| | | | MEDIA WINNER:
Jake Tapper CNN's Jake Tapper got a big score this week: the first interview with President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, which on its own would put him in contention for today's Media Winner of the Day.
How Tapper conducted that interview sealed the win for him.
He posed topics to both Biden and Harris that were of vital national importance, and asked tough questions that probably were not completely comfortable for them to answer, like Biden being asked to pledge that his family members will not conduct business that is a conflict of interest with the White House, questions about criticisms from progressive allies and those wanting more diversity on the Cabinet, and both of them being asked about navigating the sometimes competing interests between groups like the teachers unions and the scientific recommendations for the pandemic.
Journalism doesn't require an interviewer to be on constant attack, targeting their subjects like a prosecutor conducting a brutal cross-examination, but after four years of obsequiously sycophantic interviews of President Donald Trump on certain rival networks, it is good to see powerful politicians challenged.
Tapper also got Biden to respond in detail to Trump's refusal to concede, transition plans, and some of his strategies for fighting the pandemic.
There were also some lighthearted and personal moments, like hearing Biden explain how he hurt his foot playing with his dog and Harris talking about how her husband Doug Emhoff will be referred to as the "Second Gentleman" but she's just going to call him "honey."
It was a warm, genuine, and substantive discussion between a respected journalist and two people who will soon be having a lot of power over all of our lives, and definitely worth watching. |
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| | MEDIA LOSER:
Greg Gutfeld One of your humble newsletter correspondents likes to start the day with a triple shot of very strong Cuban espresso, but a recent rant has us wondering how much caffeine Greg Gutfeld is mainlining.
The Five co-host went on an unhinged tirade on Thursday, metaphorically ripping out his hair and rending his garments for the Fox News audience as he bemoaned the possibility of Democrats winning the Georgia Senate runoffs in January.
Gutfeld has always had a flair for the dramatic, and is admittedly entertaining to watch. But this histrionic schtick was a better fit for his former late night program, RedEye, than a 5 pm show on a news network. Screaming hyperbole about a pop culture topic is funny; aggressively inciting panic and division in your viewers that their fellow Americans are their enemies is not a laughing matter.
“If Democrats get control of the Senate under the current state of their party, it is over for this country," Gutfeld declared theatrically. "It is the end of our Republic...If these people are in charge, it’s nice knowing you, America."
Oh, come on!
As Mediaite's Reed Richardson pointed out, if both Democrats win in Georgia, the Senate would be split 50-50, so Harris as vice president would be the tiebreaker vote. That razor-thin majority could not survive a single defection or absence. Moderate Democrats like Sen. Joe Manchin are simply not going to sign on to defunding the police, shredding the constitution, or whatever the scare tactic in next week's GOP ads might be.
Call us Pollyanna, but we just don't believe that Senators of either party are plotting to destroy America. And after this hellscape of a year, we don't find it helpful to try to convince Americans that their neighbors are plotting their demise.
Fox News has been getting ratings by running hourly episodes of George Orwell's Two Minutes Hate, but we're not going to applaud it here. |
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| | Baby steps Trump is still pouting that he won the "rigged" election (and, natch, tweeting up a storm about it), but the wall of Republican solidarity is starting to show a few cracks.
Perhaps most noteworthy was Sen. David Perdue, one of the Georgia Republicans defending his seat in the January runoffs, who made public comments acknowledging that Biden won the election. And he did so just a few hours before Trump is scheuled to appear at a rally in his state to campaign for him. Ouch.
Former Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway also conceded the election her former boss will not, acknowledging the truth in a recent interview with 19th News.
Where there's smoke, there's liars
Trump campaign lawyer Jenna Ellis appeared on Maria Bartiromo's Fox Business show and merrily promoted a conspiracy theory about a Georgia election video -- a story that had already been debunked by Georgia elected officials (Republicans too!).
Both Ellis and Rudy Giuliani have touted this video as a "smoking gun." It's not. Nope.
That didn't stop Fox News from bringing up the video several more times during their daily coverage. They even mentioned that the Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (again, a Republican and Trump voter!) had dismissed the video as showing “no wrongdoing" -- and then immediately asked their guest, the Federalist publisher Ben Domenech, if the video was a "smoking gun." Domenech replied that there wasn't enough evidence to expect the election results to be overturned but this still "raises questions and should be investigated." Okay then.
The My Pillow dude also has an opinion about the election. Fox News thought it was worth airing several minutes of him ranting about how he was "100%" sure Trump would be president for the "next four years."
Drain the swamp? LOL JK
So apparently there was another round of purges at the Pentagon today...and now Trump loyalists David Bossie and Corey Lewandowski have jobs on the Defense Business Board. Yes really.
"Matt Putz!"
A group of Young Republicans is being heavily criticized for a gala they held in New Jersey that basically flaunted all the social distancing and face mask recommendations. Congressman Matt Gaetz attended, and his presence drew the ire of the New Jersey governor.
Even worse than anti-maskers
The Daily Show's Trevor Noah called out Democrat elected officials who have been caught violating their own Covid restrictions, and he shredded 'em good.
Operation Turtle Speed
A Johns Hopkins professor slammed the FDA's red tape holding up the Covid vaccine in a scorching op-ed.
Meanwhile, Biden said he won't make the vaccine, when it eventually gets here, mandatory, but will do everything in his power to encourage people to get it.
2,000 people a day
Larry Kudlow got grilled about Trump's recent absentee presidency, specifically on the pandemic. 2,000 Americans are dying each day and the president is nowhere to be seen, as CBS' Paula Reid pointed out. See his response here.
Let them eat cake So we are now in month 5,146 of this pandemic and the stimulus checks have long since run out for the many Americans who have lost their jobs. But Speaker Nancy Pelosi didn't appreciate it when a reporter asked her if it was a "mistake" to have waited so long for another coronavirus relief package.
Aggressively centric armadillos
Matthew McConnaughey is in the "a pox on both your houses" camp, slamming both the "arrogant" left and "fake news" on the right in a recent interview. He called himself "aggressively centric," and had a very Texan metaphor about armadillos. 6.5.0 |
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| When Economists Go Wild
CNBC expect stock price updates and economic forecasts, not smash mouth cage matches, but viewers got a bit more excitement than usual on Friday, when hosts Rick Santelli and Andrew Ross Sorkin engaged in a throwdown over the logic of allowing big-box retailers to stay open while forcing small business owners to close their doors.
There was yelling. There was angry hand waving. And a debate over who was "doing a disservice to the viewer" that broke down into "You are! You are!"
Watch the bonkers segment here.
The clip quickly went viral, and sparked some savvy social media viewers to dig up another Santelli clip from back in March, where he suggested infecting the entire human population of earth with the coronavirus as quickly as possible. Yikes. |
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