This is an abbreviated version of our weekly Patreon show. To access the full-episode and support the pod, head on over to http://www.patreon.com/muckrakepodcast Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss how responsible Jeff Zucker was for the downfall of our modern media coverage. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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| Hey everybody, welcome to the weekender edition of the Munkerik podcast. | |
| For our Patreon subscribers, thank you as always for your support. | |
| If you are listening to this into a preview, go over to patreon.com slash munkerik podcast. | |
| We depend on that support. | |
| And the reason that we depend on that support is because we are an independent media venture, unlike CNN, which is a corporate run Leviathan | |
| That has done a lot of things that we need to discuss today because one, Jeff Zucker, the head at CNN, has announced that he is stepping down immediately from his post following a strange rollout of a scandal, all that stuff. | |
| Just we needed to talk today about the damage that he has done to the United States of America. | |
| In general. | |
| But before we get to that, Nick, what is your initial reaction to this that has come out today? | |
| My initial reaction is that, you know, love takes many forms and who are we to get in the way of how that manifests itself, right? | |
| I mean, it's a pheromones, Jared. | |
| I don't... You about called me Jeff there. | |
| Yeah. | |
| I don't even know what I'm talking about. | |
| I don't care what he did. | |
| I'll be honest. | |
| If he didn't hurt anybody, if there was some sort of, how do we put it? | |
| If there was some sort of nepotism, if there was some sort of discrimination, if there was some sort of whatever, that's fine. | |
| I'm glad that he's resigning. | |
| I'm glad that he's leaving. | |
| I assume, by the way, that he'll have a CEO job before March comes, right? | |
| Somebody will pick him up. | |
| He'll be at a startup somewhere. | |
| He'll be at a foundation. | |
| Yeah, I don't care about the scandal. | |
| I just, I really, really have a lot of antipathy for this person. | |
| Well, maybe with his spare time he can go back and release some of the The Apprentice tapes that have been hiding of Trump saying the N-word all over the place. | |
| Yeah, so to get people up to speed of who, I assume you've heard of Jeff Zucker before. | |
| Let's talk very quickly about this guy's career. | |
| Of course, he ran NBC into the ground. | |
| Oh, I'm sorry, I misread that. | |
| He ran NBC. | |
| He ran the network into the ground. | |
| Was an absolute failure in charge of the National Broadcast Corporation. | |
| Just absolutely destroyed it, but in the time that he worked at NBC, he gave us, I mean, just an absolute slew of hits, including, let me find the name of this show, The Apprentice. | |
| I don't know why that's important, how that could possibly even figure into a political broadcast like this one, but, you know, brought us such things as The Apprentice and pushed a bunch of sensationalized reality TV bullshit. | |
| The Apprentice, of course, is not just a reality TV show that gave Donald Trump a platform and a rejuvenated career. | |
| But also pushed neoliberalism into the popular culture, much like Survivor, saying that we're all competitors with each other, we should all screw each other over, and what matters more than anything else? | |
| Impressing the guy sitting at the big desk so you can make money and possibly sit behind a big desk. | |
| Pretty incredible that he was there during that time and pushed this. | |
| Well, you know, it's funny because he introduced Scrubs, so there was probably the only hit, but then it wasn't his fault necessarily that Friends finished, Seinfeld was over, like, you know, it kind of was this weird time to take over NBC. | |
| So not that we're defending the guy. | |
| No, no, no, first of all, I'm not a Scrubs guy. | |
| I know people love it. | |
| I know people are... And he deserves no credit for Scrubs, by the way. | |
| No, he doesn't deserve any credit at all. | |
| I'll say that. | |
| But, you know, that's fair, but he did he did pilot NBC directly into the ground. | |
| He took it from the number one network in the country and then dropped it like a stone to the worst network in the country. | |
| Right. | |
| Fair enough. | |
| Fair enough. | |
| And so and the whole thing with with Trump and being on The Apprentice is that he never, ever, ever Now, of course, we can't do the Dead Zone thing where we would have shaken his hand in 2000 and realized that was all going to happen in a flash, you know, of a Christopher Walken flash. | |
| But the fact remains is that he was able to take this asshole who had completely bankrupted himself multiple times and had really no value in anything but was a character And give him that platform. | |
