Salon.com > Luke Russert

Hack List No. 8: MSNBC

Wed, 19 Dec 2012 19:48:00 +0000

This year, my annual list of the worst of political media highlights not just individuals, but the institutions that enable those individuals. The 2012 Hack List will be counting down the 10 media outlets that are hurting America over the next two days -- stay tuned! (Previous Hack List entries here, here and here.)

MSNBC, we're told all the time, is the liberal Fox News. That's reductive and stupid. It isn't. MSNBC isn't the liberal Fox News for two very important reasons: It usually demonstrates a greater respect for the truth than Fox News, and it's not as good as Fox News. It's not as good at being liberal as Fox is at being conservative. Fox is rigidly ideologically consistent, with its "straight news" programs echoing the same talking points and pushing the same slanted stories as its opinion shows. While there's no doubt that MSNBC is more unapologetically liberal than it used to be, it's still all over the place, with a conservative anchoring its flagship morning show, objective Beltway "straight news" proponents like Chuck Todd and Andrea Mitchell dominating in the daytime, and weekends full of ... prison shows. But more important, it's not as good as Fox at being compelling TV, which is why millions more people watch Fox every day. (There are demographic reasons for Fox's advantage, too, but it's still a huge number.)

Is the GOP playing Obama?

Thu, 13 Dec 2012 20:35:00 +0000

There's no real mystery about why House Speaker John Boehner and his allies keep screaming about wanting spending cuts, but never propose any: The kinds of cuts they are known to want, like raising the eligibility age and/or means-testing Social Security and Medicare, are wildly unpopular. So on Thursday Boehner held a ranting press conference where he railed about "spending" but didn't propose one single cut.

On MSNBC's "Now With Alex" (guest-hosted by the great Joy-Ann Reid), congressional correspondent Luke Russert told the unvarnished truth about why the party that's for cuts won't lay any out. Reid asked Russert: "Do Republicans really feel that putting forward entitlement cuts will make them more popular with the American people?"

And Russert, who has good GOP sources, explained their logic:

If they have entitlement cuts as part of this deal, they would make it, through their marketing ways, and they're better communications operatives than Democrats, that the president would own the entitlement cuts. They're not worried about that. They would say "the president owns that" in 2014 and 2016.

Look at how they did that with the defense cuts as part of the sequester. Remember those ads that Romney ran, that Republicans ran: "These are the president's defense cuts"? They'd do the same thing: "These are the president's entitlement cuts." They don't worry about that at all.

Luke Russert, nepotist prince

Thu, 24 May 2012 15:35:00 +0000

Tim Russert was not the unalloyed saint of tough journalism that his celebrators describe in posthumous tributes, but he was at least a classic American success story, of the sort that we still enjoy pretending is common: Blue-collar kid from Rust Belt town becomes enormously successful thanks largely to brains and hard work. The story of Luke Russert, alas, is a much more common one in American life: No-account kid of successful person has more success thrust upon him.

Pretty much immediately upon the death of his father, Luke Russert inexplicably had a full-time broadcasting job, supplanting his part-time broadcasting job co-hosting a satellite radio sports talk show with James Carville. (That was a real thing that actually existed. Can you imagine a human who would want to listen to that?)