MSNBC Producer Resigns With Scathing Letter: ‘We Are a Cancer and There Is No Cure’

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A former MSNBC producer has written a scathing open letter saying she left the cable news channel because she sees it as promoting divisive “fringe voices and events” in pursuit of ratings.

The letter: Ariana Pekary, writing on her personal website on Monday, praised her ex-colleagues at MSNBC but said working at the network “forces skilled journalists to make bad decisions on a daily basis.”

  • Pekary, who resigned on July 24, said decisions about topics or guests were mostly driven by ratings and profits, and while it was “taboo” to acknowledge the issue, “industry leaders will admit the damage that’s being done.”
  • She quoted an anonymous “successful and insightful TV veteran” as telling her: “We are a cancer and there is no cure. … But if you could find a cure, it would change the world.”

“This cancer”: Pekary said “this cancer” of news as fan service “stokes national division” and “blocks diversity of thought and content because the networks have incentive to amplify fringe voices and events, at the expense of others… all because it pumps up the ratings.”

  • She said the for-profit networks’ business model also threaten American lives and democracy by focusing on criticism of President Donald Trump rather than on information about public health, presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden or mail-in voting.

According to Pekary, “A very capable senior producer once said, ‘Our viewers don’t really consider us the news. They come to us for comfort.'”

  • “Now maybe we can’t really change the inherently broken structure of broadcast news, but I know for certain that it won’t change unless we actually face it, in public, and at least try to change it,” she said.

Pekary is a former NPR producer who at MSNBC worked on prime-time show “The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell.”

The reaction: Conservative commentators and other media critics on Twitter on Monday praised Pekary for speaking out.

Bari Weiss — who recently quit her job as New York Times opinion editor over what she said was a lack of tolerance of dissenting viewpoints at the newspaper — described the open letter in one word: “Integrity.”

It’s spreading: MSNBC, with its famous liberal slant, is not alone in facing internal criticism for how it balances business with journalism.

  • James Murdoch recently resigned from News Corp, the parent company of Fox News, citing “disagreements over certain editorial content published by the Company’s news outlets and certain other strategic decisions.”
  • NBC News and ABC News have both been accused by current or former staff journalists of suppressing news about powerful sexual abusers for non-journalistic reasons; both networks have denied the allegations.

Survey says: A May 2019 linguistics analysis by the RAND Corporation found U.S. news has become less fact-based in the age of “new media.”

  • The decades-long trend was most pronounced on TV news, and especially on prime-time cable, where the researchers noted a “dramatic” shift from balanced reporting to emotion-inducing opinion and advocacy.
By We'll Do It Live