Why should we trust the purchaser of TikTok to keep it going? Remember when NBC bought and then killed Television Without Pity?

Here's the Wikipedia page for Television Without Pity, in case you don't remember that wonderful website.

Here's my post from 2014:

NBC has to apologize after Olympics announcer Joshua Cooper Ramo says something stupid about Korea, Japan, and WWII.

The NYT reports on something said during the opening ceremony:

Noting that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan was in attendance, Mr. Ramo described Japan as “a country which occupied Korea from 1910 to 1945, but every Korean will tell you that Japan is a cultural, technological and economic example that has been so important to their own transformation.”

The apology comes after an on-line petition that read:

“Any reasonable person familiar with the history of Japanese imperialism, and the atrocities it committed before and during WWII, would find such statement deeply hurtful and outrageous,” the petition read. “And no, no South Korean would attribute the rapid growth and transformation of its economy, technology, and political/cultural development to the Japanese imperialism.”

I didn't listen to every word of the opening ceremony announcing, and I didn't hear that remark about Japan, but in my post yesterday about the ceremony, I had a problem with the announcers:

[I]nstead of telling us about how the various costumes, symbols, movements, and projections said something about Korea, they kept saying things like "and Asia," "and all over Asia," and "and Asian people in general." Why?! Asia's a big place, with culture and history that didn't take place in one united whole group....

I went looking for reviews of the show to see if anyone else was complaining about that and found Maureen Ryan (at Variety):

... I did get tired of the endless generalities from Ramo about what constituted “Asian” culture, which felt about as deep as a Wikipedia entry.

So it caught my eye when the NYT included this:

Critics also seized on other remarks made during the broadcast by Mr. Ramo... Maureen Ryan, Variety’s chief television critic, wrote in a review of NBC’s broadcast of the Olympic opening ceremony that “Ramo’s endless generalities about what constituted ‘Asian’ culture felt about as deep as a Wikipedia entry.”

Where did NBC get this character Ramo? The NYT identifies him by linking to a webpage that promotes his new book, so I'm going to check Wikipedia, which goes a lot deeper (and it's undeep of Maureen Ryan to offhandedly deploy Wikipedia as shorthand for shallowneess). Excerpts from Wikipedia's Joshua Cooper Ramo article:

Ramo began his career as a journalist at Newsweek in 1993. He joined Time magazine in 1996.... Prompted by an interest in business and global affairs, Ramo moved to Beijing in 2002. He worked with John L. Thornton, a former president of Goldman Sachs, in China from 2003-2005, when he joined Kissinger Associates as managing director. In 2011, he became vice chairman of Kissinger Associates. In 2015, he became co-chief executive officer....

In 2004 he published “The Beijing Consensus,” which contrasted the Chinese model of economics and politics with western, “Washington Consensus” models. In 2007 he published “Brand China,” an analysis of China’s international image. In 2011, Ramo proposed a new model of US-China relations based on complexity theory known as “co-evolution.”...

In 2016, Little, Brown & Co. released Ramo's third book, The Seventh Sense: Power, Fortune, and Survival in the Age of Networks, which purports to identify a "new instinct" for networks that characterized new groups in politics, economics and security... [and] claims that the emergence of constant, widespread connection represents a shift in power that will... lead[] to a widespread collapse of existing institutions and the emergence of new sources of power. In the book, Ramo proposed a new idea for American grand strategy known as “Hard Gatekeeping” in which the country would develop and use platforms for the control of network topology, but would carefully limit access to those platforms.

So Ramo, who said something so stupid and offensive when he was just chattering for the millions as we watched the Olympics, presents himself as some sort of grand sage of economics and foreign policy. Kissinger Associates? "Hard Gatekeeping"?

ADDED: On reflection, I suspect that NBC hired Ramo specifically because he would say things that leaned toward globalism and connectivity and launching into a future that has nothing to do with the old political conflicts. I think he was encouraged to do exactly what he did, which is why it sounded so awkward at the opening ceremony.

