WTF is wrong with you, NBC News?

Being willfully dumb is fine when you’re not relied upon for national news. And yet The Dumb is very much a pattern of behavior in newsrooms across the country.

For our purposes today: one of America’s most-watched morning news show anchors, Savannah Guthrie, is but one of NBC’s reliably bad and misinformed miscreants stinking up our airwaves. (NBC was home, very temporarily, to that ill-fated Megyn Kelly experiment.)

One terrible anchor is a whoopsie; two is a puzzler; 3 or more might be an operation.

‘Let’s not conflate issues’

Do they play dumb for grandstanding, just to generate outrage-clicks? Does mainstream news perpetually inhabit Conservative Inc.’s hallucinated grievance because of “News Lupus,” as Jon Stewart once famously said?

Special Report: GOP feverishly fabricating Apartheid in America [UPDATED]

Guthrie had the temerity to, yes, conflate The Former Guy’s squeals of “vOtEr FrAuD!!” with President Biden’s human response to GQP’s state-based well-documented integrity mission ratf*cking voters of color. And VP Harris gathered her as a result.

“States have put in place laws that are purposely making it more difficult for American people to vote,” said VP Harris, decrying an obvious scenario that we in Georgia are now living under. (Virginia will not be far behind now that Qpubs have taken over there.)

In midst of Guthrie’s irresponsible and disgusting grandstanding Madam Vice President Kamala Harris made other substantive points.

“America cannot afford blatant erosion of democracy, and in particular, the right of all Americans who are eligible to have access to the ballot unfettered.”

VP Harris added:

“I’ve met with prime misters and presidents from around the globe. They look to us as a role model as what it means to be a democracy. They’re monitoring us, wondering and questioning if there’s an erosion in one of the best role models of what democracy does and can do.”

Fascism is here

As republicans SURGICALLY revamp elections to block Dem voters, National media is cheerleading autocratic movement in America that will send us in to the abyss and kill democracy—if we don’t head it off this November. Titular leader of a political party—which is a criminal mafia, btw—still thinks he’s mob-POTUS and the party is bending to his will.

Sedition dragnet will end in RICO charges for TFG & GOP [UPDATED]

With that knowable backdrop, Guthrie really did conflate numerous issues, dangerously, with breathtaking false-equivalence. “We’ve heard [charges of election fraud] before but not from this president.” Trump cried “voter fraud” while trying to scheme his way to a second, illegitimate term. Those two things are not the same, and she knows that.

Is it just a coincidence, then, that Today‘s showrunner cut her teeth with Andrea Mitchell in the D.C. bureau?

Conflict must be very profitable for news nets… but it’s also actively making us dumber. And America is becoming Hungary in the process. 🔴

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Will Pollock is a perpetually cranky New York City escapee based in Midtown Atlanta. He’s a freelance multimedia journalist, media analyst and author of two books (award-winning Pizza for Good & Leaving Triscuit), with more on the way.

In 2001, Will earned his Masters from The Medill School of Journalism, graduating with highest honors from the magazine sequence. As permanent member of Journalism’s National Honors Society, he’s been active in monitoring, writing and blogging about media and journalism ever since he graduated.

Obsessed with good storytelling and journalistic excellence, Will uses snark, humor and reason to distill dumb shit and make it fun. He’s a seeker/maker of non-consensus news, and helps you cure crankies by finding the nut in every story.

As for-profit media continues to fail us, it’s more important than ever to find reliable sources. Authentic storytelling exists—you just have to look for it. On this blog you’ll get ideas, not ideology. Sass with class. Reporting with rapport. Evidence with a touch of evil. You get the idea.

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