NBC's Cognitive Dissonant Hack Syndrome

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NBC’s David Gregory and his anemic ratings were recently analyzed by, depending upon who you ask, either a “brand consultant” or a “psychological consultant.” Either way, the network paid a hefty fee for a consultant to explain to them what the rest of the country long ago figured out for free: “The first answer is: David Gregory is a phony. The second answer is: He’s a jerk,” Michelle Malkin, who in her salad days served as an intern for the late Tim Russert, writes at Townhall. “And no amount of brand therapy and rehabilitation consulting can fix him:”

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Gregory is the anti-Russert. His boorish behavior around D.C. is legendary — from his juvenile tantrums with the Bush press staff to his drunken radio appearances to his diva snit fits with innocent bystanders while filming news segments. One of the most telling and notorious anecdotes involves Russert himself, who reportedly reprimanded Gregory in 2008 for going ballistic on a poor waitress while the two TV stars dined at a D.C. restaurant. But “Gregory still treats most of … the newsroom like s**t,” an insider told the website Jossip. “Amazing how NBC cares more about food servers than about the people who have to deal with Gregory’s arrogance every day.”

Since Gregory doesn’t have the intellectual heft to carry in-depth interview segments the way Russert did, “Meet the Press” producers have reduced substantive exchanges to a few minutes and larded the rest of the show with fluff and stunts.

That means: If it’s Sunday, it’s “Meet the Jerk.”

Last fall, Gregory the gun-control activist masquerading as a Sunday talk-show journalist made headlines with his brazen hectoring of NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre — while illegally brandishing a 30-round ammunition magazine on national television. He has used the show to fawn over vulgar, misogynistic “comedian” Bill Maher and to repeatedly browbeat Timothy Dolan, the archbishop of New York, over gay marriage.

As I’ve noted many times over 20-plus years in this business, the problem isn’t bias. It’s the pretense of non-bias. Gregory and his peers suffer from cognitive dissonant hack syndrome, a common affliction among incurable left-wing journalists who sanctimoniously pay lip service every day to neutrality and objectivity, while brazenly using their platforms to promote partisan political narratives.

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Meanwhile, Dylan Byers of Politico, whose worldview is certainly similar to Gregory’s, attempts to explain “The death of the Sunday shows:”

“There was a time when everything would stop on Friday afternoon and Cabinet members and senators would gather around a table and say, ‘Who are we putting out on Sunday?’” one former Democratic White House official said. “Now if you want to make news, you can tweet it, or you can call any number of outlets.”

The options for influencing the news today are numerous: A politician can go on cable news, give a newspaper interview, stop by talk radio, hold a press conference or simply send out a tweet. And he or she can do any of those things on a Tuesday night or a Friday afternoon. The news will invariably percolate up the media chain — from the Twitter-chattering press corps to the front pages of leading news sites — and become fodder for next Sunday’s roundtables.

CBS shoving Dan Rather out the door after RatherGate, the retirement of NBC’s Tom Brokaw, the death of ABC’s Peter Jennings, andmeant the end of nightly network broadcasts as an influence, except for those viewers who can’t find the remote control and are still asking themselves, as Bryant Gumbel famously muttered on the Today Show in 1994, “What is Internet, anyway?” The Sunday political talk shows have reached a similarly exhausted state. It’s time for the dinosaur networks to let them go off into the ether.

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Will they? Probably not. Unlike their audiences, old network formats never die off. In 2002, PBS’s Ken Bode predicted the clock was ticking on the nightly news shows:

As Ken Bode tells [Howard] Kurtz: “When Brokaw, Jennings and Rather retire” — and Brokaw at 62 is the youngest of the three — “it is a perfect time for these corporations to decide their newscasts are no longer worth it. Unless something dramatic happens, inevitably, the network newscasts are gone.” With news available at all hours on the all news channels and the Internet, the evening news isn’t what it used to be, particularly since younger viewers didn’t grow up with the 6:30 evening news-watching habit of the pre-cable viewers.

Besides, there’s now a view that the deities who anchor the news are irreplaceable. Such is their (inflated) stature, who could possibly fill their shoes? “I can’t see anyone out there who could even approach Peter’s stature,” an ABC producer told Kurtz. In time, each will be consigned to his own mausoleum.

Brokaw, Rather and Jennings are all gone, but the nightly news shows trundle on, even though their collective viewership is a shell of their pre-Internet and pre-cable numbers. Expect the Sunday morning chat shows to similarly trundle on, jerk hosts and low ratings not withstanding. As we’ve mentioned before, the big three networks and CNN have become closed circuit TV for the ruling class. Building an audience outside the beltway, or looking for an innovative replacement doesn’t enter into the networks’ equation.

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