I said I'd watch the Golden Globes (and watch it "with an open mind"), so I owe you this post.

I don't know if I'd be choosing this topic for Monday morning if I hadn't essentially promised to write it. Why didn't I write it last night? I fell asleep. I fell asleep, and then I woke up at 2 a.m. and watched the rest of it, including the appearance of Kirk Douglas, who is 101 years old. How did he stay up? Yes, it's Pacific Time, 2 hours earlier, but still... he's 101!

Anyway, quick impressions:

1. Did all the women wear black? The President of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (which gives out the awards) appeared on stage in a voluminous, flaming red gown, supposedly because in "her Indian culture, it’s customary to wear a festive color during a celebration." Does that amount to a disagreement with the women in black? Were they resisting the usual festivity of the occasion? Do we see some implicit ethnic critique, that the white women of Hollywood were not sensitive to the meaning of color in other cultures? I look up the meaning of wearing black in India:

Black in India has connotations with lack of desirability, evil, negativity, and inertia. It represents anger and darkness and is associated with the absence of energy, barrenness, and death. Black is used as a representation of evil and is often used to ward off evil. 

2. What impression did it make, to see all that black? On the red carpet, the black made the crowd look much less glamorous. There was much less male/female differentiation, much less of a sense that the crowd was popping with especially beautiful people. In the long shots, it looked like a crowd at a boring cocktail party of ordinary-looking people. Harvey Weinstein wasn't there, but half the people in the crowd seemed not much better looking than him. There's a scruffiness to the men's "head styling," and with everyone dressed alike, the men seemed really nondescript. Inside the theater, in the long shots, the crowd looked more like a sea of white faces than usual. Even though great efforts were made to get close-ups of the black stars at the tables, the long view looked overwhelmingly white. Just the predictable effect of contrast. You'd think movie people would have better sensitivity to how component parts appear in long shots. This all-black design concept highlighted white people.

3. How did the men dress? Many of them wore not only black suits but black shirts and black ties. It looked sharp, albeit insectoid.

4. How did the men behave? I jumped over most of the men's speeches, but I think they were following a strategy of keeping it low key and throwing attention over to women whenever possible. I'd have to see a transcript to know if any of them did that old-fashioned thanking of his wife for putting up with him. I see in the news this morning that Ewan McGregor thanked his estranged wife: "I want to take a moment to thank Ev, who always stood beside me for 22 years and my four children, I love you." And then — because we need more love in this world — he also thanked his girlfriend.

5. I didn't hear any Trump-bashing. Aziz Ansari said: "I genuinely didn't think I would win because all the websites said I was going to lose." And: "I'm glad we won this one because it would have really sucked to lose two of these in a row." Wasn't that a shot at Hillary?

6. Oprah won the Cecil B. DeMille Award and gave a speech that has people saying she should run for President? Don't Trump haters realize that pushing Oprah as a presidential candidate undercuts one of the main arguments about Trump — that he didn't work his way up within politics but had the arrogance to think he could jump in and start at the top? Anyway, here's the transcript of Oprah's remarks. See if you think there's anything in there that's special. She had a tough task balancing her big moment with the need to recognize other people and to make her recognition of others about women in general (rather than black women or black people). It's a pretty gauzy text, but she sold it well:

In my career, what I’ve always tried my best to do, whether on television or through film, is to say something about how men and women really behave. To say how we experience shame, how we love and how we rage, how we fail, how we retreat, persevere, and how we overcome. And I’ve interviewed and portrayed people who’ve withstood some of the ugliest things life can throw at you, but the one quality all of them seem to share is an ability to maintain hope for a brighter morning, even during our darkest nights. So I want all the girls watching here and now to know that a new day is on the horizon! And when that new day finally dawns, it will be because of a lot of magnificent women, many of whom are right here in this room tonight, and some pretty phenomenal men, fighting hard to make sure that they become the leaders who take us to the time when nobody ever has to say “me too” again.

