A Newsletter With An Eye On Political Media from The American Prospect
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A NEWSLETTER WITH AN EYE ON POLITICAL MEDIA

CBS News Hires a Prevaricating Trumpoid

Because that's the kind of thing that TV 'news' does.

The Washington Post reports

that "CBS News's decision to hire former Trump administration
official Mick Mulvaney as a paid on-air contributor is drawing backlash
within the company because of his history of bashing the press and
promoting the former president's fact-free claims." CBS News
co-president Neeraj Khemlani gave away at least part of the game in a
staff meeting with the explanation: "Being able to make sure that we
are getting access to both sides of the aisle is a priority because we
know the Republicans are going to take over, most likely, in the
midterms ... A lot of the people that we're bringing in are helping us
in terms of access to that side of the equation." The Post notes that
CBS's new journalist hire, Mulvaney, has insisted that media coverage
of the growing coronavirus pandemic

was meant to "bring down the president," and defended a Trump
administration decision to withhold military aid from Ukraine
,
among other egregious lies and attempts to undermine our system of laws
and accountability.

The unnamed CBS producer who told the Post that "it makes no sense to
hire a guy whose entire job was to lie to us on behalf of Trump"
clearly needs to go back to TV journalism school. The people who run the
network-any television network, and pretty much any news division of
any television network-don't care what the journalists who work for
them think. Those journalists are paid the big bucks not to think-or,
in most cases, even to report. Rather, their job is to radiate likable
personalities on the air while, at the same time, to make the kind of
"news" that can potentially go viral on social media. A lie is as
good as the truth for these purposes.

CBS sought to elide the problem of having hired a professional liar by
introducing Mulvaney to viewers only as "a former Office of Management
and Budget director," rather than telling them what they needed to
know to judge his standards of honesty: that he was a long-term Trump
appointee who rose to become his acting chief of staff. But the people
who think of themselves as journalists at CBS-or any of our commercial
television networks-can only lose their virginity so many times. The
networks are going to keep booking and hiring liars, insurrectionists,
and the people who are purposefully seeking to destroy our democracy
because that's the only way they know how to do their jobs. They need
"access," especially to those officials who will make "news" by
saying mean things about their opponents. Obvious lies will be met with
only the gentlest opposition, lest an anchor's crucial
"Q-rating"-that is, his or her measured likability quotient among
the audience-take a dip due to overaggressiveness. What's more,
right-wingers watch TV news at least as much if not more than almost
anyone else. (They also tend to own its advertisers.) One often hears
people say that Trump's presidential campaign "rewrote" the rules
about how much lying, obvious racism, sexism, ethnocentrism, etc. a
politician could get away with. That's not quite true. He simply
exploited the fault lines that had already been put in place. (See
under: "Is Obama a Muslim?") That's why the former CBS chairman
and CEO Leslie Moonves-later forced out for allegations of "sexual
misconduct
"-was
not spilling any secrets back in 2016 when, speaking of the Trump
phenomenon, he explained, "It may not be good for America, but it's
damn good for CBS
."
The same words could easily have been spoken about ABC, NBC, CNN, and,
of course, Fox.

And speaking of both Fox and CBS, we note that Lara Logan, the employee
of the former and alumna of the latter, recently reported that the
"Rothschilds paid Darwin to invent evolution theory
." (It's
a wonder she managed to scoop Marjorie Taylor Greene on this news.)

Finally, if you suspected that American conservatives actually prefer
lies to truth on their news broadcasts, well, yes, of course. But they
also like money. It turns out if you pay them to accept the truth, they
get a little better at it. That's one conclusion from this study
.
The introduction of filthy lucre into the equation "improved accuracy
and reduced partisan bias in belief in news headlines-especially for
conservative participants." Even so, "Replicating prior work,
conservatives were substantially less accurate than liberals at
discerning true from false headlines. Yet, this gap between liberals and
conservatives closed by 60% when conservatives were motivated [by cash
payments] to be accurate."

