Personally, I blame it all on MSNBC. Every time they put a lying asshat like Hugh Hewitt on its air, they cultivate the culture of lying for profit. It’s hard enough to wrap one’s head around the same news network having a great talent like Nicolle Wallace on its air alongside a useless turd like Chuck Todd, but the same network having Nicolle Wallace and a man constitutionally incapable of telling the truth or being correct about anything? That’s mind-blowing. Hugh Hewitt, to be kind, is a cancer upon our political discourse. I’m being kind in calling Hugh’s collective contribution to TV punditry “wrong”. One can aspire to be truthful but still be wrong because the facts one chose to back up one’s truth don’t back it up. Big boys and girls take in the new information and change their outlooks. But, some people – like Hugh Hewitt – know damned well they’re wrong. But, being wrong across an entire career has cost Hewitt exactly nothing. If that fact were to change – if being wrong suddenly cost Hewitt more than he was making? He’d make it a point to stop being wrong – or to shut the hell up when he knew he wasn’t right.
Hugh Hewitt’s not alone of course. TV punditry is a dream job for the truly lazy because all they have to do is spew the same stuff they always spew. Republican pundits always have it easier than Democratic pundits because no one ever expects a Republican politician or pundit to ever bring receipts with them. It’s so understood, in fact, that TV news hosts rarely if ever demand that anyone on the conservative side of the ledger ever lay down a receipt for something they say or think. It’s understood that whereas Democrats deal in facts, Republicans deal in feelings – and anyway. “both sides do it”.
I’m not the first person to point at Hugh Hewitt as blight on broadcasting and journalism. A few years ago, Jonathan Chait famously took apart this Hewitt op-ed that appeared in the Washington Post (and shame on THEM for publishing such truth-free claptrap!) almost line by line and word by word – that’s how dishonest Hewitt’s op-ed was. Instead of making the case for a second Trump presidency, Hewitt “persuasively negates the very possibility that a coherent pro-Trump argument can or could be made.” As Alex Shephard put it in the New Republic, ” He’s always been a partisan hack, amplifying Democratic scandals while sweeping Republican malfeasance under the rug. He just did it in a genial, agreeable style that the Beltway media mistook as thoughtful analysis.” Boy, what goes for “thoughtful analysis” these days…
Fact: if vanilla could be evil, it would look like Hugh Hewitt. Hugh’s the poster boy for the banality of evil. Hugh’s plenty banal and plenty evil. Both sides
Another MSNBC conservative contributor who’s almost always wrong is Noah C. Rothman.
By “premeditated plot to overturn the election”, Noah means people like John Eastman and Ginni Thomas. He means every single phony elector and Trumpublican running for state office hell bent on tossing election results. To a schmuck like Noah, these are all random events with no conceivable connectivity.
Clearly what Noah has written here – he wrote it two days ago! – is demonstrably false. There’s so much evidence making a mockery of Noah’s tweet that it’s astounding he didn’t pull it down already. But why would Noah do that? What’s being totally wrong costing him? Nothing.
Noah Rothman and Hugh Hewitt can be wrong all day long on MSNBC and they’ll still pump it out just because Noah and Hugh have opinions. Few things did more damage to American journalism than its belief that it could be fair (or fairer) by pretending it was completely neutral. “Both sides do it” is pure, perspective-free cynicism. And it couldn’t be further from the truth.
If it was up to me, guys like Hugh and Noah could still appear on MSNBC but only if, before each new appearance, they went through every single instance where they were wrong last time so they can correct the record. Hugh and Noah would each spend the entirety of every new appearance debugging the last appearance of lies and bullshit.
In time, MSNBC would stoop inviting them onto their air because who wants to hear two dumb white guys apologizing for being dumb white guys? They probably won’t even do that honestly.
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