7. Here's the video of the Oprah speech. Notice the NBC logo — NBC, which played an ignominious role in this past year's sexual harassment journalism:



8. I got the video from the fashion writers Tom and Lorenzo, who say: "Yes, we could talk about how amazing she looks; how her gown is KILLA and the fit is insane; how her hair looks amazing and her makeup is beat to the gods. It doesn’t matter. While these two queens love a diva who turns it out, we love even more when a diva comes into her full power and uses that power to affect others. Nothing but respect for our president."

9. In the comments to this post, rehajm says:

I think she makes a big mistake about the media. They aren't entitled to their own truth. Their own truth is weasel words for lies. She sure got all those powerful women in the room riled up. I wonder if they now feel powerful enough to utilize the justice system, the one with a presumption of innocence, or if they expect to keep using the new one that's ripe for abuse.

Here's the relevant text from the transcript:

I’d like to thank the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, because we all know the press is under siege these days. But we also know that it is the insatiable dedication to uncovering the absolute truth that keeps us from turning a blind eye to corruption and to injustice... to tyrants and victims and secrets and lies. 

I was going to say that's a blatant display of a lack of dedication to the absolute truth — puffery and stroking. It was spoken word, so how it feels at the time is most important, but you can see in the text that she said "the insatiable dedication to uncovering the absolute truth," not "its insatiable dedication to uncovering the absolute truth." She never credited the press with having that insatiable dedication. She only held up dedication to truth as an abstract value.

I want to say that I value the press more than ever before as we try to navigate these complicated times, which brings me to this: What I know for sure is that speaking your truth is the most powerful tool we all have.

This is the part that bothered rehajm. Interesting. Above, I was stressing the difference between putting "the" or "its" in front of truth, and now the issue is putting "your" in front of "truth."

How can there be "your truth" and also "absolute truth"? One way to reconcile the 2 ideas is to say that "your" refers not to the press, but to the women who tell their stories and who are, as individual human beings, entitled to their subjective point of view. The press is separate, and it must "navigate these complicated times."

The press is under siege — a land-based military metaphor — and out on the Ocean of Complication. It should be dedicated to the absolute truth, and part of the truth is the way women experience their own lives and tell their stories. You can give an absolutely true report of the story that Ms. X told, even if Ms. X is only telling her own story, and that story is not the "absolute truth," but an element of a proper news report that will also contain other elements.

The next lines in Oprah's speech suggest that my interpretation of "your truth" is pretty good:

And I’m especially proud and inspired by all the women who have felt strong enough and empowered enough to speak up and share their personal stories. Each of us in this room are celebrated because of the stories that we tell, and this year, we became the story.

Ah! How she slipped from TRUTH!!! to stories...

10. "And here are the all-male nominees," said Natalie Portman, before reading the names of the nominees for best director. (Guillermo del Toro won for "The Shape of Water.") That line resonated when, shortly afterward, the award for Best Musical/Comedy Film went to "Lady Bird,"which was directed by a woman, Greta Gerwig.

11. Did you notice what didn't get anything? "The Post" and "Get Out."

12. That reminds me. "The Post" got nothing, which means that Meryl Streep did not win for Actress in a Drama, so who won? Frances McDormand! She wore the best dress. It was the most anti-fashion dress I've ever seen. Not just black, but high neckline, long sleeves, long full skirt, and cut way large. It was the absence of a dress, even more so than nakedness. [ADDED: Tom and Lorenzo on McDormand's dress: "We’re not going to rip apart her nun’s habit. It’s fine. It’s who she is.... Granted, we think she could’ve worn a comfy pantsuit and come off a little more chic in the process, but whatevs."]

13. And I can't believe they didn't give Best Actor in a Drama to the guy in "Get Out." Who'd they give it too? A white man, Gary Oldman, who played the white man, Winston Churchill. Oh, no. Wait. "Get Out" got classified as a comedy. The actor, Daniel Kaluuya lost to James Franco. And I see "Get Out fans 'outraged' by Golden Globes snub: 'We're in the sunken place.'" You know what that means, the "sunken place"? (SPOILER: It means your body has been taken over by a white person, and you are just going along for the ride, able to see where your body is going, but only at a distance, and unable to speak or control your own motions, which aren't really yours anymore, but that monstrous white person's.)

