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Good evening. It's Monday, March 25.
Tonight: there's quite an uproar taking place at both NBC News and MSNBC. Apparently, they are convinced that they are some sort of real news network and, as a result, many of their on-screen personalities are expressing serious rage in offense over the hiring by NBC of former Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, who is better known as the niece of Mitt Romney. According to these giants of journalism people such as Chuck Todd and Joe Scarborough, the mere presence of someone on their airwaves who was even linked to Donald Trump, who happens to be the person leading all polls to be elected as president of the United States in 2024, would sully this network's reputation for objective and high-minded news. Worse, they say, it would infuriate their liberal viewers who are very unaccustomed to hearing any dissent from the Democratic Party and would feel deeply uncomfortable if they were exposed to any views that made them feel like they weren't being agreed with.
This is the same august news outlet that is the one that currently employs former Bush-Cheney spokeswoman Nicolle Wallace, former CIA Director John Brennan, Joy Reid— Reid – who has a 7 pm show every night on MSNBC, even though got caught fabricating an elaborate lie about a time-traveling hacker who authored the bigoted blog posts under her name – and as many former agents and operatives of the U.S. Security State as one might found at a Proud Boy rally or a civil war somewhere.
This reaction to hiring a quite banal RNC chair, somebody who actually is so kind of conventional that she's hated by the MAGA world, reveals a great deal about how employees of the largest media outlets see their actual function. For that reason, we think it's worth taking a look at.
Then: Ben Carter Swisher has become a very wealthy woman, posturing as the mean and no-nonsense watchdog over Silicon Valley. She has a new book, topping the New York Times bestseller list that purports to expose the secret abuses and corruption of the leaders of this tech culture. And yet, at the very same time that she brands herself as the scores of Silicon Valley powerbrokers, the leading cheerleaders for Kara Swisher generally, and for her new book, in particular, are and always have been the very leaders of the industry she claims to subject to such harsh and unrelenting and critical journalistic scrutiny. If you're a journalist who purports to adversarially report on a leading power center, whether it be Silicon Valley, the military-industrial complex, Congress, or Wall Street, and the leading power brokers of those sectors love and support and praise and help market you, that is a very good sign that what you're doing is subservient propaganda that advances their interests, not independent journalism that undermines it. That is certainly the case for Kara Swisher, who provides a very vivid window into the role that celebrity journalists like her play as they are promoted by the very people they claim to expose.
And then, finally, the neuroscientist Andrew Huberman has become a major force in independent media, someone who has managed to find a very large and devoted audience without relying on large media corporations at all. He has a podcast that is listened to by millions of people and an audience that he built by himself over time. There is nothing—and I mean nothing—that corporate media hates more than that. Somebody who succeeds without having to rely on their rotted structure. And so this week, they set out to destroy him, as they do to everyone who finds success without relying on their corporate structure. As one of the countless failing liberal digital outlets, New York Magazine has a cover story this week with his face on it that purports to expose dirty and shameful secrets about Huberman's dating life. Yet having read it, there is not a single fact that was even worth reporting or that was even of journalistic value, let alone that one's brings shame or disrepute to him. So often these people demand that the public cry and express sympathy as their journalistic industry dies around them, and they are laid off by the dozens. And yet so often they engage in behavior that makes their failures so well deserved, and feelings of sympathy as we watch them lose their jobs almost impossible as their industry deservedly sinks, and they drown along with it.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
