re: #84 Skip Intro

Maddow and others like her might ask real questions of the guests, making them mad and refusing to return, or refusing to appear at all.

I don’t know exactly when this started, but I first noticed it on Fox with Hannity and Colmes, where Republicans would only be “interviewed” by Hannity, and non-Republicans by Colmes. I thought that was complete bullshit, but it caught on.

The neutering of the tv press is all but complete now, except for dusty corners where few viewers go.

Modern day spin doctoring and campaign management relies very heavily on control of what the politician or candidate says and who asks her or him questions. This is so because:

A. Many such people aren’t great leaders, they’re just party hacks and that because clear if they are subject to too many hostile questions.

B. It is far too easy nowadays to twist a complex statement into some sort of ‘gaffe’ or ‘gotcha’. We’ve all seen video clips taken out of context in that way, and so have the campaign managers. Hence they want to make sure the interviewee gets asked questions that can be answered as much as possible with canned sound bytes that sound good to their intended audience and that are hard to twist into a ‘gaffe’ or ‘gotcha’.