14. Didn't Gary Oldman get on some political shit list a few years ago? Oh, yes, here: "Gary Oldman can't stop apologizing for that Playboy interview he did where he kept denouncing political correctness." Those were simpler times. Oldman had said: "I just think political correctness is crap. That’s what I think about it. I think it’s like, take a fucking joke. Get over it.... We all hide and try to be so politically correct. That’s what gets me. It’s just the sheer hypocrisy of everyone, that we all stand on this thing going, 'Isn’t that shocking?'"

With Matt Lauer ousted from "Today" over an allegation of sexual harassment, it's a good time to remember the furious political bias charges Hillary Clinton made against him...

... in her book "What Happened." It was so bad, she said "Trump should have reported [Lauer's] performance as an in-kind contribution":

It was disappointing but predictable that [Matt Lauer] had so quickly steered the supposedly high-minded “Commander in Chief Forum” to the subject of emails, months after the director of the FBI had announced there was no case and closed the investigation. I understood that every political reporter wanted his or her pound of flesh... If Lauer intended to ask Trump tough questions, he had to make a show of grilling me, too.

Of course, that isn’t balanced at all—because balanced doesn’t mean strictly equal. It means reasonable.... If Trump ripped the shirt off someone at a rally and a button fell off my jacket on the same day, the headline “Trump and Clinton Experience Wardrobe Malfunctions, Campaigns in Turmoil” might feel equal to some, but it wouldn’t be balanced, and it definitely wouldn’t be fair....

I launched into my standard answer on the emails... Instead of moving on to any of a hundred urgent national security issues... Lauer stayed on emails....

"How Top NBC Executives Quashed The Bombshell Harvey Weinstein Story."

From HuffPo:

At an NBC News town hall Wednesday, NBC News President Noah Oppenheim said: “The notion that we would try to cover for a powerful person is deeply offensive to all of us. We were on that long list of places that chased this thing, tried to nail it, but weren’t ultimately the ones who broke it.”

Then he struck a rueful tone, suggesting that the NBC iteration of the story had died of natural causes. “We reached a point over the summer where we, as an organization, didn’t feel that we had all the elements that we needed to air,” he said.

Yet interviews with 12 people inside and outside NBC News with direct knowledge of the reporting behind Farrow’s story suggest a different cause of death. All of the sources who spoke to HuffPost asked not to be named, either because they weren’t authorized to speak to the media about the story or because they were fearful of retribution from NBC News executives. These sources detailed a months-long struggle within NBC News during which Oppenheim and other executives slow-walked Farrow’s story, crippling it with their qualms and irresolution....

The most embarrassing thing about this CBS News puff piece isn't that it proclaims that "Hillary Clinton lets her 'guard down'" based on nothing more than that...

... the Introduction to her new memoir makes the statement "Now I'm letting my guard down."



If NBC News cared about factual reporting, it would say "Hillary Clinton Claims She Is "Letting [Her] Guard Down' in Her New Memoir." Most of us won't believe that, and NBC must know that, so why would it ludicrously tout the book as if someone at NBC had read the book and found it revealing and forthcoming?

But the most embarrassing thing in that NBC news article is in the third paragraph. Did you notice? Let me close in on it:



They called it a "novel"!

Ironically, that's more believable than the idea that she's letting her guard down.

By the way, the book is called "What Happened." No question mark. You're supposed to read that title in a flat just-the-facts tone of voice. Not in a comical what-the-hell-just-happened? way.

IN THE COMMENTS: tcrosse said: "'What Happened' has to be the most disingenuous book title since 'If I Did It.'"

NBC: "Parisians Resigned to Hosting President Donald Trump in France for Bastille Day."

