Alex Parene at Salon has an interesting top-ten count down of the biggest hacks on the American media scene today, and I have to agree with him right down the line–from Arianna Huffington, Bill Keller, Ed Schultz, David Gregory, Tom Friedman, Nick Kristoff, not to mention the Atlantic Monthly, Drudge, CNN, and the Aspen Institute Ideas Festival.
What makes a hack? Living in an information world that is suffused with bullshit and happily accepting it as reality. Even being proud to be one of its principal purveyors.
What makes a hack? It's his or her finger-to-the-air predicatbility. His or her attempt to sound "reasonable" when the premises for everything they say are absurd. It's clueless, elite groupthink and platitudinous conventional wisdom. Why does anybody take it seriously? Anyone with a lick of sense doesn't, but it frames the "conversation", to use the fatuous Tina Brown's phrasing. Here's Parene talking about the Sunday morning talk shows:
The only people I actually know who watch these things do so out of professional obligation.
But people watch these shows. Millions of people. More people watch “Meet the Press” than “The Daily Show.” Most of those people are quite old, but it’s still the case that a significant portion of the American people are learning the contours of the great public debates of our time from David Gregory interviewing Lindsey Graham.
I wrote a few weeks ago that there is no equivalency between FOX and MSNBC, but I agree with Parene's take here:
MSNBC is more unapologetically liberal than it used to be, it’s still all over the place, with a conservative anchoring its flagship morning show, objective Beltway “straight news” proponents like Chuck Todd and Andrea Mitchell dominating in the daytime, and weekends full of … prison shows. But more important, it’s not as good as Fox at being compelling TV, which is why millions more people watch Fox every day. (There are demographic reasons for Fox’s advantage, too, but it’s still a huge number.)
There’s a reason Ed Schultz — the most Fox-like of MSNBC’s liberal hosts — has great ratings. That’s also what makes it so funny that MSNBC is supposedly planning on replacing him with Ezra Klein, which is like Fox deciding to replace Sean Hannity with Ross Douthat. Good for respectability. Bad for ratings.
And what's with Luke Russert?
Parene goes on to say:
I’ll give MSNBC its due: Chris Matthews is probably the worst interviewer on television but he is also undoubtedly one of its most fascinating and watchable personalities. Rachel Maddow is obviously and deservedly a national treasure. MSNBC’s new weekend morning programs, hosted by Chris Hayes and Melissa Harris-Perry, seem like a novel experiment in attempting to produce genuinely intelligent television using the medium of cable news and its popular tropes. “The Cycle” is exactly 25 percent great.
Matthews is a hack, but he's nuts, so I guess Parene finds that entertaining. I don't, and I can't watch him. I"ve not seen the Harris-Perry show, so have no opinion. Maddow is no hack, but I find I can't watch her show either. She just gets on my nerves. The Chris Hayes show has been consistently excellent; it's the opposite of Meet the Press hackery because he has an interesting variety of very smart, knowledgeable people on, many of the Mensches, and he seems to pick only people who won't deliver the usual b.s., and when they do, he's been pretty good on challenging them.
I don't have a problem with bias; I do have a problem with bullshit–with talking points and platitudes and cluelessness. That's what makes a hack.
See Also "Primitivs, Hacks, Naifs, Fools, & Mensches"
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