’s a server just for journalists — or more accurately, the people the administrators of journa.host deem to be journalists. That has led to accusations (on Twitter, where else?) that the server is an attempt by the moderators to “gatekeep their peers.”

In response, Mr. Weiss said that being denied entry to journa.host doesn’t currently prevent access to journa.host content, which users of many other Mastodon servers can see.

Regardless, any attempt to turn journa.host into a walled garden, free from the issues of Twitter, is probably doomed to fail: The conflicts that have at times inflamed Twitter have already caused problems for Mr. Davidson and his team.

On Nov. 18, the journalist Mike Pesca, who hosts the popular news podcast “The Gist,” posted a link to a Times story about health concerns associated with the puberty-blocking drugs sometimes prescribed to transgender youths, writing, “This seemed like careful, thorough reporting.”

In response, Parker Molloy, a journalist who writes the Substack newsletter “The Present Age,” accused Mr. Pesca of anti-trans bigotry, and then posted angrily at Mr. Davidson for not removing the post.

“@adamdavidson’s decision not to take action on anti-trans content isn’t inspiring confidence and I totally understand why other places are doing instance-level blocking,” she wrote on journa.host. (Instance-level blocking refers to the ability, on Mastodon, for one server to block content from another.)

Zach Everson, one of the journa.host administrators, responded that he agreed with Ms. Molloy, then added, “Banning someone for posting a link to an NYT article sets a precedent that we really need to work through.”

On Saturday, journa.host suspended Mr. Pesca, who was informed via a text message from Mr. Davidson, a longtime friend. (The two are currently writing an exchange of letters hosted on Substack, about the nature of cancel culture.) According to Mr. Pesca, Mr. Davidson told him he had been suspended for referring to Ms. Molloy as an “activist,” which was dismissive. The suspension “seemed arbitrary and ad hoc,” Mr. Pesca said in an interview; Ms. Molloy didn’t respond to a message seeking comment.

“We want to be a place for passionate engaged discussion,” said Mr. Davidson, who recused himself from the decision because of his relationship with Mr. Pesca. “But we don’t want to be a place where people insult each other.”

Also on Saturday, Ms. Molloy appeared on a different Mastodon server, and announced that she, too, had been suspended from journa.host for her posts.

“Did it break their rules over there? Yes, so they were certainly in their rights to suspend me from there,” she wrote. And then, in a subsequent post she wrote, “I mostly just want to be left alone.” (Later, Ms. Molloy posted an apology to Mr. Pesca.)

The staff will have to confront issues that will be familiar to anyone who has used Twitter, including bots.

“So far no Nazis in my Mastodon feed,” Bill Grueskin, a Columbia Journalism School professor, wrote in a post on journa.host on Monday, referring to the widely held perception that Mr. Musk has relaxed restrictions against hate speech. “But these ladies have shown up.”

Mr. Grueskin attached a picture of a young woman who said her name was Emma, from another Mastodon server, who had tagged him in a post. She appeared to be a bot.

“Your pictures look so elegant,” it read. “I love meeting new people and learning by sharing with each other, I think it’s good for improving yourself too.”

For the volunteers who run journa.host, it has all been a brutal introduction to the no-easy-answers world of content moderation, one that might have engendered, if not exactly empathy, a better understanding of the challenges that big social media platforms face.

According to Kelly McBride, senior vice president and chair of the Craig Newmark Center for Ethics and Leadership at the nonprofit Poynter Institute, Poynter is in talks with the journa.host team about bringing the social network under its umbrella. For the overworked administrators of the server, it would come as a relief.

“We don’t have the time to be doing this,” Mr. Weiss said.

[keywestlou]

POLITICAL DEBAUCHERY

Why the lies? Why the deception? Not by Trump. By the major companies and people who support him.

Take the issue as to the need to be vaccinated.

FOX News more than 200 times has suggested not getting vaccinated. Vaccinations unnecessary, even dangerous.

FOX has made vaccinations an issue with its employees. Get vaccinated or you’re fired! One or the other. No vaccination, no job.

Management and the broadcasters must get off on it. A form of political debauchery.

It has become known as “dismissive vaccine coverage.” Particularly dangerous to FOX’s older audience.

An example. A few weeks ago, FOX News host Laura Ingraham did what she has done over the past year: Scoffed at the danger posed by the coronavirus pandemic.

She was interviewing Florida’s Governor DeSantis at the time. Ingraham stated, “They just can’t let the pandemic go.” DeSantis agreed simultaneously dismissing the idea his State was at risk.