This is the way NBC covers the President's trip to France:

“America came to save Europe in World War I, so we owe them this,” said Jean-Pierre Tourne, a teacher who was waiting for his friend outside the Louxor cinema in the northern Paris neighborhood of Barbes-Rochechouart. “We don’t understand why the Americans elected him, but he’s the U.S. President now,” he added.

Don't worry. NBC doesn't understand either. By the way, we also came to save Europe in World War II, but who's counting? Let us know if you need us again. We're always ready to help, whether you understand us or not.

“I understand why as president he’s invited,” said [Louis Marcodini, a 19-year-old history student at University of the Sorbonne], who was sitting on the banks of Canal St. Martin in Paris’s hip 10th arrondissement. “Symbolically it’s important. We have to respect history. But as an individual, as a man, he is not wanted here. He is not in our hearts.”...

"He's not welcome here. You're in working class Paris now. He'll be at the Élysée, at the Eiffel Tower, he's not going to come here," said Yacine Mac, who was standing outside the Barbes-Rochechouart metro station, a predominately north-African neighborhood.

Well, Mr. Mac, you might be interested to know that in America, he's not welcome among the elite, and it's the working class places where he held the rallies and spoke to the people who bonded with him and made him President.

Trump blames NBC bosses for his troubles with Joe and Mika and points to the ousting of Greta Van Susteren as evidence.

Trump, not backing down, keeps tweeting about Joe and Mika, but he's not just standing his ground. He's advancing the theory. Here's his most recent tweet, from 2 hours ago:

Crazy Joe Scarborough and dumb as a rock Mika are not bad people, but their low rated show is dominated by their NBC bosses. Too bad!

That's his second shot at NBC this morning. Earlier he tweeted:

Word is that @Greta Van Susteren was let go by her out of control bosses at @NBC & @Comcast because she refused to go along w/ 'Trump hate!'

In between those 2 tweets, he attacked that other network:

I am extremely pleased to see that @CNN has finally been exposed as #FakeNews and garbage journalism. It's about time!

Those 3 tweets cohere into the theory that the bosses at NBC — like the bosses at CNN who were "exposed" in the Project Veritas video — are not following decent principles of journalism but chasing ratings. They think "Trump hate" works and they've pushed Joe, Mika, and Greta and only Greta had the guts and ethics to say no. Mika and Joe wouldn't be doing Trump hate on their own — they're not bad people — but they've got to perform in the ratings and they're following orders.

That's the theory I read in this morning's tweets.

The theory Althouse outlines is...

... what Trump is essentially saying and he's probably right or close to right.

... not what Trump is saying but it's a pretty good theory of what's happening at NBC.

... what Trump is essentially saying but it's probably wrong or nearly completely wrong.

... not what Trump is saying and probably wrong or nearly completely wrong.

... an incoherent effort at finding coherence in something that's just a big embarrassing mess.

 

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"As families of the Sandy Hook victims continue to pressure NBC to ax Megyn Kelly’s Sunday interview with conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, the network has been holding crisis meetings..."

"Insiders told us that staff were in panicked meetings all day on Monday. 'It’s a shit show. No one wants to withstand a whole week of criticism over this. There are a number of people who want to pull the interview.'"

I hadn't been following Alex Jones's theories, but I see now that he calls Sandy Hook "a hoax." Why would Kelly's show entertain such disgusting nonsense? Apparently, they're desperate to bump up their ratings. NBC sure extracted all the value from Megyn Kelly quickly, didn't it?

"Whoa."/"Ooh."/"Well, that's a bitch."

Voices of MSNBC panelists heard reacting to the announcement, just now, that Donald Trump has won North Carolina.

"I will not be used as a tool for their purposes. I am not a token, mammy or little brown bobble head."

"I am not owned by Lack, Griffin or MSNBC. I love our show. I want it back.... I don’t know if there is a personal racial component... I don’t think anyone is doing something mean to me because I’m a black person.... I care only about substantive, meaningful and autonomous work... When we can do that, I will return — not a moment earlier.”

