“NBC Anchor” really is the television news equivalent of the Florida Man idiot crime spree meme, as I tweeted last month. Although Florida Man would be a lot more fun to have a couple of beers with in-between police line-up appearances than any NBC anchor, especially Melissa Harris-Perry. But as Jack Coleman of NewsBusters writes, “Never let it be said that MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry is unwilling to float provocative ideas, regardless of whether doing so confirms suspicions that she harbors a Maoist within that’s raging to get out:”
HARRIS-PERRY: During the break I was trying to think up a solution to the problem of building audience (for women athletes), so my solution is in 2016 we go completely dark on all media coverage of men’s sports, just for one year. We have the only televised sports, the only print sports, it’s only women’s sports, and we’ll just see whether or not women could get a fan base if in fact they were the people who were constantly on our televisions and in our newspapers.
Say, considering that MSNBC is the channel that can weaponize any word it likes to be racist, including “golf” and “Chicago,” then the phrase “going dark” is a racist hate crime in and of itself. Beyond linguistics though, MHP’s task here is a simple one: you’re an employee of MSNBC, which means you’re an employee of both NBC and corporate parent Comcast. Put your money where your mouth is, unclip your lavaliere (and perhaps your tampon earrings as well), exit the TV studio, then simply walk across the hall to the NBC and Comcast boardrooms and state your proposal to them.
But then, this is the network where fellow NBC anchor Chris Hayes last year found heretofore undetectable “parallels between the abolition of slavery and today’s climate fight.” As I wrote a year ago:
OK Chris, here’s your action plan. If indeed there are “parallels between the abolition of slavery and today’s climate fight,” then your mission is to barge into the NBC boardroom and convince them to drop NASCAR coverage. And the NFL — all those charter flights to the games, and the Goodyear Blimp circling around overhead at the stadium — those will have to be dropped from coverage. And no car chases in cop shows, unless it’s hot Prius on Prius action. And no stretch limos for NBC, CNBC and MSNBC execs and the on-air talent. No helicopters or jet flights for the news team.
Do all that, have NBC sign off on it, then get back to us. If you’re going to accuse your bosses of the moral equivalent of slavery (Because Al Gore took the moral equivalent of the Holocaust decades ago, I guess), you must force them to stop.
Do it for Gaia, man. Do it for Gaia.
And then help Melissa Harris-Perry with here latest in a series of ongoing goofy Dr. Evil-esque plans to destroy men’s sports.
And if either actually did do such a thing, once the laughter in the NBC/Comcast boardroom died out, perhaps the powers that be might ask themselves why they are paying for programming that trashes their very own product.
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