| Yes, that's exactly the direct line between that and then the birtherism into running for president. | |
| And then what I get mad at him for is, yes, I have no doubt that the tapes exist that would have sunk his campaign. | |
| Now, if you ask me now, in 2022, if you had a guy saying the N-word all over the place, that would have meant—probably not. | |
| This is what Trump has done. | |
| But in 2016, and again, grab him by the pussy was out there, and that didn't do it. | |
| But I would have imagined that the stuff they have on The Apprentice would have in combination with that. | |
| And that's the thing he was able to cover for his buddy and not release. | |
| And I want to go off of that real fast because a large part of the reason that I hate Jeff Zucker, and I'm so relieved that he is out at CNN, is We spend so much time talking about, in a neoliberal world, what makes money, what brings ratings, are these smart moves, are those good business decisions? | |
| What you just pointed out is really important. | |
| Donald Trump was a personality on an NBC show under Jeff Zucker, right? | |
| And in that position, and for anybody who hasn't read the articles about it, behind the scenes, Donald Trump was, and I know this is shocking to everybody, was consistently incompetent. | |
| And was consistently hateful and sexist and racist. | |
| All of this stuff was known to everybody at NBC. | |
| There's no way that Jeff Zucker did not know that that was happening. | |
| Meanwhile, when Jeff Zucker, and like all these assholes, he fails at NBC, ends up at CNN! | |
| Crazy how that happens. | |
| Crazy how when you have money and power and privilege, you just keep failing up. | |
| He ends up at CNN, all of a sudden Donald Trump, who Jeff Zucker knew was a disgusting, racist, sexist, incompetent monster, starts running for the presidency. | |
| Instead of somehow or another sounding the alarm and saying, hey, maybe I'm not gonna release the tapes, but you need to know that this person's repulsive and you need to know that they shouldn't be anywhere near the seat of power. | |
| Jeff Zucker looked at Donald Trump. | |
| It was like, it was like a cartoon, Nick, you know, all of a sudden, just money signs in his eyes, you know, just I woo. | |
| He was the best possible thing that could have ever happened to CNN. | |
| He made CNN so much money. | |
| He got them so many eyeballs on the screen. | |
| He kept giving him, I mean, Trump ended up with $6 billion in free advertising because of assholes like Jeff Zucker, who knew that he was dangerous and awful, and just continued to put him on the airwaves. | |
| Well, at least he fired Chris Cuomo. | |
| He did fire Chris Cuomo! | |
| And Chris Cuomo should have been fired so many times before. | |
| Wait, I just want to tell you this. | |
| I actually like Chris Cuomo, I gotta tell you. | |
| Him and Don Lemon, when they would interact, it was delightful. | |
| I really gotta tell you, I enjoyed, and I enjoy, you know, people always yell at him. | |
| Total, I'm taking a left turn here, but when he would joust with Kellyanne Conway, I enjoyed seeing him do that and try and back her down into a corner when she was too squirrely to be backed down, but nonetheless. | |
| Anyway, sorry. | |
| I need to let off my chest. | |
| I want to point out that what you just brought up. | |
| There is a reason why Zucker was successful at CNN, because he was able to transform the show. | |
| And in the large part, this was based on Fox News, right? | |
| CNN, MSNBC, particularly following September 11th and the Iraq War, they all started becoming more and more like Fox News, right? | |
| Because it was this innovation. | |
| It was capturing its audience in a way that other people weren't. | |
| And in this case, All of a sudden, it went from being news-oriented to being more sensationalized, being based more on personalities. | |
| Jeff Zucker, one of his quote-unquote greatest innovations was sportsification of the news. | |
| And for anybody who listens to this show who also watches ESPN, And you know these shows, it's Pardon the Interruption, it's Around the Horn, First Take, all of that. | |
| There's a reason why cable news started looking like that, right? | |
| Because they wanted to make it entertaining. | |
| They wanted to get more eyeballs on the screen. | |
| And while I get that that is the job of like a corporation, at the same time, that does damage. | |
| You know what I mean? | |
| Like, it actually does sort of hurt discourse. | |
| It hurts knowledge. | |
| It creates the need for a Donald Trump. | |
| It creates an opening for a Donald Trump. | |
| And he was perfect for these people. | |
| Like, you couldn't have created a better character for Jeff Zucker. | |