Following up on my recent inquiries about just who are the anonymous
funders behind the Jewish journal Sapir, edited by the
right-wing/Israel-can-do-no-wrong New York Times pundit Bret Stephens
,
some recent sleuthing offers some clues. A fellow named Timothy Hentzel
is an officer of Bison Asset Management, a Florida-based family fund
belonging to the incredibly reclusive billionaire Andrew Shechtel

and his family. Coincidentally, Hentzel is also the CFO of MFN Holdings,
which owns the Maimonides Fund (located at 1350 Broadway, a proverbial
stone's throw from the Times offices). Maimonides, readers may recall,
is the dark-money source that funds Sapir. This naturally leads one to
wonder if Shechtel, as many have long suspected, is also the primary
funder of MFN Holdings and therefore the Maimonides Fund, and therefore
Sapir, and therefore Stephens. It's not proof, of course, but it is as
close as I can get. (The funding priorities of the Israeli government,
the Mossad, and other organizations one might suspect are not available
for public perusal.) As it happens, if you go to the "Who We Are"
vertical on the Maimonides Fund's website
, you will find literally zero
information about who they are. They also don't respond all that
quickly to journalistic inquiries. I recently sent them one about all
this under their "contact us" vertical on the same site
and received no response. Maybe
someone reading this can do better. I am told that the fund, and Sapir,
have far bigger plans for Stephens than have so far been revealed, and I
intend to stay with this story even if New York Times ethics cops do
not.

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The U.S. economy in two questions: Who makes less than $15 an hour?

And guess whose profits peaked above 15 percent in the second quarter of
last year

before settling at a mere 13.9 percent?

I am lucky enough to live in the greatest city in the world, and one of
the attributes that makes it so is that it is set up for pedestrians. We
New Yorkers are great walkers. I've lived here for nearly 30 years and
never once felt the need to have a car in the city, especially now, with
so many Citi Bikes and accompanying bike paths everywhere. Thing is,
many of the people who do drive in the city prefer to menace the rest of
us rather than stop for a yellow-turning-red light. This happens to me
almost every day. What is maddening about it is that there's an easy
(and profitable) solution to the problem. Just place the same sort of
cameras at busy intersections they have at tollbooths, and issue
automatic tickets to red-light runners. All cities should do this. But
no, my city cannot because the state legislature won't allow it. I was
at a fancy party Wednesday at Carnegie Hall for the relaunch of the
right-wing, Israel-obsessed New York Sun newspaper website. The presence
of our mayor, Eric Adams, had been promised. As he was just in Albany
arguing for "home rule" on city schools
,
I hoped to ask him about fighting for this issue as well, as it has long
been an obsession of mine. But I waited for an hour and 45 minutes, and
he never showed. Anyway, here

is a useful explanation of the problem and the stupidity of our
anti-pedestrian policies, and I'm still asking ...

Odds and Ends

Will Smith's slaphappy performance at the Oscars
notwithstanding, I thought the broadcast
pretty awful, straight downhill after the admittedly pretty decent
opening. And none of my favorites won except for Drive My Car in the
international category. Both Penelope Cruz and Kristen Stewart were
robbed for best actress. Drive My Car or Licorice Pizza should have won
for best picture (since Parallel Mothers was not even nominated). As for
the tribute to the Bond movies, well, here
's mine. And here
are a few better tributes to The
Godfather than the one the so-called "Academy" managed to produce.
(But one thing I still don't understand: Why do you "leave the
gun" when you kill someone? It's not just so you can carry the
cannoli ...)

Another thing I don't understand, but didn't have room for when I
wrote about the miniseries recently: Why does John, not George, play
lead on "Get Back"?

Speaking of the Beatles, I cannot resist posting this great song
by "the Beatnix." I find it
immeasurably superior to the original. Then again, so, too, is this
. Almost anything is. "Stairway," I
would argue, belongs in the Guinness Book of World Records in the
category "Worst, most often played song of all time."

Finally, I try not to let any March 26 pass without noting that it marks
the first-ever gig of the mighty, mighty Allman Brothers Band. Here
they are in 1971, and here
is what remained of them on March 10,
2020, as I and 20,000 or so of their closest friends repeatedly wiped
down our seats a million times and held our breath to experience their
final (and ironically Allman-less) performance. There really is only one
way out ...

See you next week.

~ ERIC ALTERMAN

Become A Member of The American Prospect Today!

Eric Alterman is a CUNY Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn
College, an award-winning journalist, and the author of 11 books, most
recently Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie-and Why Trump Is Worse
(Basic, 2020). Previously, he wrote The Nation's "Liberal Media"
column for 25 years. Follow him on Twitter @eric_alterman

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