Moyers On PBS

His demos are good, though, especially against O'Reilly, whose audience is drifting toward Poli-Gripland.
Wasn't MSNBC originally supposed to be some groundbreaking TV-web synergy monster? What happened to turn it into another cable news outlet?

 

Absolute, demonstrable bullshit.

 

Fact - Bill Moyers brought up an "internal NBC memo" on his show. I think it has been sufficiently proven that no internal memo existed. At the very best it was a memo from an external consultant. For Moyers to mention an internal memo as some sort of smoking gun is either an example of pretty shoddy journalism or he was intentionally being misleading.

Fact - Donahue says he first learned about the supposed memo when he read about it in the NYT. JackS has shown that the NYT never published anything about an "internal" NBC memo. Donahue couldn't get this simple fact down and the producers of the show once again either exhibited shoddy journalism or they were willing to let this obvious misstatement go in order to further mislead the audience.

Fact - Fenian first described the supposed memo as a "famous" internal NBC memo. Either Fenian failed to do his homework or he was willing to take whatever Bill Moyers says at face value with zero critical thinking involved . This again could either be an example of shoddy journalism (trusting Moyers because Moyers was saying something pleasing to Fenian's ears) or proof Fenian is willing to stretch the truth to try and make his case.

These are the facts and the facts are undisputed. Either Moyers and Fenian are shoddy journalists or they are partisans willing to mislead with half-truths and lies. You decide.

 

Dishonest about me.
Dishonest about Jack.
Four pages running.
Proven to be a fake? By whom? Where?
(Hint: Not Jack. He says he accepts that the study/memo exists, but that its provenance might be outside NBC.)
Clock's still ticking, foof.
And, let us re-enter, for a moment, the global argument:
Did the elite press fall down on its job of calling to account an administration that was lying and misleading the country into war?
Did this program make the case?
If not, or if it made the case dishonestly, are we arguing a) that the elite press did its job and the country got lied and misled into a war anyway, or b) that the country was not lied or misled into a war and the elite press, as represented in this program, do its job properly?
Quoting A Few Good Men, even the minor dialogue parts, without attribution is not only dishonest, it's really lame.

 

JR - I have 3 things I would like to say in response to your post.

1. I am not surprised that you jumped in here to make a gratuitous insult aimed at me. I am surprised that you bothered to watch the show before jumping into the conversation (that goes against your usual behavior of just spouting off without knowing the facts). However, I am not going to trade insults with you. I have decided that you are not worth my strife.

2. I've met Max Baer Jr. and he was a fine gentleman to me. To be compared to him is not something I take as a slight in the least.

3. Your use of "hillbilly" as some sort of joke exposes both your ignorance and bigotry. I'm sure the folks who live in North Carolina or West Virginia or that part of the Southern United States must think your "joke" is really funny. The Triangle Park area of North Carolina, for example, is among the elite areas for both technology and education in the entire world but I guess the residents there are just hillbillies in your eyes. Some of the greatest Americans like General Chuck Yeager and Sargent Alvin York were self-described "hillbillies". So I'm not sure what the aim of your joke was but the result was just to further expose your own ignorance.

 

Fenian - if I have been dishonest about what you have said - please give me an example.

As far as JackS - I have made sure to provide his quotes so that it is not me who is interpreting his words. You do the exact opposite.

If you dispute the facts I laid out - explain why (without resorting to insults please - insults are not facts)

 

We agree on one thing -- comparing you to hillbillies is an insult to hillbillies.

Jack can speak for himself.
And he undoubtedly will.
His last statement on the subject.

"I thought an "internal memo" was probably fiction. When I subsequently deduced it may have been an outside consultant's report, the existence became more plausible to me."

Your last statement on the subject:
"I think it has been sufficiently proven that no internal memo existed."


Challenged three times to produce any evidence of anyone ever alleging what you've alleged above -- that the document did not exist -- your last statement on that subject:

...

