They were all warned when Comcast sold off MSNBC last week– Morning Joe, Joy Reid, Rachel Madow. The era of corporate-sponsored Trump-hating media had finally run out of gas as their ratings plunged. Apparently, the co-hosts of Morning Joe received advanced notice of viral obfuscation before their fellow MSNBC spreaders. Over the weekend, Joe and Mika high-tailed it over to Mara-a-Lago to meet with Trump saying it was to “restart communications.”
Following the election, viewers of the MSNBC “news programs” featuring the above four hosts dropped their shows like a hot cake. Earning salaries totally approximately fifty million dollars annually, these four MSNBC hosts spreading the most Trump vitriol must be huddling to discuss whether their new owners will even renew their bloated contracts as they expire – or before!
Over at ABC News, The View girls must be thinking the same thing. Their combined salaries total almost twenty million dollars annually. Whoopi Golberg and Joy Behar command most of that amount with each being paid $7-8 million annually by ABC News. Apparently seeing the handwriting on the wall, Behar Is listing her sprawling Hamptons Mansion in Sag Harbor for $10.95 million.
To further ruin their financial and professional futures, on November 15, speaking on The View for her and her fellow panelists, Sunny Hostin stone-facedly read in a monotone voice a carefully prepared statement concerning on-air negative comments the panel members previously had made. To preclude legal action against ABC News, her remarks were about three of President-elect Donald Trump’s recent cabinet appointments about allegations of sexual misconduct, all of which had been denied and which none had been legally charged. Just incidentally, Hostin is one of the lowest paid View panelists. During the Hostin announcement, loudmouths Goldberg and Behar made themselves as small as possible, slouching down in the background.
How much more legal exposure and bad publicity generated by these high-paid women is ABC owner Disney willing to absorb after the 2024 election turnaround?
The third member of the big three legacy corporate news operations, CBS, faced a $10 billion lawsuit for damages in the network’s “60 Minutes” interview with Vice President Kamala Harris. 60 Minutes producers allegedly edited the interview with presidential candidate Kamala Harris to make her answers appear more favorable to the viewers.
Meanwhile, over at CNN, Chris Wallace, never one to fail to give Trump anything but grief, relinquished his position there and its seven-million-dollar annual salary. Fox News and Wallace had terminated their twenty-year relationship before he joined CNN just three years ago. Wallace stated to The Daily Beast that he “decided to leave CNN to explore new platforms”. At 77 years of age, if Chris has a home on the water, then that “platform” could be a place where he and his older friends can sit enjoying cocktails while catching a few fish for dinner.
Last week, prime-time news broadcasts on Fox News interviewed The Wall Street Journal’s only regular never-Trumper columnist, Peggy Noonan. Peggy’s WSJ columns prominently featured at the top of the right-hand Opinion Page never once failed her weekly opportunity to take a surly shot at Trump until the last two weeks since the election. Then in the November 23-24 WSJ edition, her column was replaced with the comment, “Peggy Noonan is away”.
Like the other major news corporations, is even the WSJ washing its political decks in anticipation of Trump’s January return to the White House? Before the election, both The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times failed for the first time in decades to endorse the Democratic presidential candidate. Each in their own way, corporate news executives have tolerated, or even promoted, these Looney Tunes characters. Over the past eight years, these media merchants of disunity have been spouting out their regular toxic tirades while receiving obscenely high salaries.
Perhaps the media corporations now realize that the era of personal destruction must be ended for them to maintain their credibility with the public and help bring a divided America back together again.
The last one is out; please turn out the lights!
TW3
November 28, 2024
John Whitmore Jenkins
by