You just have to laugh each time NBC spends big money on another ethically challenged “journalist” from the white nationalist news network Fox has become and it doesn’t work out.
First it was liar-for-hire Greta Van Susteren in 2017 for $5 million a year, then Leni Riefenstahl wannabee Megyn Kelly for $20 million per ($69 million overall). Meanwhile, former Fox hate-mongers Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck have failed to pull significant audiences since leaving Fox and starting their own ventures.
And the beat goes on.
Said no ever named Andy Lack.
The 71-year-old avatar for class warfare who leads MSNBC and NBC just can’t get enough of the shameless opportunists who staff the Right Wing Lie Machine. Lack is a country club commando raised in rich enclaves, who despises the masses, and openly worships oligarchy and the Predatory 1 Percent.
He is a poster child for fake liberalism, poser journalism and toxic elites and a boil on the ass of the traditional Liberal principles of equality, freedom, democracy and regicide. Just begging to be lanced.
The damage Lack has done to the news field has gone largely unnoticed for the past 25 years for one reason, and one reason alone – Rupert Murdoch and Fox News have been worse.
Lack’s marginalization of America’s faltering middle class has been over-shadowed by Fox’s racial and religious scapegoating. However, the painful truth is that news has been transformed from a unifying force into a tool of rich tyranny and class warfare during his watch at NBC, MSNBC, and CNBC.
Andy Lack’s NBC celebrates corporate greed, Wall Street cheerleaders, and the destruction of the middle class. And not in a small way.
Lack’s poser journalists prefer to allow rich people to speak for the masses than actual members of the poor and faltering middle class. Sure they lean “left,” but not towards the masses.
NBC leans left toward Corporate Dems, rich hypocrites, the self-proclaimed masters of the universe of Wall Street, and a global economy with no labor protections.
Their political reporting focuses on how much money political candidates generate from legal bribes, rather than their actual positions, integrity and qualifications.
Their economic reporting focuses on the appearance of growth and the positives of new technologies, instead of painful truths. Like the official unemployment rate of 4 percent obscures the real jobless rate of 40 percent; rigged elections between dueling Wall Street cheerleaders rob American voters of choice; the gig economy is really a sharecropper economy; and e-commerce and self-driving technology threaten to destroy more than 44 million jobs in a nation with just 130 million full-time workers.
All is well in America, according to Andy Lack, because all is well for him and his fellow toxic elites. Never mind the portions of the country outside the New York, DC, Silicon Valley and Boston privilege bubbles.
In his America, we can all afford a few fake journalists. Like those employed by the White Nationalist Lie Machine.
Why hasn’t it worked out?
Reason No. 1, they’re not bonafide journalists. If they were they wouldn’t need to cheat to accumulate good ratings by working at Fox, which exists solely to misinform the electorate, grow corporate profits, and divide the masses.
For example, Greta Van Susteren was hired with no journalism experience. She’s got a legal background.
Reason No. 2, the kind of unprincipled liar-for-hire who would report for Fox is not going to be able to produce public service journalism – because their minds don’t work that way – much less connect with real working people.
Reason No. 3: The talent that elevates political propaganda doesn’t lend itself to the telling of painful truths.
Case in point, NBC’s hiring of trust fund babies Chelsea Clinton ($600,000+ a year from 2011 to 2014), Jenna Hager Bush and Meghan McCain as national correspondents in 2011. Three icons of America’s failed political aristocracy without a single journalism degree or formative reporting experience between them.
The highlight of Chelsea’s disgraceful tenure was a hard hitting expose on vegetarian food trends. Apparently, the cotton candy industry was stonewalling her.
So why hire these three modern day political princesses at a time when experienced journalists were being kicked to the curb by the truckload to cut labor costs?
NBC did it to curry favor with the very newsmakers they’re supposed to scrutinize. Just like the crooked mob boss handing out low-show union jobs to his confederates in the film “On the Waterfront.” Or a crooked cop who spends his free time with mobsters.