Said Melissa Harris-Perry, walking away from her MSNBC show. The second-highest rated comment at the link — which goes to the NYT — is "I'm sure someone will come along and explain this to me but I have no idea what the issue is here. Why is this news?"

If executive heads don't roll, the network should keep Williams and let its viewers enjoy the embellished, punched-up, personalized version of the news.

"Brian Williams Might Have Also Lied About Navy SEALs, the Pope, and the Berlin Wall."

"We have some idea which of our special operations teams carried this out," Williams told David Letterman shortly after bin Laden was killed. "It happens to be a team I flew into Baghdad with, on the condition that I would never speak of what I saw on the aircraft, what aircraft we were on, what we were carrying, or who we were after."

In another telling, Williams said that he had been "told not to make any eye contact with them or initiate any conversation" with the SEALS. But, he said, that didn't stop him from befriending the men. According to Williams, he got into a conversation with one of the elite soldiers about the knife he was carrying. "Darned if that knife didn’t show up at my office a couple weeks later," Williams said. He also claimed that, nearly a decade after this supposed embed, a member of SEAL Team 6 sent him a souvenir from the raid on bin Laden's compound in Pakistan. "I got a white envelope and in it was a thank-you note, unsigned," Williams said during another Late Show appearance. "And in it was a piece of the fuselage of the blown-up Black Hawk in that courtyard. Sent to me by one of my friends."

Why are we only noticing the improbability of these tall tales now? It was out there in plain view all along. I mean, I wasn't viewing it. I didn't watch him on Letterman, but apparently this is Williams's style and why the network promoted him.

It's not enough for Williams to be fired. In fact, it's beside the point. If executive heads don't roll, the network should keep Williams and let its viewers enjoy the embellished, punched-up, personalized version of the news.

It's the NBC brand. Be out and proud!

Jon Stewart is leaving "The Daily Show" and Brian Williams is leaving "NBC Nightly News."

Williams is suspended for 6 months. I guess they want to see if we'll forget why he left and start wondering why he's gone, so they can bring him back. That's all very lame and pathetic, and I don't watch the nightly news, so there's a limit to my outrage about NBC's wan interest in the truth.

Stewart is gone for good, presumably, and by his own choice. 

Mr. Stewart, whose contract with Comedy Central ends in September, disclosed his plans during a taping of the program on Tuesday.

Saying that “in my heart, I know it is time for someone else” to have the opportunity he had, Mr. Stewart told his audience that he was still working out the details of his departure, which “might be December, might be July.”

“I don’t have any specific plans,” Mr. Stewart said, addressing the camera at the end of his show, at times seeming close to tears. “Got a lot of ideas. I got a lot of things in my head. I’m going to have dinner on a school night with my family, who I have heard from multiple sources are lovely people.”

Reading that, I feel a tad skeptical. The man is in contract negotiations! Comedy Central just lost Stephen Colbert, and Stewart must believe they really need continuity on "The Daily Show." Stewart has stayed in his place there for 16 years, while his subordinate comedians — Steve Carell, Stephen Colbert, John Oliver — have moved on to bigger things. They owe him. His departure might be December, might be July? Might be years from now! Throw more money at Mr. Stewart, Comedy Central, you cheap bastards! Show some respect! Show some gratitude!

He said he wants to spend more time with his family. That's code for: I didn't want to have to leave. Isn't it?

That reminds me of something from this Daily Beast article about David Axelrod and his new book that's going to be the basis of my next post:

["Believer: My Forty Years in Politics"] recounts... his parents’ divorce and his father’s subsequent suicide; and his guilty conscience over his own role as an often-absent parent, working on out-of-town campaigns while his wife, Susan, kept the family together as they confronted the challenge of raising a daughter seriously disabled by epileptic seizures.

“It was painful to write some of that,” Axelrod says, noting that he as he put together the family chapters, he sent them to his eldest son, Michael, as a cautionary note: “Don’t do to your kids what I did to you.”

