Oligarch-Owned Media Continues Its Death Spiral

But at least we saw watermelons tossed off a roof one last time.

One of the saddest spectacles of the last year and a half in American politics — besides pretty much everything — has been the sight of oligarchs and their hand-picked apple-polishers doing everything they can to turn some of the nation’s storied media properties into pathetic simulacra of right-wing outlets. This has all been done in the service of sucking up to Donald Trump, who people treat like the all-powerful Oz instead of what he actually is: the doddering, dementia-blasted near-octogenarian aging faster than a wheel of brie in the middle of the Sonoran Desert.

This process has involved turning those media properties over to the management of incompetent boobs who we wouldn’t put in charge of a pretzel cart occupying a couple of square feet of sidewalk outside the Port Authority. These folks have taken the storied brands of The Washington Post and CBS and turned them the equivalent of, respectively, a lower-tier conservative blog from 2008 and a cable-access channel that can barely figure out how to operate a camera.

It has been something to see. And in the last week, we have had prominent examples of why, instead of throwing your hard-earned money at David Ellison or Jeff Bezos, you should support independent media. (Like Wonkette!)

First, the Post. The one-time home of such legends as Woodward and Bernstein, of David Broder, of Ben Bradlee and Marty Baron, laid off nearly half of its newsroom staff. But not to worry! The paper replaced all that wealth of knowledge of newsgathering with ... with ... with whatever the fuck this is:

(It is a trailer for Make It Make Sense, a web show featuring WaPo opinion writers sitting in a living room, or on a set that looks like one, pretending to have a spontaneous chat about issues of the day. It is different from every other talking heads news-talk show in that they are on a couch and dressed casually. And no one will ever name a band after it. It’s more likely that WaPo will just Stop Making Make It Make Sense.)

Yr Wonkette would actually prefer the news not to feel like chatting with our friends. When we chat with our friends, we have a range of other crap to talk about: the Red Sox, our spouses, our kids, our prostates, the new sushi place out at the beach, whether anyone is reading some doorstop of a Kristin Hannah novel or watching the latest season of Virgin River, and so on.

What we do not want is a podcast featuring some of the smuggest people we’ve ever seen in front of a camera yammering on and on with warmed-over dorm-room-level libertarianism like Hrrr-drrrr AKSHUALLY we have a very progressive tax code and the rich, contra that socialist Bernie Sanders, actually pay most of the nation’s taxes.

Or perhaps you’d prefer this Harvard graduate sneering about a new program in California that gives 400 free diapers to any baby when it leaves the hospital:

Personally, we think this is a good idea. Having enough diapers on hand is one less stress point for new parents trying to adjust to the fact that they are now charged with taking care of a squalling poop machine that needs nearly round-the-clock attention. Besides, 400 diapers is all of a little over one month’s supply for newborns, who go through 8 to 12 of the damn things per day. Since that needy loaf of not-yet-fully-developed brain is going to be in diapers for the next 18 to 36 months, giving parents one month’s worth is hardly that generous, seeing as how they are going to be on the hook for another 35 months.

The diaper program will cost $12.7 million in the next fiscal year. That is a rounding error in California’s budget. If we were still a California taxpayer, we would approve of our tax dollars going to this way more than we would approve of them going to build another football stadium.

“If Newsom really wanted to help families, he wouldn’t be handing out diapers because he wouldn’t have to. He’d be boosting prosperity and opportunity. He’d be lowering the cost of living, dealing with crime, making energy more affordable. He’d be tackling those day-to-day quality of life issues.”

First of all, having a month’s worth of diapers around when you bring your newborn home from the hospital very much counts as a day-to-day quality of life issue.

Second of all, does this rejected Jeopardy contestant think that this diaper program is the only thing Gavin Newsom is working on? Boosting prosperity! Lowering the cost of living! Surely these are not issues that the governor of a state with nearly 40 million people is ignoring so he can do a photo-op with an exhausted new mother and a box of Pampers.

Watching these four nitwits babble about shit about which they have clearly never spoken to others or down any research about, we were comforted by the knowledge that Make It Make Sense has so far been a huge dud. As you can see from its YouTube page, the videos are all only getting a few hundred views. Pathetic numbers for a Washington Post property. Maybe the numbers will improve if they start throwing watermelons off the roof of the building like Letterman used to do.

Which brings us to CBS News, which this week managed a fuck-up that we don’t think we have ever seen before:

CBS Evening News anchor Tony Dokoupil failed to get his Chinese visa in time to cover President Donald Trump’s meeting with Xi Jinping.

Dokoupil will instead broadcast from Taipei, while his competitors, NBC News’s Tom Llamas and ABC News’s David Muir, will be anchoring from Beijing, where the action is really happening.

This trip to China has been on Trump’s schedule for months. How are you one of the three major broadcast networks and you couldn’t get a visa in time to get your anchor to a high-profile summit between the leaders of two of the world’s largest nations? There are entire groups at CBS that handle logistics for travel! Unless Bari Weiss has fired anyone who knows how to do that. Which, according to the Status podcast, she has.

So while NBC and ABC had their anchors on the ground in Beijing, Dokoupil was broadcasting from a hotel over a thousand miles away. In the capital of an island whose status is a very touchy subject in China. In fact, Dokoupil and his crew got booted from the hotel because its management was worried about his comments about the conflict:

A source told Status that the hotel management “was appalled” by the aggressive manner in which Dokoupil discussed the democratically governed island, which Beijing claims as its own, as Trump was meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

So to sum up, CBS couldn’t get their anchor within a thousand miles – literally – of where the real action is because they screwed up one of the most basic parts of international travel. Then the anchor got booted out of his hotel and had to find another location from which to broadcast his regular evening news because he almost caused an international incident talking about something that everyone in news and politics knows you have to be very careful talking about.

The Bari Weiss Experiment continues paying dividends. Mostly for comedy and people like Marie Kondo who love mess, but still.

Speaking of CBS, this upcoming week will see the end of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. The reasons for its cancellation remain mysterious. It remains the highest rated late-night show, yet CBS pulled the plug for allegedly financial reasons. No one has yet proven for sure that the cancellation happened because David Ellison wanted to get on Donald Trump’s good side so he could get approval for the big Paramount-Warner Brothers Discovery merger. But between the timing and Colbert being on top when he was taken out, it is an inescapable conclusion.

Anyway, because we mentioned Letterman earlier: he was a guest on Thursday night’s episode, where he and Colbert went old school by throwing shit off the roof of the Ed Sullivan Theater. As fan-servicey nostalgia goes, it was really great:

[The Daily Beast / The Daily Beast / The Guardian]

In case we hadn’t yet made the point, there has never been a better time to support independent media. Wonkette is independent media. See where we’re going with this?