| Yeah. | |
| You know, this makes me think, you know, in our interview we had that's coming up on Tuesday, which everyone's going to want to listen to, I was thinking about why, you know, progressive outlets have failed when the right-wing outlets in talk radio have been just a huge cash cow. | |
| And maybe we should get, like, some watermelons and some sledgehammers and we should just start doing, you know, Gallagher and just outrage at what's going on. | |
| But, like, if Gallagher could do it and it was a comedy show, like, why couldn't we just do it, like, you know, and just be all spectacle and anger and id? | |
| I mean, it seems like that's what he understood that people tap into. | |
| Well, so, actually, it's funny you bring that up because, and we're recording this on Thursday. | |
| Or, no, it's Wednesday. | |
| What is time? | |
| I don't know. | |
| You know, it is whatever you want it to be. | |
| It is whatever you want it to be. | |
| Yesterday an article came out in which Vox interviewed Ben Pfeiffer of the Pod Save America crew. | |
| Would you agree right now that that is probably the strongest liberal radio slash podcast? | |
| That has to be, right? | |
| I think it was, and I'm assuming it still is. | |
| If not, it's very close to the top. | |
| Yeah, so Pfeiffer was being interviewed about the messaging of the moment. | |
| Wait, wait, you're not a friend of the Pod? | |
| Sometimes they make decent points. | |
| I've got problems other times. | |
| And you know what? | |
| They try and represent people. | |
| We don't have to go to war with Pod Save America. | |
| They do what they do. | |
| We do what we do. | |
| I'll say this, though. | |
| Pfeiffer was asked, what is wrong with the Democratic brand? | |
| What is wrong with the Democratic Party's brand? | |
| And listen, between you and me, and I think our audience is not going to be surprised here, the problem with the Democratic Party's brand is that they don't stand up for principles. | |
| They don't push things that would change things. | |
| Large swaths of them have been bought off. | |
| And on top of that, they're afraid to stand up for No, no, no, no, no. | |
| He said that he thought the problem was that the Democratic Party has never created a Fox News. | |
| And I understand where that's coming from. | |
| Oh, no, no, no, no. | |
| He said that he thought the problem was that the Democratic Party has never created a Fox News. | |
| And I understand where that's coming from, and I know what that means, but I also, I just think that's weird and cynical and problematic. | |
| I know that that's not wrong, but it's also problematic. | |
| Yeah, but what's MSDNC? | |
| Yeah, it's not. | |
| It's not, but it's in that realm. | |
| We've talked about this too. | |
| Corporate media doesn't want to change anything. | |
| They want this sensational shit. | |
| I mean, Jeff Zucker has now written the playbook for CNN and MSNBC. | |
| I mean, it's the the swelling music. | |
| It's the outside of a debate or a convention having a crane shot. | |
| You know what I mean? | |
| That comes in and Chris Matthews is there. | |
| And, you know, they dusted up the the mothballs off of him and brought him out. | |
| And now they have a I mean, Zucker's favorite thing was what? | |
| Like a 16 person panel. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And I gotta tell you, somebody who's been on cable news where there's, like, more than you, it's impossible. | |
| You can't have a conversation like that. | |
| There's nothing substantive that can come from that. | |
| Right. | |
| Oh, I hear you. | |
| And the spectacle is obviously the most important thing. | |
| And then also the development of individual, you know, individuals like Matt Au and Brian Williams, both of whom are gone or one of them's gone. | |
| The other one will be gone in that same response to, you know, Hamdi and he that won't be named. | |
| Yeah, and I gotta tell you, so right now cable news is a little bit in trouble. | |
| There's only a handful of shows that are actually doing very well. | |
| CNN has crashed. | |
| I mean, it just absolutely crashed. | |
| And there's a lot of reasons why CNN has crashed. | |
| First and foremost is Jeff Zucker's quote-unquote leadership, I guess we would call it. | |
| Also, people don't trust CNN. | |
| The Cuomo thing did not help to find out that one of their anchors was basically running interference for his disgraced governor brother. | |
| That didn't help. | |
| They don't necessarily have much of... | |
| I don't know. | |
| What... | |
| If I said to you, what does CNN say, what would you say? | |
| What is CNN's message? | |
| You know, it's weird. | |
| All I can kind of picture is, have you ever been to a hospital? | |
| If you walk into a hospital room, that's what's on, right? | |