When McCain was confronted by her new peers, the private school product defended her undeserved position as a national correspondent on the basis that she had tutored kids at church, delivered flowers to hospital patients, and secured internships for herself at Newsweek and Saturday Night Live.
Princess McCain was so lost in the real world she didn’t even know that baby journalists don’t start out by expressing their opinions about anything. They start out on the cop beat. Preferably in the sticks
McCain habitually cites Columbia University as her alma mater, thereby implying she graduated from its prestigious graduate School of Journalism.
She didn’t. She got an undergraduate degree in art, just like Lack. Who studied art at the Sorbonne in Paris and Boston University.
The head of MSNBC and NBC never paid his dues by attending journalism school or working the police beat either. Just like Matt Drudge, Andrew Breitbart, Arianna Huffington, Mark Zuckerberg and all of the other fake journalists who are ruining the news field by conflating news, opinion, political propaganda and corporate press releases.
NBC’s history of hiring power brokers and their kids as journalists doesn’t end with the three princesses. The network also hired professional race baiter Al Sharpton.
The minister turned political opportunist turned New York City into a racial powder keg in 1987-88 by championing the false allegations of racism and rape of 15-year-old Tawana Brawley.
In NBC’s world, the Sharptons and MLKs are the same.
In its America, we can also afford to turn a blind eye to the sexual predations of aging leches like disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein. Lack’s NBC had that story first and sat on it, according to The Huffington Post.
Given Lack’s track record, you have to wonder whether he was trading favors with a fellow country club predator. NBC-produced “Access Hollywood” pulled the same kind of crap when it suppressed Trump’s infamous “grab them by the pussy soundbite” with Billy Bush.
Lack helped elevate Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential primaries. Lost in the outrage over Trump’s favorable coverage by Fox, was the fact that NBC was airing Trump rallies in their entirety.
That’s not reporting. That’s giving a free stage to someone who generates rating through fear and bullying. Like the bear baiting and public executions of old.
“I think it’s a helluva story — and I like big stories,” Lack told the Daily Beast, rejecting the notion that NBC and other news outlets were providing the reality TV star with free political advertising.
“Donald Trump is leading our news coverage, and everybody else’s, because Donald Trump has cut a path through the Republican Party,” Lack explained.
The former art major, with zero print news experience, never explained why the same argument didn’t apply to independent candidate Bernie Sanders. Like Donnie Trust Fund, Sanders was filling stadiums. Unlike the five time draft evader, Sanders was not Hillary Clinton’s preferred opponent.
Lack is the same clueless rich fool who protected longtime Today Show host Matt Lauer through decades of alleged sexual misconduct.
The sad part of it all is that Lauer probably would have been fine under the right leadership. Meaning someone with a solid journalism foundation, who knew how to say “fucking stop.”
Why?
Because one of the first lessons of the police beat is that a department with no internal affairs issues is a department awash in systemic corruption.
Corruption is part of any field in which temptation battles daily with individual impulse control. Ignoring low-level misconduct in that kind of climate is an invitation to high-level misconduct.
Just like the kind of sex trading which has infected broadcast news and Hollywood for decades.
The best way to deter young police officers from taking $5,000 to escort drug shipments is to send them to the woodshed the first time they accept a free cup of coffee or apple. Not because they’re wrong for accepting a free apple, but because it’s the gateway to more serious corruption.
The same is true of journalists.
You don’t hurt your people by holding them to high standards, you help them. If Lauer had been held to high standards he’d still have a career.
If Lack had ever been held to such standards himself, he’d know that.
That remains to be seen. NBC’s parent company, Comcast, is all about profit growth. Not good journalism or making America a better place.
Lack’s “no morals” approach to news ratings fits that framework perfectly.
In this mercenary climate the only issue is whether Comcast can grow profits with Lack at the helm. Not whether he deserves to survive.
This opportunist POS has already answered that question.
America is better without him, but it’s also better without the Comcasts of the world who empower him and those like him. And they’re not going any where.
Until you make them.
