TV’s divas and bad actors stage a petulant revolt.
Only a backstage showbiz movie could match this week’s monkeyshines at NBC and MSNBC. Former Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna Romney McDaniel was hired to be a commentator at the joint political network until its on-air activists staged a revolt against their bosses. Talking heads Rachel Maddow, Jonathan Capehart, Lawrence O’Donnell, Joy Reid, Joe Scarborough, and Chuck Todd complained on the air about McDaniel, as if her presence would sully the uniformity — and sanctity — of their tawdry partisan terrain.
But those comfy corporate media ingrates aren’t real revolutionaries waging an uprising like the intra-party conflicts among their idols Joseph Stalin, Grigory Zinoviev, Vladimir Lenin, and Leon Trotsky during Russia’s October Revolution. These left-wing TV buffoons are just paper tigers staging a new version of their favorite hoax — a petulant insurrection.
Rebellion was in the air. Former CNNer Don Lemon had attempted to ambush his new employer Elon Musk on the inaugural episode of his new show on the X platform. Maybe the NBC and MSNBC clowns were trying to rival Lemon’s audacity. Just days later, Chuck Todd followed suit on Meet the Press by chiding his bosses for the McDaniel hire.
We can learn something about these diva snits from classic movies such as All About Eve, Sunset Boulevard, The Bad and the Beautiful, Two Weeks in Another Town, A Star Is Born, The Oscar, Valley of the Dolls, Gods and Monsters, Up Close and Personal, A Face in the Crowd, Boogie Nights, Ed Wood, and The Day of the Locust. D.C.’s Beltway backstabbers match Hollywood’s egotists. Their petty Bolshevism is a showbiz variant on power-madness but without a clear ideological agenda. (Todd is the Neely O’Hara adversary of TV news, and Maddow is its Eve Harrington careerist.)
TV’s so-called journalists offend the profession, abusing the prominence of their publicly broadcast appearances. Simply criticizing their showboating doesn’t reveal enough; it’s best to recognize them as faux politicians — court jesters who promote one particular political agenda by twisting truth into Fake News.
The network method of peddling lies from a particular slanted viewpoint (while, of course, always accusing their opponents of lying) is what makes them actors. Taking them on as performers protects us from ever mistaking shows such as Morning Joe, 60 Minutes, Face the Nation, Anderson Cooper 360, Meet the Press, and The Reid Out with Joy Reid as anything other than propaganda.
TV spin doctors perpetuate their own dishonesty; that’s why Nancy Pelosi hired ABC producer James Goldston to manufacture TV extravaganzas for the J6 Committee. The ruse created the illusion of investigating truth; it’s just such prestidigitation that motivated the tantrums of MSNBC’s bad actors.
This goes beyond an inside-baseball issue about NBC management’s inability to understand their own brand. Employing ex–RNC head McDaniel was true to form, as when MSNBC installed former RNC head Michael Steele as a regular on Morning Joe, where he constantly tap-dances his RINO status. By forcing NBC brass to fire McDaniel, the network’s upstarts revealed their antagonism toward free speech and debate, brazenly insisting on political conformity. (Maddow’s blather about “protecting integrity” is a pretense that only her densest followers would believe.)
It is the shame of TV-industry movies such as The Insider, Broadcast News, Up Close and Personal, Switching Channels, Morning Glory, and the laughably titled Truth (the now-forgotten Cate Blanchett–Robert Redford film about CBS and its Dan Rather flap) that they never got to the truth about the hypocrisy that turns network news into Fake News. Those sham journalism films were misleading because Hollywood’s left-leaning fantasists stayed loyal to Beltway newscaster bias. At least All About Eve helped us to see that showbiz folly was based in private neuroses.
MSNBC’s in-house pirates displayed high dudgeon that no self-respecting producer or news editor would tolerate. (That’s why Elon Musk showed Don Lemon the exit.) Their sophistry failed. Everyone could see their temerity and that they were only overreacting to an outsider invading their elitist ranks. Narcissistic stars may exhibit amusing vainglory (like Isabelle Huppert in The Crime Is Mine), but they are no different — and less offensive — from self-righteous TV anchors.
James Brooks’s 1987 Broadcast News lacked the scrupulous honesty of a showbiz roman à clef — it valorized the idea of journalistic integrity, which is dead to corporate media, with its delusions of class and moral superiority. (It could also be that Hollywood sucks up to odious network opinionators such as Rachel Maddow, Stephen Colbert, and George Stephanopoulos for fear of losing a chance to hype the latest product.) Unlike Hollywood-Broadway behind-the-scenes flicks that used scandal to defend the oft-beleaguered idea of art, Fake News movies believe in only one (leftist) ideology.
The inner workings of TV journalism are mysterious to viewers outside it. The egotism hiding behind political arrogance deserves scrutiny, yet we’re unaccustomed to doubting TV icons. They pretend to be smart, but you can only trust that arrogant actors will be arrogant.
Movies such as All About Eve and Valley of the Dolls didn’t just satisfy our curiosity for gossip. They were also cautionary tales debunking the hypocrisy and despotic behavior of their stars. Apparently, the backstage world of far-left political television never inspires curiosity among its lemmings; and there is no caution, just a strong tendency toward censorship that’s now out in the open.