"I'm utterly uninterested in the news that Williams is stepping away from his job for a few days."

I wrote that last night as a footnote to a subject that did interest me: Maureen Dowd's revelation that NBC executives knew Brian Williams had a problem of "constantly inflating his biography" and that it had become "a joke in the news division." Why was nothing done about it?

I was writing on my iPad last night, so it was too hard to elaborate, but now that I've got a keyboard, I wanted to say that there are 2 reasons why I'm not interested in the news that "Brian Williams is stepping away from NBC Nightly News for a number of days."

1. Williams should be fired. A voluntary (or coerced) hiatus is too piddling to matter.

2.  I never watch any nightly new shows. It's like a corruption scandal in a sport I don't watch.

I think in the whole time I've been writing this blog, I watched a nightly news show exactly once: to check out the debut of Katie Couric as a network news anchor: "Okay, I'm watching the Katie Couric show." ("It's so annoying to feel forced into it!...)

I do watch the Sunday morning talk shows — ugh, they'll probably blab too much about Brian Williams today — but that's because they are bloggable — more analysis of the news I've already read (and there are transcripts).

The nightly news shows — if I remember them correctly — present summaries of news stories that I already know about through reading. I guess I could blog about the slanting and distorting and the choice of stories, but I can't bring myself to care by the end of the day when I've already applied my bloggerly attention to the printed mainstream media like the NYT and the Washington Post. And there's no transcript.

The network news just doesn't seem important anymore. Good news for Brian Williams: There's a limit to the damage you've done. (I must say, I feel a little sorry for him — his lying seems pathological, the man appears to be mentally disordered — but he makes $10 million a year, so... no pity.)

It's those network executives who deserve our contempt. Their failure to do anything when they knew for so long about his problem shines a light into the abyss of their standards.

"NBC executives were warned a year ago that Brian Williams was constantly inflating his biography."

"They were flummoxed over why the leading network anchor felt that he needed Hemingwayesque, bullets-whizzing-by flourishes to puff himself up, sometimes to the point where it was a joke in the news division."

Some surprising background, from Maureen Dowd.

By contrast, I'm utterly uninterested in the news that Williams is stepping away from his job for a few days.

"I have achieved more in the first year than I ever thought I could."

Who talks like that?!

Deborah Turness, the president of NBC News. She also says: "The heat that happens here is quite unique." Unique heat?

Some unnamed former colleague is quoted saying she brings "a bit of rock-chick swagger to a newsroom full of middle-aged men."

Rock-chick swagger? Where does bilge like that come from?

Cinco de Mayo racist stereotyping.

On MSNBC.

Shame on NBCUniversal! It's shutting down Television Without Pity and even making all its old content unavailable to the public.

Incredible! I've been reading Television Without Pity since... I think as long as there's been the web. Since long before I started blogging (in 2004). Before I even owned a laptop, before there was WiFi, I used to print out pages of TWoP recaps to have something with me to read when I went out walking and stopped in a café. And don't tell me that sentence makes it look like I read while walking. I did read while walking in those days before iPods and digital audiobooks. I read Television Without Pity! What was the point of watching a show like, say, "American Idol" if you weren't going to laugh at it reading Television Without Pity?

Is there any NBC show that I've watched in the last 15 years? "Seinfeld" ended 16 years ago, so maybe not. Damn them! I guess I didn't need TWoP to watch NBC because even with TWoP, it wasn't worth watching.

Why is NBC destroying this internet treasure?

The sassy TWoP TV review and recap site — its motto is “Spare the snark, spoil the networks” — was purchased by NBCU’s Bravo cable unit in 2007. Both were founded in the Web 1.0 era.

I guess the network decided it wanted to spoil itself. It wants to be spoiled. Or it already was spoiled and not even snark could save it. Damn them!

The closing impacts 64 employees at the women-focused DailyCandy and three at TWoP....

It only took 3 employees to run TWoP?! You can't string along 3 employees? (As for DailyCandy, sorry, I don't follow it, despite being a woman, or perhaps because I am the kind of woman who doesn't want my reading woman-focused).

