As we
noted in this space last week, Microsoft is getting a divorce
from NBC News.
This week the news is official — and who will head the new
NBCNews.com?
That would be Vivian Schiller — who, you will recall, became
such a liability for NPR in the wake of the Juan Williams firing
debacle that she was thrown under the NPR bus.
Brent Bozell of the Media Research Center has dissected with his
usual sharp eye. Here’s the
link (with embedded links) but I confess Brent’s statement is
so dead on that I have pasted it in its entirety below:
Microsoft’s ill-advised marriage of convenience to NBC News has
finally landed in divorce court, and it couldn’t have happened soon
enough. Like any marriage built on a lie — in this case that MSNBC
would be a legitimate news organization — it was doomed to
fail.
The MSNBC brand is a tumor, corrupting everything it touches,
and it’s good to see that Microsoft is finally cutting it off. Even
though Microsoft untethered itself from MSNBC TV in 2005, MSNBC.com
was still a stain on one of the most valuable, respected
corporations in American history.
Since the cable network’s inception in 1996, our Media Research
Center analysts have worked diligently to track and expose MSNBC’s
bizarre descent into madness where the news is contorted into some
sort of liberal fever dream. From Keith Olbermann’s anti-American
hot air and Ed Schultz’s ‘right-wing slut’ attack and urge to ‘rip
out’ Dick Cheney’s new heart, to the most recent rantings of Al
Sharpton to incite racial violence in the Trayvon Martin shooting
and Andrea Mitchell’s attempt to fabricate a “super market scanner
moment” for Mitt Romney, MSNBC has sent journalism back to the
partisan hackery of the 18th century.
MSNBC’s embarrassing mockery of the news and deliberate refusal
to Tell the Truth has tainted the NBC News brand with a layer of
stink so thick it could take generations to cleanse. Is it any
wonder that a titan of industry like Microsoft would want to
distance its valuable brand from MSNBC’s radioactive stench?
Maybe, just maybe, Comcast has finally suffered enough
embarrassment thanks to its NBC News and MSNBC divisions to muzzle
their frothing, rabid liberal attack dogs and go back to reporting
the news.
Of course with former NPR President & CEO Vivian Schiller at
the helm of NBCNews.com, that’s hard to imagine.
Ouch.
NBC has become a network with deeply serious problems. The news
brand, once impeccable, has been tossed into the media equivalent
of a sewer. The symbolism involved in putting Schiller at the head
of this restructured ventured is stunningly dense.
Here’s
Schiller telling the world that Juan Williams needed a psychiatrist
because of his political views. And here is the event
that finally got Schiller fired from NPR, a James O’Keefe video
sting in which an NPR official (also named Schiller, but no
relation) went off on conservatives. Mediaite wrote it up
this way.
The fact that NBC has zero understanding of the symbolism
involved with Schiller sends an in-your-face message to millions of
Americans who once looked to NBC News to tell them the facts, the
news of the day.
The appalling treatment of Juan Williams has not been
forgotten.
Schiller’s well-on the record liberal elitism is only going to
exacerbate the image of NBC News as home to a brain-dead, reflexive
left-wingism that openly exploits racism, gay bashing,
misogyny and religious bigotry to get ratings — which,
surprise, surprise, it never gets.
Not to put too fine a point on this, but one gets the impression
that NBC News is so intellectually incestuous it makes the network
look like some perverse version of all those old jokes about
hillbillies sleeping with their sister.
They haven’t a clue internally that something is amiss.
At the end of the day, NBC News is dead because of its lack of
intellectual curiosity and a high tolerance for things most
Americans abhor. One doesn’t have to agree with same-sex marriage
to know that calling someone a “punk faggot” or the “n-word” (as Al
Sharpton has done) is wrong. One doesn’t have to be a rocket
scientist to know that calling a woman — any woman but surely the
wife of a US Senator — a “whore” (Ed Schultz) is wrong. One
doesn’t have to be the smartest knife in the drawer to understand
that a full-fledged attack on a presidential candidate’s religion
is bad enough. But not applying the same standard to the Senate
Majority Leader when that senator (Harry Reid) practices exactly
the same Mormon faith as Mitt Romney — and somehow thinking no one
will notice is — outright idiocy on the part of Lawrence
O’Donnell.
In essence, all these people are sleeping with their sister —
intellectually speaking.
MS is gone from MSNBC.
And quite obviously chaos reigns.