Since DeSantis’ appearance, his reelection committee has begun selling merchandise mocking pandemic restrictions. Also since the appearance, the 7 day average of new coronavirus cases has quadrupled in Florida.

The first Capitol offender charged with a felony has been sentenced. Eight months in prison.

The length of the sentence disgraceful.

Thirty eight year old Paul Hodgkins pled guilty last month to obstructing Congressional proceedings – specifically the counting of electoral votes. He had been in the Senate chamber 15 minutes wearing a Donald Trump tee shirt and carrying a Trump flag.

Federal Judge Randolph Moss said Hodgkins deserved some leniency because he pled guilty “exceptionally early,” was not involved in violence, and issued a “sincere apology.”

Judge Ross was wrong. Off base in the sentence. It was way too lenient. Hodgkins was involved in an insurrection in one of the most sacred American buildings. His presence alone warranted a significant sentence. Federal judges normally do give credit to a defendant who pleads “exceptionally early.” Hodgkins’ crime was not a normal one, however.

When was there a previous insurrection at the Capitol? Never! The insurrection itself was a “unique experience requiring a unique application of justice.”

Amazing. Defecate on the U.S. Capitol and walk away with a slap on the hand meager sentence!

The sentence imposed by Judge Ross has set a standard by which the other 500 plus defendants will expect to be sentenced.

Kasie Hunt. An outstanding TV journalist. Always charming. Right on. No bullshit. Called them as she saw them. Never wrong.

She announced last friday she was leaving MSNBC. A quick comment to that effect at the end of her 5 am show Way Too Early. She was interviewed later when she appeared on Morning Joe. No one asked her why she was leaving, where she was going, etc.

It now appears to have been revealed. Hunt is going to CNN. Her responsibility to develop streaming control platforms. A burgeoning area in television.

Money has to have been a part of her judgment factor. She was earning $250,000 a year at MSNBC. Her new position with CNN will pay between $1 million to $1.5 million per year.

No one can argue with her move.

The word on the street is NBC could not match CNN’s offer.

The college football season less than 2 months away. Coach Dino Barber announced Tony DeVito has the “edge” to be starting quarterback.

I am disappointed DeVito might be the starting quarterback. He failed last year. I was not impressed. He simply did not have it. I feel it will be the same this year.

Syracuse fans are desperate for a “good season.” It has been years. It should be a new quarterback for a new Carrier Dome.

The Olympic Village in Tokyo is being labeled “anti-sex.” The beds are constructed of cardboard and easily fall apart with more than a sleeping body on them.

The Olympic hierarchy claims the purpose of the cardboard beds is to prevent coronavirus from spreading.

The athletes look at it differently. They believe the real reason is “to avoid intimacy among athletes.”

All good the cardboard beds will do. Where there is a will there is a way. Youthful roaring sex drives will not be denied.

Gold, etc. from Atocha found again last friday. The strike did not provide anywhere near as much as in previous discoveries. However it will keep the Mel Fisher divers at their work.

The strike revealed 1 gold coin, 2 silver ones, and an ancient musket ball.

Atocha went down 400 years ago. The gold coin found still bright and shiny. It was 30 feet down under 10 feet of sand.

The diver comes from a family who have found gold and other items from Atocha in years gone by. In 1985, the diver’s father was part of the team that discovered a bonanza. One hundred sixty five pounds of gold finger bars and chains. At another time, his mother was part of the team that discovered treasure from the mother load itself.

I have begun sharing Steve Thompson’s recollections of Key West beginning in 1973 for a very simple reason. People want to know what went on back then.

Today TACOS paragraph 4.

I met the big guy named Bud Man / He had a glass of rose in his right hand / He always had a smile on his face / He rented me my first taco place / He owned the Old Anchor Inn next door / It was the old town underground drug store / All the locals called it the “Snake Pit” / ‘Till the Feds moved in and closed it / He invited me to his house one day / And immediately gave me a glass of rose / He had chickens and ducks and rabbits too / The doors were all open they just walked right through / Bud Man and Dorothy were legends here / They sure helped me out that whole first year / Everyone remembers Bud to this day / With that big warm smile and a glass of rose.

Tonight my blog talk radio show. Tuesday Talk with Key West Lou. Nine my time. Join me. Lots of fun. Louis ranting and raving. www.blogtalkradio.com/key-west-lou.

Enjoy your day!

