It's The Ratings, Stupid.

 

While Gil Scott-Heron may have been right about the revolution not being televised, that does not rule out the stupid.

Being televised, I mean. 

Especially if said stupid garners big time ratings.

To wit, here is the Washington Post's Margaret Sullivan writing about why cable news in general, and CNN in particular, couldn't lay off the stupid back in the salad days of golden escalator rides, if not showers:

Just a few years ago, CNN seemed intent on giving Donald Trump as much help as possible for his (2016) presidential run.

The network obsessively covered the candidate’s raucous speeches in the Republican presidential primary. It treated his campaign like entertainment, rather than a prelude to autocracy. It ran chyrons like “Breaking News: Standing By for Trump to Speak” over footage of an empty stage and hired Trump loyalists such as Corey Lewandowski and Kayleigh McEnany as talking heads to boost his reputation...

{snip}

... (Then CNN boss Jeff) Zucker and Trump shared a common goal: TV ratings.

Trump, quite accurately, has called himself a “ratings machine.” The endless media attention he has commanded is a testament to that.

And Zucker? A former NBC executive once called him a “ratings whore.” A reporter who worked for him at CNN put it more genteelly, telling New York Times columnist Ben Smith that ratings were always the executive’s “North Star.”...

And it wasn't just the cables who were hooked on the money that Trump's ratings while spouting the stupid would make for them. It was the network's too as the late, great Eric Boehlert noted at the time (i.e. the spring of 2016):

...CBS executive chairman, president, and CEO Les Moonves recently insisted the Trump campaign "may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS," adding, "Donald's place in this election is a good thing."....

****

But that was then and this is now.

From Digby, writing about how the cable networks dealt with a particularly stupid announcement earlier this week:

...The hand-picked Mar-a-Lago crowd was straining to stay engaged as Trump rambled on. First CNN cut away and then Fox News followed suit — MSNBC didn’t cover it at all — switching to their pundit panels even as he was still talking. That was when we finally got a glimpse of how this pseudo-event was going to be received by the media...

Hmmmm...

One can only wonder if Mr. Trump will take this latest development as a sign that the only way to get those ratings and networks back on his side is to ratchet the stupid up to, say, infinity.

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