| Although Fox News... Or an airport, yeah. | |
| Yeah, but I think Fox News has kind of captured that a little bit more, and I feel like if you were to walk into more hospital rooms, and the key to that is that it'll be on all day long, like people are sick and they don't feel well, or they're in and out of consciousness, and that TV is just on, and so they're kind of getting ratings in a weird way. | |
| But CNN, to me, it's so ineffectual to me that I don't even have an opinion. | |
| I don't think it's fake news. | |
| I feel like they have some modicum of journalistic integrity, I suppose. | |
| But other than that, I really can't give you an opinion. | |
| MSNBC I can. | |
| I have feelings about that and I know what that stands for. | |
| But CNN, I don't know. | |
| It's a drift. | |
| Yeah, it is. | |
| It's completely adrift. | |
| And, you know, MSNBC is in trouble, I think, for a few reasons. | |
| Maddow's stepping away for a little bit to do a film with Ben Stiller. | |
| Anybody who's been paying attention to all of the movings and shakings in the media, Maddow keeps talking about leaving. | |
| And Maddow wants to do other stuff. | |
| Podcasts, movies, books, all of that stuff. | |
| I mean, Maddow is like the main star at MSNBC. | |
| The ratings are going down there. | |
| Fox News is going great because, like you said, the people who aren't dying of COVID, it's just on, right? | |
| It's at their place of business. | |
| It's on in their living rooms. | |
| It's all of those different places. | |
| Here's the frightening thing about all of this, and let's get to the actual newsworthiness of this. | |
| Nothing has changed since 2016. | |
| If anything, things have just gotten worse and worse and worse. | |
| They either need Donald Trump to come back, or they need a Trump-like figure. | |
| They need it desperately. | |
| And one of the truest things that Donald Trump ever said, and I hate it when those words come out of my mouth, but it doesn't make them less true. | |
| He said, they all need me. | |
| The Times, the Post, the MSNBC, CNN, they all need me. | |
| They do. | |
| Because of the current system that we have, political and economic system, they do need a Donald Trump. | |
| And so that doesn't bode well for 2022 midterms, 2024 election. | |
| Because That is the rising tide that lifts all boats. | |
| And they're all looking for that. | |
| They're all desperate for it. | |
| And if you thought $6 billion in free ads was something, you really haven't seen anything yet. | |
| Right. | |
| Well, you can picture those meetings where they're looking at the rates, the ratings and the money they made from 2016 to 2020. | |
| And then they're looking at what it is now, which presumably is a lot lower. | |
| And so they're like freaking out saying, what is it? | |
| And they're going to simply say, well, Trump is not in the White House right now. | |
| That is the difference. | |
| That is why. | |
| And it is a fact, and it's a very, you know, disgusting and soul-killing notion that, yes, you know, if they want to continue keeping their jobs, which is a very big motivational factor for everybody in this country. | |
| Turns out. | |
| Yeah, they need them back. | |
| And that can infect, you know, how they're going to do programming and how they cover things. | |
| It's really, you know, the funny thing is it makes you want to say, well, we should make news. | |
| You know, take money out of the news may not make it a for profit thing. | |
| Well, then now you're talking about state propaganda, right? | |
| Because that becomes under the government. | |
| You can't have that either. | |
| Yeah, I don't know what the answer is with that. | |
| I do know that a large part of the issues in this country are. | |
| They're caused by for profit news. | |
| I mean, I don't I don't know about where you're from, but where I'm from, like local media, the newspaper, I mean, just absolutely destroyed. | |
| And, you know, those local sources are pretty much just completely gone. | |
| They've been gobbled up. | |
| They've been turned around. | |
| Did you see the woman doing the spot where she gets hit by the car? | |
| She's doing it to the camera? | |
| Oh, yeah. | |
| But what that tells you is that she was by herself. | |
| She literally sets the camera up. | |
| She hits record. | |
| Oh, yeah! | |
| I hadn't even thought about that. | |
| Yeah, I don't think there was anybody there to help her. | |
| And so this is what it's gotten down to. | |
| It's like they've gotten down to such a bare bones. | |
| It's just a reporter, producer, film, like everything. | |
| And you're talking about local news, which by the way is atrocious. | |
| Local news is just straight-up garbage, but the ones that still exist, a large, large swath of them are owned by like Sinclair, and they've been turned into propaganda arms, right? | |
| And so now all of a sudden, and I got to tell you, things like the Washington Post, and the New York Times and the Washington Post, while we're on the subject of all this media stuff and Trump, I mean, they branded the shit out of themselves as being anti-Trump and truth tellers, meanwhile obfuscating the fact that they helped get us into the Iraq war and that they've laundered law enforcement lives for years and years and years. | |
| In all of this, like, I'm sorry, it's not a good thing that a Jeff Bezos can come in and basically spend his pocket money on a major newspaper. | |
| That's not great! | |
| The fact that we have all these independent publications around the country either being gobbled up or just disappearing, that's not good! | |
| That leaves you with Fox News, right? | |
| That leaves you with the CNN under the control of people like Jeff Zucker who are not moral, ethical, or Decent. | |
| You know what I mean? | |
| There are consequences of this. | |
| Like, this stuff doesn't happen and then you look up and you're like, ah, everything's fine. | |
| Well, I know why you're so mad, Jared. | |
| I figured it out. | |
| It had nothing to do with what we're talking about. | |
| Not that. | |
| It's related. | |
| Oh no! | |
| I know exactly what you're getting ready to say. | |
| It's what's happened to Wordle. | |
| Wordle. | |
| RIP to a real one. | |
| There is nothing I like better in the last couple weeks, not even where I would open up that same tab on my browser on my phone, and it would be blank and ready to fill out, and to know that it's going to be behind a paywall now at the New York Times, of which I do pay for, by the way. | |
| Time out. | |
| Did you see, because here, actually this was way too precious, Nick. | |
| I hope that you saw this. | |
| Did you see the New York Times? | |
| And by the way, there's like 95% of the audience right now is like, I hate that they did this to Wordle. | |
| 5% have no idea. | |
| Wordle, of course, is like this really wonderful little game. | |
| I completely agree. | |
| It was one of the best parts of getting up and drinking my coffee over the past few days. | |
| It was wonderful. | |
| And the CNN had on the New York Times games editor after Wordle was gobbled up by the New York Times, because of course they gobbled it up, New York Times games editor was on CNN and the anchor's like, can you tell us that Wordle will remain free? | |
| Did you see this? | |
| No. | |
| Oh yeah. | |
| So the anchor's like, can you, can you guarantee us that Wordle will remain free? | |
| And this worm of a guy was like, I can tell you it will be free at the start. | |
| And the guy's like, can you tell us it will remain free? | |
| And he's like, oh, I guarantee you that it will be free to start. | |
| And I was like, all right, thank you. | |
| Great, wonderful. | |
| By the way, it's already out there how to attack the code that you can then get at the free wordle from their website. | |
| Apparently they didn't put it, you know, They didn't obfuscate it well enough. | |
| So someone was saying, yeah, just copy-paste this thing. | |
| It'll work for you for free forever, but it won't remember your scores, which is a part of the problem. | |
| You want to be able to see your results day-over-day. | |
| But here's what I got to tell you, Jared. | |
| It wasn't the game itself. | |
| You know, it's because the game itself is fucking Wheel of Fortune, right? | |
| We all know Learnste, right? | |
| L-R-N-S-T-E are the five most common letters, and that's what you learn from... Actually, I learned from Wheel of Fortune. | |
| It's always what they pick. | |
| Bold of you to give out your Wordle strategy to everybody. | |
| That's wonderful. | |
| Well, I asked people on Twitter, I'm like, do you guys use the same word every day? | |
| I gotta say, this is the weekender, so this is some information. | |
| I like it. | |
| I like it. | |
| And somebody said ado, and I'm like, no. | |
| I mean, listen, I'm much more of a consonant guy. | |
| I like to identify the vowels. | |
| You know what, ado could be handy. | |
| I tried it, though, the other day, and it was a nightmare, and it added at least one more step. | |
| But here's why it would work so well. | |
| You know, here's the reason. | |
| You can only play it once a day. | |
| Yeah. | |
| It wasn't the thing where you're going to get lost and sit there for hours and hours and play game after game. | |
| Once you're done with one, you have to wait the other and a whole bunch of hours until midnight comes to play again. | |
| That, to me, was something so, like, delayed gratification and something to look forward to. | |
| That's what caught my fancy. | |
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