Alex Pareene's Super Hack List: The Sunday Shows, The Drudge Report, CNN

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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!

Click here for a link to Part I.

7. The Sunday Shows

Every Sunday morning, the big four broadcast networks all air their FCC-mandated “public affairs” programming, which consists of a host (a white guy) interviewing the same dozen lawmakers, journalists and pundits in a rotating order. The lawmakers are usually not the most powerful members of Congress — often they’re somewhat marginal figures in terms of influence, in fact — and the pundits and journalists all generally share the same, or very similar, worldviews. The only people I actually know who watch these things do so out of professional obligation.

But people watch these shows. Millions of people. More people watch “Meet the Press” than “The Daily Show.” Most of those people are quite old, but it’s still the case that a significant portion of the American people are learning the contours of the great public debates of our time from David Gregory interviewing Lindsey Graham.

FAIR is the organization that has most recently sorted and tallied the Sunday show guests, and yet again, the shows skew white and conservative. FAIR looked at the guest lists for ABC’s “This Week,” NBC’s “Meet the Press,” CBS’ “Face the Nation, and “Fox News Sunday” from June 2011 through February 2012. They found:

Of one-on-one interviews, 70 percent of partisan-affiliated guests were Republican. Those guests were overwhelmingly male (86 percent) and white (92 percent).

The broader roundtable segments weren’t much more diverse: 62 percent of partisan-affiliated guests were Republican. More broadly, guests classified as either Republican or conservative far outnumbered Democrats or progressives, 282 to 164. The roundtables were 71 percent male and 85 percent white.

U.S. government sources — current officials, former lawmakers, political candidates, party-affiliated political operatives and campaign advisers — dominated the Sunday shows overall (47 percent of appearances). Following closely behind were journalists (43 percent), most of whom were middle-of-the-road Beltway political reporters.

Media Matters tallied the guest lists in 2005 and 2006 and came up with very similar results. There are never labor leaders, scientists, academics, activists or public policy experts on these shows, ever. There are scarcely any women or people of color. The Sunday shows are broadcast live from the cocoon.

To merely note that they’re right-leaning, though, doesn’t quite do them justice. They embrace an ideological spectrum that goes from Mary Matalin to James Carville, but the panels are dominated by David Brookses and Tom Friedmans and Bob Woodwards, all spouting the same faux-”moderate” Beltway consensus bullshit. They lean right because the elite Washington consensus is that America leans right. But they worship moderation, baby-splitting, and shallow displays of bipartisanship above all else. Imagine David Gergen and Peggy Noonan agreeing with each other about Simpson-Bowles, forever.

In election years, they fill the panels with partisan hacks. Not just liberals and conservatives, but people who are being paid to go on TV and use prepared talking points to make the case that their candidate will win. It is extremely difficult to see how that serves “the public” in any fashion. Sunday Shows from late in the campaign season reach heights of useless hackdom few other television programs can match. It’s nothing but surrogates spinning and pundits making vague or wildly inaccurate predictions based on their “guts” or “intangible” qualities like “momentum.” There’s a reason ABC’s “This Week” was the venue for the legendary Mark Halperin line, “This is excellent news for John McCain.”

Post-election, the Sunday Shows have been devoted to discussions of (and panic about) “the fiscal cliff.” Anyone who watches these shows likely comes away with a wholly inaccurate impression of what the “cliff” is and does, though they will learn that all of our wonderful elected lawmakers are doing their best to avert the “cliff” and seek bipartisan compromise to lower the deficit, even though “the fiscal cliff” was already a bipartisan compromise to lower the deficit.

If you want to learn precisely how insular and self-satisfied and totally deaf to public opinion and outside expertise and experiences Washington is, the Sunday Shows are enlightening. Just don’t expect to learn anything useful about politics or policy, ever.

6. The Drudge Report

Shortly after noon on Nov. 6, Time’s Mark Halperin posted this on Twitter: “When John Harris & I wrote ‘Drudge rules our world,’ we were describing what IS, not what ought to be. Doubters already proven wrong today.” A few hours later Barack Obama won reelection, which I assume came as a shock to people who do get most of their news from Matt Drudge.

Here’s a brief tour of 2012 as the Drudge Report covered it.

• Mitt Romney picked Condoleezza Rice as his running mate.
• Mitt Romney picked Gen. David Petraeus as his running mate.
• News that Barack Obama secretly invented a girlfriend in his book rocked the nation.
• Mitt Romney selected Tim Pawlenty as his running mate.
• A video of Barack Obama saying “I believe in redistribution” changed the course of the presidential race.
• A video of Barack Obama speaking to black people in 2007 changed the course of the presidential race.
• A shocking late-October bombshell announcement from Donald Trump changed the course of the presidential race.
• Jake Gyllenhaal endorsed Mitt Romney.
• Barack Obama accepted campaign donations from Osama bin Laden.
• “Vanloads of Somalians” committed voter fraud in Ohio.
• Most national public opinion polls of the presidential race were decidedly inaccurate until “unskewed” to represent a more Republican electorate.
• The exception: Polls from Rasmussen.
• Election Day exit polls were initially a “BOOM FOR O” and then, strangely, simply “tight,” and then they ceased to exist entirely.

5. CNN

Maybe we beat up on poor CNN too often. I have previously bemoaned CNN’s inability to get breaking news right, offered advice on how to save the network and offered constructive criticism of their decision to hire Jeff Zucker. CNN was also well represented in 2011′s Hack List, with Wolf Blitzer, Piers Morgan, Erick Erickson and Erin Burnett all making appearances.

But it deserves to be criticized because so many of the things it does wrong could be so easily corrected. (Say, by firing Piers Morgan and cutting back on Wolf Blitzer’s hours.) And not only that, but CNN the institution is clearly capable of doing better, as it shows every day on CNN International, the sober (and profitable) overseas arm. Instead, it chooses every time to go harder on “personalities” and gimmicks. It has hired, to run its whole operation, the man who took NBC’s “Today” show and turned it from a regular news broadcast to a celebrity chat show and concert showcase. (He then proceeded to destroy all of NBC.)

CNN has a bigger staff, larger reporting budget, and many more overseas bureaus and correspondents than any of the other cable news channels, but the only time it ever betrays any evidence of those resources is during an international crisis. The rest of the time it’s Wolf babbling at a giant TV screen or Piers Morgan obsequiously interviewing a famous person. Take it away, anonymous CNN staffer: