Fearlisting & The Decay of Tradmedia

On the Morning Joe meltdown, countless press layoffs, and the numerous ways I've felt like a complete psychopath this week

(Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Lately, I’ve been feeling a little crazy.

Every time I open TikTok, or something from the mainstream media, or even something from the “calmer” Blue Skies, I feel like I’m witnessing something that, in another lifetime, would have been seen as the cuckoo bananapants event to end all cuckoo bananapants events. Every day is like looking at the aftermath of a vase shattering on the ground. I heard it from the other room; I told my wife about it. We went to investigate, and now there’s a big ass mess on the ground. The worst part? In this scenario, the broom has been outlawed. There ain’t no sweepin’ this mess up, sis.

But it’s not just that it’s ONE thing making me feel crazy: it’s ALL the things. And it seems to start with the way tradmedia is on a bit of a doom spiral.

Like for example, on December 5, Joe Scarborough went into the kind of unhinged rant you would expect to see on the cesspool formerly known as Twitter or in the comments of a Ben Shapiro video.

Instead, it happened on MSNBC. It lasted twenty minutes, and consisted of Joe and Mika bending over backwards to justify their reported meeting with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago.

"If they have a chance to talk on the background with the incoming president and president-elect, they would do it," Scarborough said. "In fact, as somebody wrote during this outrageously stupid, immature series of articles that lied time and time again about us, reporters said 'I'd be fired if I had the opportunity to go in and talk to somebody who's the incoming president of the United States and I didn't do it.' Ask any journalist at The New York Times and New York Post- and this is a funny thing. People at The Washington Post, especially, hair on fire! Media report, ‘how dare they, how dare they.’ At the same time that The Washington Post is doing the same thing, trying to speak to the president on background, trying to speak to people around the president on background. That's what reporters do!"

Which is kind of a funny thing, right? For one, I don’t think it’s just that Joe and Mika went to visit Donald Trump - it’s that after years of calling Trump a fascist, of him denouncing the worst tendencies of Trump, such as him decrying Trump wishing he had generals like Hitler’s, after years of blasting Trump as a downright evil man, he changed his tone completely. Who cares if a commentator or a reporter goes to interview the president-elect, even if it’s Donald Trump? Especially if your morals are firm and consistent.

What I believe most people truly care about is the spinelessness of it all. The day before Joe’s temper tantrum, Morning Joe had David Frum on, a journalist for The Atlantic. When asked about the rumors surrounding Secretary of Defense nominee Pete Hegseth’s heavy drinking, he made a scathing remark. As he writes in his own essay for The Atlantic:

“I answered by reminding viewers of some history: In 1989, President George H. W. Bush nominated John Tower, senator from Texas, for secretary of defense. Tower was a very considerable person, a real defense intellectual, someone who deeply understood defense, unlike the current nominee. It emerged that Tower had a drinking problem, and when he was drinking too much he would make himself a nuisance or worse to women around him. And for that reason, his nomination collapsed in 1989. You don’t want to think that our moral standards have declined so much that you can say: Let’s take all the drinking, all the sex-pesting, subtract any knowledge of defense, subtract any leadership, and there is your next secretary of defense for the 21st century. I told this story in pungent terms. It’s cable TV, after all. And I introduced the discussion with a joke: “If you’re too drunk for Fox News, you’re very, very drunk indeed.””

Almost immediately, Frum was reprimanded by a producer during the ad break, and not too long after that, Frum was astonished to find that Mika Brzezinski issued an apology for his remarks.

So, in response, Frum wrote an article detailing his feelings that Trump’s threats against “unfriendly media” are starting to have a chilling effect on political discourse in the mainstream media - and possibly for good reason.

“Shortly before leaving office, Trump amplified a conspiracy theory that Brzezinski’s co-host, Joe Scarborough, was a murderer,” Frum writes. “Kash Patel, Trump’s nominee to head the FBI, has compiled an enemies list to target with investigations. Trump’s candidate to chair the FCC has speculated about stripping licenses from platforms that displease the new incoming administration. Interference with mergers and acquisitions to punish critics was a feature of Trump’s first administration. Now MSNBC may be spun off by Comcast, leaving the future of the liberal network very much in question. The hosts of Morning Joe visited Mar-a-Lago in November to mend fences with Trump. They genuinely have a lot to worry about.”

And then Frum ends with the sobering remark: