Cenk Uygur: preference

Transcript context

…That’s also really interesting. So, if you’re an advertiser, if you’re big pharma and you’re advertising, it’s not that the advertisement works. It’s that the hosts are too afraid, not explicitly, just even implicitly. They’re self-censoring. They’re not going to have any guests that are controversial, anti-big pharma, or they’re not going to make any jokes about big pharma. That continues and expands. That’s really interesting. Sometimes it’s super direct. When I was a host on MSNBC, I had a company that I was criticizing in my script and management looked at it. By the way, I used to go off prompter a lot and it drove him crazy, not because I wasn’t good at it. I think my ratings went up whenever I went off prompter, but because they couldn’t pre-approve the script. What do they want to pre-approve? Hey, are you going to criticize one of our sponsors, one of our advertisers, et cetera? So we had a giant fight over it, and the compromise was I moved them lower in the script but kept them in the story. So, sometimes it’s super direct like that, but way more often it’s implicit. It’s indirect. You don’t have to say it. So, I give you a spectacular example of it, so that you get a sense of how it works implicitly. So, since GE is a giant defense contractor, they own MSNBC at the time of the Iraq War. They fired everyone who was against the Iraq War on air. So, Phil Donahue, Jesse Ventura, Ashleigh Banfield, but Ashleigh Banfield, they did something different with. She was a rising star at the time. She goes and gives a speech in Kansas, not really even having a policy position, but just talking about the actual cost of this Iraq War and how we should be really careful. They hate that. So, they take their rising star and they take her off-air and she goes, “Okay, good. Let me out of my contract. It’s okay, I’ll go.” Because she was such a star at that time, she could have easily gotten somewhere else. They go, “No, we’re not going to let you out of your contract.” Why not? Were you going to pay me to do nothing? Yeah, not only that, we’re moving your office. Where are you moving it to? They literally moved it into a closet and they made sure that everybody in the building saw her getting taken off the air and moved into a closet. The closet is the memo, right? That’s the memo to the whole building, you better shut up and do as you’re told, okay? So that way, I don’t have to tell you and get myself in trouble. It’s super obvious. There are guardrails here, and you are not allowed to go beyond acceptable thought. Acceptable thought is our sponsors are great, politicians are great, the powerful are great. So how do we begin to fix that, and what exactly are we fixing? Is it the influence of the lobbyists? It feels like companies have found different ways to achieve influence. So, how do we get money out of politics?…

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