Less Than Zero

“Which Vile Character Assassin Will MSNBC Hire to Replace Bashir?”, Brent Bozell of the Media Research Center asks:

The question here isn’t whether or not MSNBC will dispense with the hateful rhetoric it shamelessly peddles as ‘news.’

The question is: Which vile character assassin will NBC/Comcast recruit to replace Martin Bashir? MSNBC is an absolute laughingstock. If you’re not apologizing for your insults (Ed Schultz), you’re resigning because of them (Bashir). And if you’re not smart enough to resign, they have to fire you (Alec Baldwin).

NBC is the network where civility goes to die. And Comcast: You own that indecency.

And it’s working so well for them in the ratings, to boot.

At the Baltimore Sun, media critic David Zurawik adds:

They don’t do news at MSNBC any more. They just do propaganda. And you can only attack your ideological enemies so long before you find yourself in the realm of hate speech as Bashir did.

I hope this event will help Comcast come to understand how deeply Griffin and his cynical programming strategy have damaged the brand of NBC News and the network in general.

You can fire 10 Bashirs and issue 20 phony “respected colleagues” PR statements, and it won’t start to repair the harm you’ve done to what NBC News once stood for.

Ace adds that “MSNBC has a stable of troglodytes, but Bashir’s vulgarity was too much even for them:”

Central to the leftist’s sense of vanity is his mistaken belief that he is an elevated person, in taste, intellect, and culture. In fact, he is none of these things. In almost all cases, he actually aspires to mediocrity — or at least he would aspire to mediocrity, if he weren’t already so convinced he had nothing else to prove to the world.

Martin Bashir directly challenges that self-flattery. Not only is he thick-headed and crude as a general matter, but he routinely resorts to provocations so vulgar that only the crudest malefactors in the Fightin’ Fightin’ Nutroots could fail to notice their vulgarity.

As such, he’s bad for business. Starbucks could not con people into buying $6 cups of coffee if, directly beside the register, stood a magazine rack openly displaying vintage copies of Hustler.

When the courtly, but equally far left Tom Brokaw finally retires, I wonder if he’ll issue any thoughts on how badly the tone of his network and its subsidiaries has cratered.

Worse thought: Is Brokaw even aware of the collective tone of his fellow anchors?