Smartest thing you've ever posted.
Learning to argue a case from your favorite bloggers is really stupid.

 

To be helpful, here's a contemporary account from those liberal moonbats at VARIETY.
You will notice that there is nothing from NBC regarding the authenticity of the document -- nobody calling it a "fiction" or a "fake" -- just that Donahue wasn't dumped for political reasons.
And, let's try to to be clear. He says it was why he was dumped. NBC denies it. NBC subsequently hired, in succession, Michael Savage, Dick Armey, and Joe Scarborough, the latter two of whom had no experience as broadcasters to speak of. Their ratings were no better or worse than Donahue's were, although I do suspect they came cheaper. Nevertheless, from these facts, it's hard to argue against the notion that, acting on someone's recommendations, MSNBC was taking a swing to the right in an attempt to catch what it thought was the prevailing zeitgeist and increase its ratings. In doing so, it crippled its capacity to bring contrary opinion to its admittedly tiny public at a crucial moment in history.

Anyway, submitted for your perusal.
(Variety -- 3/10/2003)
A HARD RIGHT

BYLINE: Craig Offman

SECTION: INSIDE MOVES; Pg. 8

LENGTH: 233 words

HIGHLIGHT: 'Donahue' decked by conservative crunch



Cable news channel MSNBC may have taken a hard swing to the right, but the left is punching back.

As the net fights off activists opposed to its recent hire of shock-jock Michael Savage, some MSNBC insiders say conservative politics had a heavy hand in the cancellation of Phil Donahue's 8 p.m. program --- the highest-rated show on the net.


The show saw big boosts in ratings when it stacked panels with hardliners and hawks and featured agenda-driven topics like immigration.

At the same time, network management apparently didn't care for the anchor's left-leaning politics, a contention that echoes a recently leaked internal memo that found Donahue's politics would not have been palatable to auds in wartime.

"He was handcuffed," Donahue ally and activist politico Ralph Nader tells Variety. "They ensured that three guests had to be right-wingers in order to discuss right-wing topics."

Insiders claim at editorial meetings, program producers followed a formula that for every one liberal they put on a panel, they needed two conservatives --- one, presumably, to compensate for moderator Donahue.

When Michael Moore was suggested as a guest, one staffer quipped the gadfly filmmaker would require four conservatives.

Management, though, is staying above the fray.

"Politics had nothing to do with the cancellation," says MSNBC prexy Erik Sorenson. "It was all business.">

 

Fenian - serious question - are you really this obtuse or do you think if you say a thing enough times that it will finally come to be true?

JackS says that he can give some possible plausibility to the existence to a memo from an OUTSIDE consultant. Bill Moyers spoke specifically about an "INTERNAL" NBC memo (which you characterized as a "FAMOUS" memo as if anyone who hadn't heard of this bigfoot of an INTERNAL memo was living in a cave). I said "I think it has been sufficiently proven that no internal memo existed." Do you not know the difference between the meaning of the word "internal" and "external"? Dictionary.com can be useful when running into words whose definitions are unfamiliar. If it is not a matter of ignorance of what those two simple words mean - then what are we to think? Are you in so much denial that you cannot allow yourself to differentiate between such basic words or are you trying to mislead people on purpose because getting people to agree with your political views is so basic to your very existence?

Either way Fenian - for anyone paying attention to this thread - your performance has been pretty sad. You seem to be turning into the Matthew Harrison Brady character from the end of Inherit the Wind in front of our very eyes.

 

BTW Fenian - I asked you to point out where I had been "dishonest" about what you said or what JackS said. I think I sufficiently proved that your example was false.

I would ask you to either provide a concrete example of where I have been "dishonest" in regards to you or JackS in this thread. If you cannot - I hope you would have the common decency to apologize for basically calling me the equivalent of a "liar".