POLITICAL DEBAUCHERY was originally published on Key West Lou

[thisdaynews]

Inside Kamala's campaign-changing strike on Biden

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/inside-kamalas-campaign-changing-strike-on-biden/

Inside Kamala's campaign-changing strike on Biden

poster=”http://v.politico.com/images/1155968404/201906/2048/1155968404_6053294016001_6053279540001-vs.jpg?pubId=1155968404″

true

2020 democratic debates

She and her advisers assiduously plotted the attack — and how to capitalize on it afterward.

Kamala Harris’ campaign is spending the next three days trying to extend the best two hours of her political career.

Harris’ surprise cross-examination of frontrunner Joe Biden produced the third-biggest fundraising bonanza since her launch. The Democratic senator is working to capitalize ahead of a crucial second quarter fundraising deadline: She blanketed news shows with nearly a dozen TV appearances, and her digital team is pumping out clips and other reminders of her interrogating Biden, hoping that Democratic voters will envision her doing the same thing to Donald Trump.

Story Continued Below

“It’s a great springboard,” said Bakari Sellers, the former state lawmaker and top Harris surrogate in South Carolina, saying it would add rocket fuel to her end-of-quarter fundraising push. Sellers said he’s taken a just-you-wait approach with people who’ve questioned Harris’ stock. “Last night, everyone said ‘there it is right there.’ No one can describe what ‘it’ is. But now they know she has it.”

Inside Harris’ campaign, the first debate was viewed as the unofficial start of the contest, the first big opportunity when primary voters start paying attention to the presidential race. The debate coincided with a new level of comfort she’s described feeling in recent weeks with opening up about her upbringing and personal life, more than a half-dozen aides and allies told POLITICO, something they’ve been gently urging her to do as a way to forge a connection with many voters who don’t know her.

Harris was seen as having an enviable debate night draw because she avoided a confrontation with a surging Elizabeth Warren in exchange for being among all three of the other top-polling candidates. With Cory Booker appearing on the first night, Harris, whose father immigrated from Jamaica and late mother from India, was also the only black candidate in her Thursday grouping.

Harris’ objective was not to fade into the background of an ideological slugfest between Biden and Bernie Sanders, the advisers said. Her campaign had spent months fixated on Biden, whose support from black voters has kept him atop all of the early polls. They gamed out several scenarios in which she could use her personal story as a point of contrast with his decades-long record, including over his opposition to busing.

In the debate, Harris willed her way into the conversation about race and policing, calmly noting that as the only black person on the stage, she’d like to be heard.

But her opening first came last week when Biden offered nostalgic memories of a time when he worked with segregationist colleagues like Sens. James Eastland and Herman Talmadge, proponents of using states’ rights to slow walk civil rights legislation. Harris, whose sole experience with a full stage of competitors came during her Senate primary in 2016, prepped with a small team of aides in Washington and then in Miami. A senior strategist, Averell “Ace” Smith, imitated Sanders, while Biden was played by Harris’ national press secretary, Ian Sams.

While walking through her planned exchange with Biden over busing, Harris’ campaign planned for a variety of answers from him, from contrition to a more measured approach to the more forceful denial of the position that he ended up giving — a stance that was called out by fact-checkers as untrue given his past quotes rejecting the wisdom of busing.

Harris herself ended up settling on a line that within minutes would appear in social media memes and just a few hours later would be screen printed on t-shirts selling for $29 on her website: “That little girl was me,” she said, of her desegregated class.

“You replay the thing and it seems like she was having a conversation with him,” a Harris campaign official said in playing back the encounter. The point she drove home, the aide added, was “this was something that meant something to me.”

Under no scenario did they consider Biden offering her such a gift to conclude the exchange: “My time is up,” Biden said. “I’m sorry.”

Harris’ aides in the early states said they’ve been inundated with calls since the debate ended, including from activists and officials they’d reached out to weeks ago but hadn’t heard back from. Harris travels next to California where she’ll headline five fundraisers over 30 hours in Los Angeles and the Bay Area, and appear at three events for San Francisco’s Pride celebration.

Harris had been in search of a breakout moment to match her tough questioning of Attorney General William Barr in May, and her pummeling of Trump cabinet officials since she arrived in the Senate in 2017. She proved she can translate that same type of performance to a campaign setting, said Brian Fallon, a former aide to Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer.

“That goes a long way to helping voters envision her prosecuting the case against Trump on a debate stage next fall,” he said, “which is exactly the impression she wants to leave with Democrats who are prioritizing vague notions of electability.”

