Had you noticed that media outlets just can’t stop adding conservative talking heads to spout conservative viewpoints that will appeal to conservative viewers for whom liberalism “upsets their tum tums”? Well, Daily Kos writer Hunter did, and he blogged about it on Thursday.
Hunter quoted from and then reacted to a New York Post report on the latest manifestation of this recurring problem: NBC’s announcement that Joe Scarborough will become a regular contributor to Meet the Press in order to “bring a right-leaning voice to the program to appeal to viewers turned off by the show’s famously left-leaning former hosts including the ousted David Gregory.”
From Hunter’s post (emphasis added):
The perceived problem with…Meet The Press is that it was insufficiently conservative? That seems a curious lesson, but like every other thing in the history in punditry the presumed cure for the problem at hand is to intentionally drift farther into the fog of fuzzy pundit rightism. The current formula must not be working because the pundits are not saying the right things; the frustrated pundits then declare that the problem is that viewers are being pelted with too many upsetting left-of-center statements, which upsets their tum tums, so they have to ratchet the whole enterprise a little more rightward in order to cater to an ever-shrinking, ever-more-aged crowd of people who need validation, not knowledge. You know, conservatism.
This is the New York Post, mind you, so they could just be lying outright about the network blaming David Gregory's obvious frothing communism for the ratings slide. On the other hand, refreshing the program with the likes of Joe Scarborough—the network's closest equivalent to a decaffeinated Glenn Beck—does indeed suggest the program seeks to be "edgier" mainly via cookie-cutter ideological prattle.