I will also point out that I had requested that you respond to my previous post without resorting to insults. That simple request appears to have been too much for you. Raising the level of discourse here at SportsJournalists.com is something that is wished for by many of the "veterans" of the board. The inability for you to respond to a single post without insults or snark or naked partisanship is disappointing. We would like this to be a board for adults - not adolescents who have to somehow insult others to make themselves feel better.

I await you proof that I have been "dishonest" or your apology.

 

I don't know that I have a stich but, if I do, I hope it saves nine.
And Chris -- so dedicated to civility that he doesn't hesitate to drag people's marital histories out at the drop of a hat --seems to have decided that A Few Good Men is insufficiently erudite so he's reaching back to the eighth grade reading list.
Now, as to the fame of the memo. Well, it's mentioned in at least four books I can name, and it was widely publicized at the time in newspapers ranging from VARIETY (see posted clip, to which no response is yet forthcoming) to the Washington Post. If you weren't paying attention at the time, well, that's not my problem. Judging from what I recall from this board, an awful lot about the run-up to the war was getting past you at the time. Blind cheerleading based on half-baked ideology and will do that to a feller.
And are we really going to quibble now about the difference between "internal" and "external"? Assuming Jack is right, do you honestly believe that, simply because a corporation engages an "outside" consultant, that anything the consultant does is, prima facie an "external" work product? Do corporations keep the work product of outside consultants secret? Do they keep them secret in their company computers? Do they put them in those large metal things called file cabinets in the company's HQ? And you claim that it has been "sufficiently proven" that no such "internal memo" exists at all? Your proof? What Jack posted here. Period. (Clock still ticking on my previous question about contemporaneous cites.) And it's based on a definition of the word "internal" that is drained of its full meaning. That's dishonest. Words do not simply mean what you want them to mean.
(Oh, and spare me the "You called me a liar!" tubthumping. Your arguments are dishonest. You? I could care less.)
For example, "centerpiece" and "pillar," two words that you used to describe the Donahue interview's relationship to the credibility of the Moyers documentary. Luckily, the local PBS'er ran it again last night, and I had a stopwatch with me. Donahue doesn't appear until 51 minutes into an 85-minute program. He and Moyers chat for about two minutes before the show moves on to Michael Massing, an author whom I would bet a shiny buffalo nickel you've never heard of. (Stay away from Mr. Google.) They come back 75 minutes into the show, and they finally talk about the famous memo/study. This discussion lasts...58 seconds.
Centerpiece?
Pillar?
More than Landay and Strobel from Knight-Ridder? More than Walter Pincus? Hell, Rather gets more screen time.
Words do not mean just what you want them to mean.

 

Thanks for giving me a laugh this morning Fenian.

The image of you watching the show again with timepiece in hand just to try and make points on a dumb argument on an Internet board makes me laugh. Is your ego really that big or that fragile?

I'm sorry that a person of your supposed intellect cannot tell the difference between the importance between internal vs external. Your refusal to see the difference between those two words is like your refusal to admit that Donahue was not fired for his political views. Your refusal to grasp the obvious is unexplainable.

As far as commenting on your bit that appeared in Variety - I didn't comment on that because I was embarrassed for you. Its 233 words in what equates to slang ("net" for "network" - "auds" for audiences) that relies on what they call an "internal memo" (I'm still chuckling over you fawning over a blogger supplied bit of questionable evidence) and the opinion of Ralph Nader (I guess Michael Moore was unavailable for comment at the time). Do you seriously think that post equates to any sort of proof to support your position that Donahue was fired because of his political views? What color is the sky in your world?

As far as "contemporaneous cites" - if you check page 2 of this thread you'll see that I cited something from CNN about why Donahue was fired. It seems obvious to everyone that only one citation was necessary for that. You are the only one who is clinging to an illusion that Donahue was fired because he was antiwar.

The simple question remains - why would Moyers include the Donahue segments in the first place if as they had to know - the position that he was fired for his views about the war were misleading at best? Why the need for the two orders Col Jessup?