Harris moved immediately to capture the momentum, which became clear even before the debate ended: The size of her average online contribution shot up 67% in real time. She appeared in four separate on-camera hits with MSNBC and two with CNN late Thursday and early Friday, caught about two hours of sleep and then went live on CBS’ “This Morning,” “Morning Joe” and taped an interview for Sunday with MSNBC’s Kasie Hunt. She visited the for-profit detention center for unaccompanied migrant children, in Homestead, Fla., with other presidential candidates and then raced back to Washington to cast votes in the Senate.

After decamping from California, Harris’ campaign expects her to spend considerable time in Iowa, where she’s been busy hiring more staff and securing caucus commitments. On Friday, Des Moines activist Tom Fisher offered his endorsement, pointing to her firm presence on the debate stage. Fisher’s term for Harris was one she’s used occasionally to describe herself: “joyful warrior.”

Read More

[recentnews18-blog]

New Post has been published on https://shovelnews.com/how-msnbc-created-a-cable-news-addiction-epidemic/

How MSNBC Created a Cable-News Addiction Epidemic

“If it bleeds it leads,” runs the old saying about local news. Family of five killed in crack-fueled home invasion on Long Island. Gang violence on the South Side. Of course, no one watches local news anymore—except, of course, the millions of people the right-wing, Trump-friendly Sinclair stations reach every day. Everyone—meaning everyone but the demographic undesirables watching local news—is watching cable news: Fox News, CNN, MSNBC. A cable-network group head recently moaned to me that his demographically desirable female viewers had, en masse, ditched daytime viewing for MSNBC. As reality TV supplanted soap opera, so now cable news has supplanted reality TV. Thanks to the mix of pre-meditated and accidental outrage emanating hourly from the White House (leavened, albeit less so every day, by entertaining incompetence), cable news is where you go to tap into that need to watch stuff happen—in this case, watch our democracy implode in real time. Had Hillary won, none of this would be here. Sure, Fox News would’ve stuck around for a while, but eventually its viewers would have died off, one by one, pitching forward into their bean casseroles as Tucker Carlson made “I’m a moron” faces at them through the tee vee.

But MSNBC is now challenging Fox News for ratings supremacy. Its main anchor, Rachel Maddow, sometimes out-rates Minister of Propaganda Sean Hannity. Maddow is nominally a straight-news anchor. She does not opine openly; she doesn’t need to. She has become so intertwined with her audience, so intimately in sync with her viewers, that we look for clues in the pitch of her voice, the ratio of her funny-ha-ha faces to her funny-weird faces. Critics like to point to her showman’s over-reliance on storytelling, her long, entertaining multi-block narrative detours—achieving a level of oral folk narrative akin to Russian skaz— as a failure to just give us the facts already. But as Michael Kinsley used to point out: there are plenty of facts; the trick is making them make sense. Maddow is uniquely skilled at pulling in historical antecedents, drawing obscure connections, and smartly distinguishing among known knowns, known unknowns, unknown unknowns. And she is almost alone in understanding the urgency and danger of this moment.

Photos by Heidi Gutman/ABC/Getty Images (Maddow), by Roy Rochlin/FilmMagic (O’Donnell).

MSNBC intuited the nature of the resistance early, quickly promoting its cadre of young, competent, but also, it must be said, unusually winsome reporters to host slots throughout the day. Kasie Hunt, 33, whose excellent Sunday-night show, Kasie DC, is often promoted with a quick AC/DC flare-up, cocks her head slightly to the left and offers a shy smile before delivering the daily horrors. Capping a daytime run of women anchors is fact-based Republican Nicolle Wallace, whose palpable outrage is tempered by “Isn’t this all absurd?” laughter. Heading into the evening hours, the network promoted secret fourth Beastie Boy Ari Melber to the six-o’clock hour and installed guy-your-sister-should’ve-married, Maddow protégé Chris Hayes in the eight-o’clock slot. Melber and Hayes, both shy of 40 and both shockingly smart and well read, port a bit of daytime’s just-back-from-Coachella vibe to the evening hours, providing a counterpoint to Maddow and the slightly world-weary sangfroid of MSNBC’s well-cured inside-the-Beltway alpha males, Chris Matthews (the bumptious one), Lawrence O’Donnell (the mordant one), and Brian Williams (the just-starting-to-age-into-avuncular one). Oddly, perhaps, given that MSNBC is signaling “We got next” millennial optimism, there are only three regular nonwhite hosts: Ali Velshi, a Muslim of Indian extraction; the very un-millennial civil-rights warhorse Al Sharpton; and Joy Reid, who gets to host the weekend early-morning slots previously held by an earlier MSNBC African-American host, Melissa Harris-Perry.

