“Message received”
MSNBC’s new network president, Rebecca Kutler, saluted He Who Would Be King last week and said, “Yes, Sir! How low?” Kutler offered in sacrifice a half-dozen of its anchors (and their production teams). The network plans to relocate some to new ensemble-format shows.
Former Obama administration official, Brandon Friedman, posted an image of ousted anchors (above) and remarked, “Seen together, hoo boy. Message received.”
Timothy Snyder warned us. And warned us again. And again. “Do Not Obey in Advance.”
Democracy Now! spoke with Snyder back in December on how corporate America was “bending” to Donald Trump “following ABC News’s decision to settle a Trump defamation case by donating $15 million to his future presidential library.”
“There is a problem when the people who have the most money set the example of yielding to power first,” Snyder said. “It’s textbook anticipatory obedience.”
Lester Holt is exiting his slot as anchor and managing editor of “NBC Nightly News” after a decade. Ayman Mohyeldin is losing his weekend evening show. Alex Wagner will surrender her 9 p.m. weekday show to Jen Psaki once Rachel Maddow completes her first 100 days of the Trump administration stint in that time slot, The Guardian reports:
Along with Mohyeldin’s weekend evening show, the network is also cancelling Katie Phang and Jonathan Capehart’s shows.
The plan is for Capehart, like Mohyeldin, to host a new show, and Phang would continue as a legal correspondent. Wagner will stay with the network as a senior political analyst.
The cancellation of Joy Reid from her 7 p.m. weekday show — it ended Monday — was perhaps the most jarring. Enough that Rachel Maddow spoke out against the network’s decision during her show Monday night, with a focus on Reid’s firing.
“Personally, I think it is a bad mistake to let her walk out the door,” she said of Reid.
Maddow described it as “unnerving” and “indefensible” for the network’s only two non-white primetime hosts lose their shows. Meanwhile, dozens of producers and staffers are facing layoffs or being invited to reapply for new jobs, she said.
“That has never happened at this scale in this way before when it comes to programming changes – presumably because it’s not the right way to treat people,” she said. “This is a difficult time in the news business but it does not need to be this difficult.”
Oval Office Man reacted specifically to Reid’s firing:
“Lowlife Chairman of “Concast,” Brian Roberts, the owner of Ratings Challenged NBC and MSDNC, has finally gotten the nerve up to fire one of the least talented people in television, the mentally obnoxious racist, Joy Reid,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Based on her ratings, which were virtually non-existent, she should have been “canned” long ago, along with everyone else who works there.”
In “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century,” Snyder warns, “Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then they offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.”
Contrarywise, the Associated Press refused to join Bootlickers Anonymous in rebuffing Trump’s demand to rebrand the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.” What people call it is not important to him. What is important is that he can compel people’s obedience when he insists that up is down and the past is alterable. In real time, we are watching a Trumpian retread of “Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.”
Scott Nover opines on the hypocrisy of Big Hair Brother’s “language-policing demands” at Slate:
For Trump, Musk, and the team of billionaires—elected and unelected—running the government, the hypocrisy is the point. The real language police are inside the White House, and they’re running with a nouveau take on “alternative facts” all these years later. If the AP isn’t able to push back successfully when it’s extorted for narrative control, then we’re already entering something else altogether: a truly Orwellian time in American politics. When free speech is only what the government says it is, then we don’t really have free speech.
But Kutler heard Trump’s personal decision to ban the Associated Press from the White House Press Room loud and clear. MSNBC offered itself without being asked, as ABC did. Barely one month into the Trump 2.0 administration she reinforced for Donald Trump that other news outlets would cave to his will to maintain their access.
The waters between Texas and Florida have always been called the Gulf of America.