MSNBC and trying to appease the dragon

Media outlets have tried to placate the Trump dragon by lighting themselves on fire. Not only does it not work, but it betrays their talent and audience -- and destroys their own businesses.

The sudden conflagration of MSNBC has left many of us stunned and furious — at the whitewashing, at the elimination of vital voices, at the betrayal of longtime hosts and producers.

Of course this is part of a larger trend, of the larger media companies seeing the dragon approaching and trying to mollify it — inviting it into their castles, lighting themselves on fire, to spare the dragon the trouble.

CNN demoted Jim Acosta, a frequent and sharp critic of Donald Trump, and relegated him to the graveyard shift, prompting him to quit; they had previously eliminated the entire Opinion section of CNN.com. The Washington Post infamously refused to run its own team’s editorial endorsing Kamala Harris for president, and it has pushed out many of its most outspoken voices in the past year, including Jennifer Rubin, Greg Sargent, Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Ann Telnaes (whose cartoon showing Post owner Jeff Bezos kneeling before Trump with a bag of money was censored), and executive editor Sally Buzbee (who was pushed to suppress a story about Post CEO Will Lewis’s involvement in Rupert Murdoch-owned British tabloids’ criminal hacking of individuals’ phones and emails). The New York Times brass has shown a vast disparity in how it covered Joe Biden vis-a-vis Trump, even as its reporters continue to dig into the scandals and conflicts of interest involving Trump, Elon Musk, and other members of the administration.

And now, MSNBC has fired Joy Reid and is demoting Katie Phang, Jonathan Capehart, Jose Diaz-Balart, Alex Wagner, and Ayman Mohyeldin — and in a possibly connected move, Lester Holt is stepping down as the longtime anchor of NBC Nightly News.

A live shot from MSNBC, where the network has lit itself on fire.

The patterns are obvious. Silence and eliminate the loudest critics of Trump, or anyone Trump dislikes. Squash any opposition to Trump, and 86 any pieces or cartoons that are considered inflammatory. Whitewash the talent pool to make it less diverse in an attempt to placate the MAGA beast — akin to how Target, Google, Facebook, Walmart, Amazon, McDonalds, and Ford all abruptly ended their DEI programs in the last month.

There are manifold problems with all of this — but let’s just put aside the injustice of it for a moment. Even viewed purely through the lens of what would be self-serving for these institutions and leaders, the appeasement of Trump is entirely impractical and will actually cause these businesses to go into death spirals from which they may never recover.

First, appeasement of tyrants never works. It merely emboldens them. Tyrants are bullies. They prey on weakness. They can sniff it out the way a shark can sniff blood in the water. Offer the tyrant what he wants, and you’ve proven you’re a mark — you can be pressed further, you can be exploited, you can be manipulated and used to the tyrant’s ends. Give him an inch, and he’ll take you for a mile.

None of these corporate executives or owners are safe just because they have bent the knee and kissed the ring. Now Trump knows he can work these people, and they will cave again and again.

Second, appeasing Trump is bad business, a betrayal of their own customers. For any company that has thrived precisely because of its resistance to Trump — or in the case of say, Target, its previous reputation for supporting business owners of color and its overall vibe of being a relatively more progressive alternative to Amazon and Walmart — reversing course is already proving to be devastating.

Target’s stock price is down 23% since it ended its DEI programs (while Costco, which kept its DEI programs, is up 19% during the same timeframe). MSNBC and CNN’s ratings have completely collapsed.¹ The Post, which had defiantly adopted the masthead slogan of “Democracy Dies in Darkness” during the first Trump term, lost over 300,000 subscribers because of its suppression of the Harris endorsement — ruining what was supposed to be a better financial year for the paper (it had been losing $100 million a year and was on track to lose only $50 million in 2024, but the endorsement scandal pushed that back to $100 million). And to take perhaps the sharpest example arising now, Tesla — which had long cultivated a pro-environment customer base for its electric vehicles — has now had a 35% drop in its stock price as Elon Musk’s extremism and extracurricular activities become ever more apparent.

MSNBC’s demolition has another misguided dimension to it: the network, along with its siblings like CNBC and USA, is currently being sold by NBC Universal (and its parent Comcast). To the extent that MSNBC’s moves are an attempt to sand down the sharper edges of the network’s coverage, to make it more palatable to buyers, this is backfiring badly. The whole point of MSNBC since at least 2002 has been to serve as an outspoken left-of-center beacon — and now they’re abandoning the exact thing that made them successful.

Such a self-immolation of one’s business is especially insane when the business itself is already precarious, in the case of the old legacy media space, or in the case of the still fragile and futuristic EV space.

These executives and owners are destroying the very businesses they are supposedly trying to save.

That is what you get for trying to please the dragon — especially when the entire purpose of your kingdom had been to fight the dragon to keep people safe.

1. CNN has been fading for longer now, but that’s because CNN started appeasing Trump in his first term, trying to become more moderate in its political positioning, alienating many of its viewers. Many weeks in the last 8 years, CNN was drawing 1 million viewers in primetime, compared with 4 million each for Fox News and MSNBC — and some weeks MSNBC was able to beat Fox News. Now both CNN and MSNBC are lucky if they can each draw 400,000 viewers a night, compared with 3 million for Fox News.