Morning Joe, with its host fiancés, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, is a soap opera of its own. This is not just because of the danger, danger, high-voltage courtship of its co-hosts but also because of their multi-year ménage à trois with Donald Trump, whose self-love loomed over the proceedings each morning during the campaign, phoning in (from bed, it seemed) to goof off live on early-morning TV. When Joe and Mika finally, inevitably, turned on Trump last year, he responded like a spurned lover, describing Brzezinski as bleeding from plastic surgery. Morning Joe has been a masterpiece of triangulation: after competing with CNN to give Trump uncritical airtime in 2016, it has morphed into the smartest critique of Trump and Trumpism outside of Maddow.

Which brings us to the problem with MSNBC and this cable-news moment in general. It is not bias, though Fox News goes far beyond mere bias to provide an all-sheltering disinformation bubble. It is the way cable news traps us in the daily drama, forces us to watch the news ping-pong back and forth across our screens, locked in a variant version of the feelings Alex Heard first called hathos—hate + pathos—the cringe-y pleasure derived from watching bad things happen to other people. In this case, the pleasure is mostly gone, but the hathotic (if I may) compulsion grows ever stronger, because the bad things are happening, or are about to happen, to us.

MSNBC, like Fox News, uses remarkable message discipline to keep focus on each day’s A-story. That’s short-now thinking, which was O.K. at a time of less moment. Right now, it’s the long now that requires attention: Dark historical forces are moving the ground beneath our feet. Democracy is in danger here and around the world. Maddow’s boomeranging history lessons, which return elegantly to bong us in the head with their chilling resonances, and the estimable house historians Jon Meacham and Michael Beschloss, give us glimpses into where we’re headed. But, in general, cable news, by its form and shape, with its endless natter, its parade of talking heads competing for the most Twitter-worthy sound bite (I’m one), obscures what is actually going on. News failed us in the last election, and prevents us now from understanding how deeply rotten our culture and political systems have become.

The extant TV-news model, developed over years of budget cuts and continuously iterated tweaks, feedback looping with minute-by-minute ratings, has settled on a format of competing natterers, minimal enterprise reporting (Jacob Soboroff’s coverage of the maltreatment of migrant children sticking out all the more for its rareness), and relentless micro-topicality. The net result has been to effectively gamify politics: Chris Matthews’s Hardball is “where the action is.” Showtime’s smart politics series is called The Circus. CNN, blindly following a framing that’s been in place since The Making of the President in 1968, declares Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation as a huge “win” for Trump.

We’re all part of this game, of course. We believe that by keeping up with the news on a minute-by-minute basis, and maybe by banging out a few tweets and Facebook posts to enter our outrage into vast databases of outrage and counter-outrage, we have meaningfully participated in the ongoing political conversation. But what we’re really doing is enabling a kind of pseudo-discourse—a miasma of ephemera and misinformation—that sucks us into the Trumpian post-meaning vortex. Form, as Neil Postman wrote 33 years ago, excludes substance. We are left feeling some combination of overwhelmed, bloated, trapped, morally outraged, and, even still, mesmerized. It’s all too horrible; maybe I’ll stick around for Lawrence.

Source: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/11/how-msnbc-created-a-cable-news-addiction-epidemic

[thenewdemocratus]

Ben Meiselas: 'Donald Trump Spokesperson KICKED OFF CNN on LIVE TV for ANTICS'

Source:Meidas Touch talking about the lack of exchange between CNN anchor Kasie Hunt & MAGA spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt. Source:The New Democrat “MeidasTouch host Ben Meiselas reports on CNN host Kasie Hunt ending her interview with Donald Trump spokesperson Karoline Leavitt who refused to answer the questions on the debate and spent the interview attacking the moderators.” From the Meidas…

[thenewdemocratus]

Early Start With Kasie Hunt: 'You're Lying': George Conway Clashes With Republican Commentator Over Donald Trump Guilty Verdict'

Source:CNN with a George Conway vs Scott Jennings live TV debate. Source:The New Democrat “Lawyer George Conway and CNN Senior Political Commentator Scott Jennings joined “CNN This Morning” to discuss Donald Trump’s guilty verdict in his criminal hush money case.” From CNN I’m not going top try to play mindreader and argue that Scott Jennings is lying here. He just might be complete idiot when it…