MSNBC Fires Host For Asking Tough Questions
“I am not going to do a show where I have to pretend most of the politicians in Washington are honorable gentlemen.”
In the following video Cenk Uygur, host of The Young Turks, explains why he just left MSNBC to return to his internet show after being offered more money and a smaller role. To paraphrase, Cenk’s explanation is basically, “Management wouldn’t let me tell the truth.” Cenk had just beat FOX News and destroyed CNN in the ratings after grilling politicians and accurately reporting about the Obama Administration.
httpv://youtube.com/watch?v=5x7o0sNrulg
This would not be the first time MSNBC has removed a host for opposing authority while dominating the ratings. When Phil Donahue’s MSNBC show, Donahue, was cancelled in 2003, “he was actually attracting more viewers than any other show on MSNBC.” Said Donahue “We were the only antiwar voice that had a show, and that, I think, made them very nervous. I mean, from the top down, they were just terrified.”
Jesse Ventura was bought out out of his MSNBC contract after less than four months, despite generating 39% higher ratings in the Saturday slot he was shunted into. “I was basically silenced.” said Ventura. “When I came out of office, I was the hottest commodity out there. There was a bidding war between CNN, Fox and MSNBC to get my services. MSNBC ultimately won. I was being groomed for a five day-a-week TV show by them. Then, all of a sudden, weird phone calls started happening: ‘Is it true Jesse doesn’t support the war in Iraq?'”
“My contract said I couldn’t do any other cable TV or any news shows, and they honored and paid it for the duration of it. So in essence I had my silence purchased. Why do you think you didn’t hear from me for three years? I was under contract. They wouldn’t even use me as a consultant!”
To explain this strange situation, where top-rated guests are fired seemingly against good business sense, here is Dan Rather, speaking about the conglomeration of “mainstream” news entities. I have transcribed much of his speech below.
httpv://.youtube.com/watch?v=8ckeqIoZz9c
“What has changed most is the character of news ownership. I only found out years after the fact, for example, about the pressure that the White House of the late President Richard Nixon put on my then bosses during my coverage of the Watergate crimes. Pressure to cut down the length of the pieces. Pressure to call me off that story and so on. Because back then, my bosses took the heat – so I didn’t have to. They did this so the story could get told, and so the public could be informed. This was in the mid-1970s. But it is rare now, to find a major news organization owned by an individual, someone who can say in effect – ‘The buck stops here’. I’ve said it before, I say it again, that now, the more likely motto is, ‘The news stops with making bucks.’ America’s biggest most important news organizations have over the past quarter of a century fallen prey to merger after merger, acquisition after acquisition, to the point where they are now tiny parts of a measurably large international corporate entities. Entities whose primary business often has nothing to do with news. Entities that may at any given time have literally hundreds of regulatory issues before multiple arms of government concerning a vast array of business interests that have nothing to do with news. These are entities that as publicly held and traded corporations have as their overall reigning mandate to provide a return on shareholder value. To increase profits. And not over time. Not over the long haul, but quarterly, if not on a tighter schedule. One might ask where news fits into this model. And if you really need an answer you can turn on your television, where I suggest to you you will quickly see some if not all of the following: you will see and hear political analysts reduced to in-studio shouting matches between partisans armed with little more than the days talking points, precious time and resources wasted on so-called human-interest stories, celebrity fluff, sensational trials, and gossip. So called ‘debates,’ I put it in quotations, where the one thing that is sure not to happen is genuine debates, and where the questions that the public really cares about seldom if ever seem to get asked. And you will see and hear international coverage that leaves the American public ignorant of the world outside our borders, unaware of its complexities, and the ways that U.S. interests are bound with those of other nations. Does the American news audience know – for one example – that the concern among foreign policies elites in this country, over the situation in Georgia, has everything to do with major gas and oil pipelines constructed there with U.S. backing against Russian protests? If the American public remains unaware of this fact in the whole, and in the main, after the broad but shallow coverage of recent weeks, ask yourself who is to blame. I could go on, and I know you’ll be relieved to know that I won’t, cataloging journalistic sins of which I know you’re all too aware. But all of these things, these failings, pretty much come down to this: in the current model of corporate, big international conglomerate corporate ownership, the incentive to produce good and valuable news is simple not there. American journalism is in need of a spine transplant. Let the treatment begin today with those of you in this room. You can take this message home with you, you can take it back to your desks and your workplaces, to your colleagues and your fellow citizens. Magnify it, multiply it, and spread it. Make it something that cannot be ignored. Not by the political parties. Not by our candidates. Not by the owners and executives of media companies. Write these people, call these people, send them the message that you know your rights. You know that you are entitled to news media as diverse and varied as the American people. And that you deserve a press that provides that raw material of democracy. The good information that Americans need to be full participants in our government of, by, and for the people. And most of all, show them with your example, what a truly independent media looks like. Because your country needs you now, more than ever.”