The reason for the closing down was pretty basic: Despite creating laudable sites, there was still not enough traffic and, therefore, a difficulty monetizing the properties, especially in the wake of increased competition since the pair were first founded.

You bought it, it was what it was, so perfectly what it was that you couldn't change it, so you killed it, you fuckers. Great value had been created, you cast your greedy eyes upon it, you thought you could leverage that value, and all you did was destroy it.

Why did NBC buy it, to ruin it? Is it like the Koch Brothers buying the NYT, keeping it going for 7 years, then liquidating the whole operation? Except NBC — and Universal, it's apparently one atrocious entity — is a media operation, reaching out to us, wanting our eyes, ears, and minds. NBCUniversal needs our love or at least our tolerance. I absolutely hate them for this.

Here's how the message is delivered over at Television Without Pity:



Here's the discussion at Throwing Things, where I learned the news. The general opinion seems to be that NBC is only closing what it had already ruined, and "classic Television Without Pity" was already dead. Typical comment:

I can't remember the last time I visited Zombie TWoP. But the quality of the writing and the crazy depth and detail of each recap on OG TWoP was phenometastic.

I'd love to get a scraped archive of the recaps (without having to click through each link.)

And:

Once they had a Project Runway recapper who didn't know what a bias cut was, I was gone, but man, I used to spend days deep in the forums debating Veronica Mars, and it was great for catching up on missed shows or shows you started late or when you wanted to read a dissertation on a "Battlestar Galactica" episode. So, yes, not surprised, but sad.

Whose leg felt that thrill?

The NYT book review of Gabriel Sherman’s biography of Roger Ailes, "The Loudest Voice in the Room," is written by Janet Maslin, who trashes the book, but not because she likes Ailes. It's that Sherman failed to get the goods on Ailes.

I just want to focus on one sentence:

The second half of “The Loudest Voice in the Room” is mostly devoted to recent and familiar news, beginning with the moment Fox began getting thrills up its leg over Bill Clinton’s Monica Lewinsky debacle. 

Come on. MSNBC owns the expression "thrill up my leg." Even though the Bill-and-Monica story had lots of sex and Fox News may have been eager to cover it, the eagerness didn't arise out of a vector of thrill going toward the groin. The journalistic enthusiasm described as a "thrill up my leg" came from Chris Matthews and he was titillated not by anybody's sexual activities but by the speechifying of Barack Obama.



That's on the list of nominees for most ridiculous, embarrassing thing ever said on a TV news show, and we're never going to forget it. Have at Fox News, perhaps by mocking some schoolboy furtively masturbatory outburst if you can, but if you talk of thrills up a leg, that leg is attached to MSNBC.

Etymological sidenote: The original meaning of "debacle" — used above in the phrase "getting thrills up its leg over Bill Clinton’s Monica Lewinsky debacle" — was, according to the (unlinkable) OED "A breaking up of ice in a river; in Geol. a sudden deluge or violent rush of water, which breaks down opposing barriers, and carries before it blocks of stone and other debris." The figurative meaning is: "A sudden breaking up or downfall; a confused rush or rout, a stampede." Yes, it's a dead metaphor, but it goes nicely with blowjobs, don't you think? Not that Bill ever was icy.

"Ronan Farrow has "assiduously avoided" publicity "for much of his life," according to The NYT Magazine, arduously aching to bestow publicity upon him.

The 26-year-old son of Mia Farrow and Woody-Allen-or-Frank-Sinatra has also had an MSNBC show thrust upon him.

His public persona is friendly but guarded.... So working as a television personality seems a strange choice; it’s likely to foreground all the things he has been so keen to leave in the background — his looks, his family, his private life. 

Oh, no, no, no, no, don't speak about how beautiful I am. Do put that in the background. I'm so keen to put that in the background. And in the foreground, please put... what? What the hell else is there? Why is this lad on television and in The New York Times?